Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Sat down at my computer this morning, started working, and then suddenly the keyboard stopped working.  After that I noted that my iPhone backup had an error (a weird one about backup file corruption).  After a little troubleshooting, I found out that my USB hub, which I've had for a couple years, has suddenly stopped working.  Worse, it appears to have taken out the USB hub in one of my monitors (the one it was connected to).  Bummer.  New hub is on order.  I have 11 USB devices plugged into my laptop; but now six of them are disconnected for lack of a port.  The rarity of outright device failures these days makes them stand out much more than such a thing used to! :)

Yesterday was very busy around the manor here.  Most of the day I was working with our builder and one of his helpers, putting in two of the new doors (so now, three down, one to go).  There were ... challenges.  The door from the mudroom into the house had to be shimmed oddly because the hole it was fitting into wasn't square.  The bigger challenge was for the new door from the sun room into our bedroom.  That one had a jamb that would have projected a couple of inches into our flooring – not what we wanted!  Fortunately it was possible (though not easy!) to remove about 3" of it.  That first photo below shows the process, which involved considerable force. :)  In the middle photo, our builder is cleaning up the old framing, which had about a bazillion nails, staples, and other unknown things projecting from it.  My job was to vacuum up the detritus.  The last photo shows that same door from inside the sun room, after they got it into the frame and shimmed into square.  Getting it in was a bit of a challenge, as the height of the hole was about 1/32" less than the height of the door.  Once again, force was involved.  The good news is that that door isn't going anywhere!  The 10" hole on the left of the door is there because the framed hole for the door was a non-standard width.  Rather than get an expensive custom door, we opted to get a standard size door and fill in the hole with wallboard on both sides.  That's our general approach when we run into something non-standard – if we ever have to replace this in the future, I'd sure rather be able to just buy a standard door!


While the doors were being installed, a crew came out to insulate the mud room.  They did this by netting the inside of all the studs, then blowing in chopped fiber insulation.  This should have been the work of a couple hours, but their machine that chopped and blew the insulation broke down right in the middle of the work.  The two guys doing the work called their boss, who came running out to our place to fix the machine.  He disassembled it, fixed whatever the problem was, reassembled it, and tested it – only to find out that the 4" diameter, 100' long hose that delivered the insulation was plugged up somewhere in the middle.  The hose wasn't transparent, so they couldn't see where the problem was.  They did a nice binary search to find it – first cut the hose in half, discovered it was in the first half.  Cut that in half, discovered it was in the second quarter.  It took four cuts and they had a 6' long piece that they could see the plug.  They cleaned that out, taped the hose pieces back together with duct tape, and they were back in business.  An hour later, they were done.  I had a lot of cleanup to do in that room; a dusty, fibrous mess was everywhere

Last night we did something that was both extremely pleasant and oh so satisfying: we had a fire with our new fireplace doors!  It's the first time since we bought this house that we could have a “real” fire.  Everything worked perfectly.  There was no smoke leak, not even the tiniest amount.  The warm air system worked like a champ.  Best of all, we now have the ability to regulate the fire all the way from blast furnace to nearly off.  I was able to adjust the air input so that we had a nice fire that lasted almost two hours with a single loading, instead of the 15 or 20 minute bonfire we've gotten used to with the intense draft our chimney draws.  We're really going to enjoy having this!

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