pboehmer.com

2014.01.17

When we built the addition, the builder put in a perimeter drain that goes to a sump pump in the new section of basement. My biggest fear, specially after the incident in 2012 (see post on 2012.07.26), is a pump failure that will result in flooding of the basement. I have a UPS on the pump which should keep it up for a couple of hours, but if the pump fails, we won't know it until its too late. In the case of a power outage, I have it set up to notify me by text message, but I don't have any monitoring for flooding.

I looked online for some kind of water leak/flood monitor that had paging or other some kind of networked monitoring so that if we were out of the house and something happened, I could go home and at least get my utility pump in place to minimize the damage. The lowest price unit I could find (74.99 @ Amazon.com), but it required a monthly charge for monitoring. After that, the price shoots up to over $200.00.

After a little research, I opted to attempt to build my own using an Arduino board (something I've been wanting to tinker with for a while) with an Ethernet shield and a water sensor. The Arduino Ultimate starter kit w/ Ethernet shield was $79.99 from Amazon and the water sensor (which I haven't purchased yet) is around 15.00. So under $100, I should be able to put together a flood notification system. Check the project section in the near future for full documentation of the build process.

2014.01.10

Hope everyone had a great New Years. This years celebration for the Boehmer clan was much quieter than years past and honestly, this was a good thing. The addition's first and second floor are complete (finally) and work is now focusing on the basement and garage. The basement just needs some drywall work done on the stairwell, while the garage is getting a complete man-cave makeover.

I broke down and picked up LEDs strips and a controller to do static colors for the cornice lighting in the family room. In addition to the strips, I also got a beefier 12v power supply so that I can keep the chasing LEDs as supplemental lighting. Will everything turned on, we may have to put up seizure warnings.

My work's radio equipment has been pretty flaky over the past week due to the sub zero temperatures. We lost a switch, a power supply for a switch, power supply for a radio, a base station radio, and a finally a lightning arrestor. I've had two climbs this week and had to visit four other sites, grrr.

2013.12.15

Thanksgiving was a great time as always. Like I mentioned in my previous post, we had some family members over to see the addition and it seems that everyone gave it a resounding thumbs up. I know its been a long time coming, but I finally was able to get some pictures of the completed family room. I know the walls are a little bare, but at least we blinged it out for Christmas. Note the colored cornice lighting that is set to blue (it can do 99 chase patterns in various RGB schemes, but it can't do a solid white, go figure).

I was able to move the firewall and media server to rack mount cases and relocate them from the computer room to the basement this past weekend. Moving the servers down to the basement freed up a monitor that I am now using as a second head for my gaming workstation that hasn't seen any gaming in a couple years now. Maybe a video editing station?

All that's left for the family room and second floor is to get the doors painted, small detail work with the second floor railing, and some caulking were I have gaps in the trim. After that I'll start tackling the garage, or as I like to call it, my future second home.

2013.11.26

A lot of progress has been made since my last update, but no pictures to show for it. The trim, which was supposed to be the easiest part of the project, has quickly become the bane of my existence. The biggest issues are the stairwell between the family room and second floor and the doorway between the kitchen and family room. Since the two rooms are different colors, the idea was to carry over the floor molding on the second floor around the stairwell, essentially separating the two colors. My builder suggesting using a shorter version of the floor molding and mount it upside down against the molding in the stairwell. The problem is that the shorter molding is also about a 1/16in thinner than the existing molding. The other problem point is where the molding going along the stairs meets with the upside down molding going along the stair well. I can't seem to work in a good transition between the two points.

I'm under a little more pressure this week to get most of the odds' n' ends taken care of because we are having family over during Thanksgiving to show off the addition. Granted, most of the issues probably won't be noticed, but the fact that I know they are there bugs the heck out of me.

The good news is that the home theater is fully operational in the family room now and all of the other TVs in the house are tied into a re-worked video distribution system that I relocated to the basement. I hope to have the internet firewall and media server moved down to the basement in the next couple of weeks.

btw, hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

2013.10.23

I have about 90% of the trim work done in the family room. I still need to finish up the second floor, stairwell, and trim around the doorway from the kitchen to the family room. I planned on having the trim finished, but I was diverted (per the wife) to getting the home theater moved from the living room to the family room. Normally this doesn't sound like a huge undertaking, that is, until you see what I have to deal with:

Now, I admit, this wire spaghetti monster is my own making (and no, I did not put in the wallpaper, it came with the house). On top of supplying 7.2 channel entertainment to the living room, it also supplied video to the entire house by use of channel modulators and IR repeaters. It also doesn't help when every device nowadays has/needs an Ethernet connection.

This past weekend I managed to move and hookup the stereo, one of the satellite receivers and the BluRay player. So essentially, I have split up the system in half. Hoping to have the rest of the system done by this weekend along with some pictures.