Home Improvement

I have added 2 new projects to my list of things to do in 2020.  Even though I haven’t done anything yet on the existing list, I added two more.

I know most people have doors & locks on their basement cages.  We never have.  When I moved into the condo back in 2012 the cage door was already leaning against the wall around the corner from the cage.  I never felt the need to put it back on.  Until now. 

Despite taking almost half a year off from blogging, I managed to accomplish a lot! Being on furlough for the first 5 weeks of the year with nothing to do but projects helped immensely, but I think that’s in part what caused my burnout.

The 3rd heating zone is our master bedroom.  I installed the smart thermostat in there back on November 30th, but didn’t have time to feed the wire through the wall until this past weekend.  Since you have already read all about our other 2 smart thermostats, I’ll keep this post very short.

Last May I started de-mousing the foundation around our front stoop with hardware cloth. I only got a bit of the right side done. This past weekend I stapled hardware cloth around most of the front stoop in an attempt to keep ahead of them!

This past May I spent about 6 weeks completely cleaning and overhauling the girl cave.  I removed 2 large trash bags of crap, and moved a bunch of stuff to the basement for storage.  I didn’t take any “before” pictures, because, well, I guess since I wasn’t really in a blogging mood I also wasn’t thinking ahead to “before” pictures.

Today after work I was running around doing chores and unpacking boxes into assorted Christmas gift piles.  While I was walking through the kitchen to the basement I noticed Darwin was perched in front of the fridge, staring intently underneath it.

After installing the living room smart thermostat, and seeing how well it worked, and how cool it was to access it from our phones, we bought 2 more Geo Lux:  one for the dining room/girl cave zone and one for the bedroom zone.

Last month, when we finally turned our heat on for the year, we realized our living room thermostat had broken.  The buttons did nothing.  Jim suggested that instead of replacing it, we try a smart thermostat, so we could control and check our heat from our Android phones and the internet.  Cool!

A few months ago I made the decision to flip flop the bedroom and girl cave light fixtures because the bedroom ones were too bright and the girl cave ones weren’t bright enough. Success! Too bad I forgot the bedroom AC was on a different circuit when I went to change out the outlet.