renovations – Whatsittwoya

Office Lounge

During recent employment in the HVAC industry, the company I was working for had a slow period during the spring which resulted in not much work coming in through the front door. I happen to be a carpenter, so I was asked if I would mind building office walls for the company to make up the time (and get a full 40 for the week instead of sit at home).

Sure, why not… It had been some time since I had worked, having spent the first 4 months of the year at NAIT getting a gasfitting ticket, and now, finally employed in the field, I still needed another 300 or so hours to complete the apprenticeship portion of the ticket. I could care less if it was doing HVAC or stapling flyers, I wanted the ticket finished and on the wall – so yes. I’ll do that. Read more “Office Lounge” →

At Home

Rack attack!!

Yes, here comes the tale of the inevitable, the essential, and long awaited upgrade of our home network to relative industry standard.

After many years, and unceremonious additions of a gigabit switch and router, I’ve finally gathered the needed ingredients for a substantial upgrade across the majority of the network. Now, I didn’t get stupid about it by sticking in 10GBE switches and the like, but rather I cast an eye towards future proofing the setup for the next ten years or so.

The first on the list was an upgrade to my current NAS, a Synology DS212+, which had served me well (pun intended) for a decade. It began life here with 2TB drives, which soon filled up and were replaced with 2 – 6TB drives. These were installed without protection as JBOD (just a bunch of discs), were approaching capacity, and beginning to throw minor errors in their health check, so I knew time was running out. Also, as I learned, I had begun to call on it for much more over the year (eg. this site) and while the DS212+ was great for serving video, it was only ‘able’ to do everything else. Read more “Rack attack!!” →

At Home

The Laundry Room Re-Visited

It’s been quite a while…. but I’ve returned to finish the job in the basement.

One of the nagging complaints about it was the still un-tiled portion of the laundry room, which was under the water tank and to the base of the furnace. It was one of those jobs that annoyed me every time I thought about it because tiling that portion of the floor was the easy part of the job.

Really, it was. I probably could have done this a long time ago (definitely), but a thousand bad excuses prevented me from doing so. Poor little me didn’t want to go without hot water for even a day (which was actually the extent of it), and I knew I’d have to turn off the gas to the tank… so I should wait until summer so the furnace isn’t needed, right? Read more “The Laundry Room Re-Visited” →

At Home

Pining for a re-defining

Let me be the first to say Yechhhh!

This laundry room has always been a nemesis of mine, in particular, the poorly “thought out” shelving area to the left of the freezer. I just don’t know what they were “thinking” during the planning stage, but it is a spectacularly awkward array of inaccessibility. Simply put, it is another branch of Elliot’s “fuck it” tree that I am now going to sever. Read more “Pining for a re-defining” →

At Home

Wrap Up

Wow, the last post seems so long ago. Things have been moving along here, but not at the same pace, that’s for sure. With the carpet down, and most of the angst about it out of my life, I could relax a bit and get to a few other things, which was quite the laundry list of niggling little details waiting their turn for attention, with each one of them taking your full resources and time until they were finished.

So, lemme see… First among them was a cover for the electrical panel. This one had me rooting through all the scraps I had leftover, saved, or tucked away not knowing what I want them for, and I actually ended up using a piece of 1/4 inch particle board that came as packaging for the dishwasher as a backer for it. Read more “Wrap Up” →