SonicChicken blog

We’re into the 12^th week of our remodeling project. Barb and I both had five days off for Fourth of July, and we spent most of that time working on the house. We got a bunch of stuff done over our “holiday”…

We met with Eric, our cabinet maker. He should be contacting us today or tomorrow for final approval of the cabinet plan. Cabinets should be done in about 2-3 weeks, and installed shortly thereafter (assuming drywall is done). Eric suggested that we look into prefabricated vanity counters for the new bathroom. Tile Outlet had these for ~$375 each (’Uba Tuba’ 37″ granite with sink bowl installed and pre-drilled faucet holes). No grout lines to clean, and it’ll look great! Eric also suggested that we order the cabinet trim piece for our microwave, so I stopped by A&A and talked to Gavin about that. ETA is about 1.5-2 weeks (2007-07-20).

Barb got all the exterior sheathing removed from the back side of the original house, which should make for a quicker demolition party.

Nearly all of the construction debris has been loaded up. The back yard looks much better now, and it’s a lot easier to move around. We’ll be buying the bathtub tomorrow, since we’re finally able to drive the truck into the back yard again.

We met with the roofer, Bill Hall, after we passed our roof diaphragm inspection. He gave us a bunch of new chores, almost all of which are done. Barb went to the supply house and picked out our roofing material: Owens-Corning 40-year “Oakridge” teak.

Our HVAC contractor, Jose, came and looked over our project. He needed us to make copies of the floor and electrical plans, including any changes we are considering for subsequent remodel phases. He took care of most of his venting/roof penetrations today. We still have to figure out exactly where the furnace is going before he can place the flue vent.

Windows for our addition should arrive sometime this week, in which case they will be ready to install next Monday (right after our demolition party this weekend).

We got all of our non-glass doors ordered from U.S. Building Materials (off Sunrise Blvd, south of White Rock Rd). Great folks, by the way! ETA on the doors is about two weeks (2007-07-23).

I started working on our electrical installation. I got most of the outlet and switch boxes positioned in the bedrooms, hallway, laundry room, nook, and the added-on area of the living/great room. I still need to do the bathroom. The kitchen and the rest of the great room may have to wait until after the demolition party.

Lots of stuff done, but quite a lot left to do!

Update: Added a bunch of tags to this post.

A few months ago I bought an AirPort Express to play with, mostly because I wanted to play my iTunes through the stereo speakers instead of my laptop’s. This was so easy that it didn’t even warrant a blog entry. I just plugged the AX brick into an outlet and plugged a 3.5 mm stereo-to-RCA cable between the AX brick and one of my stereo inputs. Since I was only planning to use my wireless laptop to transmit to the AX, I didn’t even have to bother with connecting the AX to my (wired) network.

I made some changes on my AX earlier this week. I needed to print quite a few pages from my laptop, and wanted to see if I could take advantage of the USB port on the AirPort Express. I moved the printer into the living room and plugged its USB cable into the AX brick. This didn’t work instantly — I forgot to fire up the AirPort Admin Utility (probably in the Applications / Utilities folder on a Mac) to associate the new printer with the AX. I also took advantage of the fact that my wife was out of town for a few weeks and ran a network cable into the living room for the AX brick. (She still hasn’t noticed it, so I must have done a reasonably neat job of installing it.)

Still, nothing worth blogging so far–I mean, c’mon: A Mac laptop connecting to an Apple network appliance? Of course it’s going to work. Painlessly. We take it as a given, like the sun coming up in the morning. But today my wife noticed the printer in the living room, and she was a little curious. “Honey, what is the printer doing next to the stereo? Shouldn’t it be connected to the computer?” Uh oh! Holy marital strife! To the Internet, Batman! A quick Google search for "airport express" windows printing turned up this post which revealed The Trick: download Bonjour for Windows! Visit Apple’s Bonjour page and look for a link labeled “Get Bonjour for Windows” (currently at the bottom right of the page). Once I installed Bonjour on our Windows 2000 box (on the wired network, not WiFi), it took a few mouse clicks (and no decisions) to install the printer. Wow! Did I really install a printer on a Windows box without having to go to Device Driver Hell and back? Now that’s something worth blogging!

In all fairness, this printer had already been installed on the Windows box, so the drivers were already there. But I’ve never seen network printing done so easily as this. I can definitely see more AirPort Express bricks in our network’s future…