Furough Projects

My company instituted company wide furloughs for all salaried employees starting last week.  This is my furlough week and I am putting it to good use getting a few projects finished.

Our patio in the back has not been looking too good for awhile.  The ground has been sinking and as a result it kind of waves a bit.  Plus the wood edging needs stain.  So we decided to take it out and replace it with a deck.  Plus we have plan for the old stones.

So the first task is to get the stones out, the kids and I accomplished that yesterday.  Quite a bit of work, but it is done.

The other thing I was able to do yesterday was put up some more shelves in our attic.  We have quite a collection of ski's that a friend of Jen's didn't want anymore...  It was cool enough yesterday that the warm attic felt pretty good.

Now the plan is to put up more shelving...  If shelving on one side is good, both sides must be better right!

Brome Bird Care Bird Feeder

We have a bird feeder that Jen's aunt and uncle gave to us for Christmas probably 10 years ago.  It finally started to deteriorate and the squirrel protection mechanism went bad so the poor birds couldn't get to the seed anymore.

I contacted the company and requested the replacement part I thought I needed, the spring mechanism.  They sent the part, but when I received it I realized that it was actually a different part that was broken.

So I contacted them again and they emailed me a parts list and asked that I carefully figure out all the parts that needed replacing.  I figured out that I needed 2 parts, one was a pretty substantial one.  They sent them right out and I was able to get the bird feeder back in action!

Here is a link to their online store.

I was super impressed with the lifetime care warranty, they really stood behind their product for me!

Hard drive died!

So the hard drive in our family computer stopped working, bios screen stuck.  :(

I ordered a replacement SSD from best buy and picked it up on my way home.  It is twice the size of the old one.

I wanted to try a cloning tool I got, so I put in the HD from our other computer and cloned it to the new drive.  It was done in about 15 minutes.

Once I installed the new SSD, the computer came right up.  Awesome.

I was able to go into drive manager and extend the drive so it used the full size.  Looks like I could provide another service to my neighbors :)

Leaking Humidifier

My wife asked me to turn on the humidifier a couple weeks ago because it was getting dry in the house.  When I turned it on though, I noticed it was leaking water.  So I turned it back off and just got around to it yesterday.

After checking that the drain line and the pad looked fine, I noticed that the rubber tube that carries the water from the solenoid to the top of the filter pad wasn't quite seated to the bottom of the nipple.

I turned it back on and noticed that when it first starts, the rubber tube slips up a bit.  I figure that the calcium in our water is probably building up in the tube causing a little more pressure when it starts up.  So I just put a zip tie on it and will monitor it going forward.  At some point I will need to soak it in CLR :)

VHS to Digital

I posted in Next Door that I was willing to convert VHS tapes into digital.  It kind of blew up and now I am in contact with quite a few people who might be willing to hire me for that :)

I am just using a $10 usb adapter to do the conversion, which is pretty simple.  But people are busy I suppose.  Also the library will help people out with doing it as well.

CLR to the rescue

The faucets in the kids bathroom were/are looking pretty dingy.  We have hard water and the calcium builds up on things.  We try to clean then off, but over time it takes it toll.

We bought some new faucets today, to motivate me to see if I could clean the old ones off by removing them and soaking them in CLR.  The results are pretty good.  I think we can get another 10 years out of them :)

They are leaking a little they are turned on, so I contacted Delta to see if they will send me some springs and seats to redo them.  Otherwise I will order some.

Before, this is the other sink which wasn't quite as bad.  I will get to this one sometime in the future.  We could probably do the faucets in our bathroom as well, so I will get a bigger bucket.

Here is the faucet after soaking and some elbow grease.  It isn't perfect, but like I said it passed the bosses test.

Reload the garage

We have been burning quite a bit this winter so far, and our wood pile in the garage was depleted.  We had bad weather today so I worked from home and I was able to reload.

There is nothing quite like a wood fire.  It is a lot of work to cut and split the wood, then move it around.  But it has definitely resulted in smaller heating bills and the ambiance can't be beaten.