Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Our kitchen backsplash was in need of repair. It had the original 90’s wood backsplash which didn’t bother us a ton aesthetically, but having wood right behind the sink wasn’t a great design choice. It was difficult to keep the wood from getting rotten and moldy. We have long talked about a large remodeling project for the downstairs so that always got lumped in, but finally I decided that I should just fix the backsplash even if we end up ripping it out later.

While I’ve seen tile projects done before, I’ve never actually done one myself. Thanks to YouTube, I felt like I could figure it out. After some searching, I found a mosaic tile that would fit in the 4″ gap between the counter and our windows, greatly simplifying the project. I was also able to use pre-mixed adhesive and pre-mixed grout which simplified the project more. And even though I only needed to make about a dozen cuts, I rented a wet tile saw for a day.

The whole project went pretty smoothly. There was definitely a learning curve and I would do better if I was repeating the process, but nothing in the final result made me want to rip it out and start over. The hardest parts were the 45 degree angles in the bump out around our sink.

A day or two before I started working, I realized I didn’t have any tile spacers. While the mosaic tile came on a mat, I figured there would be spots where I’d need the spacers and I also needed spacers to hold the tile off the counter top at a consistent height. Rather than try to find spacers that exactly matched the tile layout, I pulled out my calipers, got the measurements, and 3d printed a huge number of the spaces. Each one cost less than a penny and only took about 3 minutes to print.

During the project, I missed some adhesive that dried onto the wall outside of where it was needed. I had also nicked the wall with a knife in that spot. Whenever we do paint projects in the house, I buy a small sample jar of the same color and keep that, but after ~12 years, would it still match? I was surprised to see that, yes, it matched perfectly!

So now I’ve got a tile project under my belt and I feel more confident to try something bigger. That’s good because our upstairs guest bathroom could use a makeover. Maybe I’ll have a bigger tile project in my future.

Our house was built in 1990 and had the dreaded Louisiana Pacific siding. (Detailed explanation from a home inspector site.) The siding was only warrantied for 25 years and when you throw in the major defects in the design, we had large areas of our house that were really bad. We also needed new paint so it seemed like a good time to bite the bullet. Some of our neighbors have done partial replacements of the bad areas, but we’re hoping to be in this house for quite a while and I don’t like future problems looming over me, so we decided to do it all at once. We ended up going all out and adding full window replacement to the job as well. It really increased the total price, but it’s cheaper to do it at the same time as the siding versus doing it later. The windows were original too and we had a tough time even opening some of them, not to mention dealing with mold from all the moisture that accumulated inside, etc.

It’s hard to even get a contractor to call you back, but I got two bids and chose the lower priced one because multiple neighbors had a good experience with him. The job was supposed to start the first week of April and finish mid-May. The actual job started in early May and finished in … August. Ouch. We had a dumpster and port-a-potty in our driveway for a very long time. They say a job has three levers: quality, schedule and price. You get to pick two. Price and quality were our top concerns and that’s what we got. I’m very thankful to the contractor for not cutting corners when our job took way longer than expected.

If you drive past, you probably don’t notice much different about the siding (except that it’s clean!) However, I smile now as I walk around the house because I don’t see swollen, rotting siding. And it’s wonderful having windows that open with just a finger or two. But possibly my favorite thing is knowing that we don’t have this huge bill looming in our future. It was something that had to be done before we sold the house (or take a big hit on the sale price).

Now that the contractors are gone, I have a huge work list to complete to rehab the yard, but I’m excited to dig into that (pun intended). Much of it has been going well and I’m surprised at how quickly the trampled grass and bushes have been recovering.

We started off the year having very little idea of what our garden would actually end up growing. Turns out, it worked pretty well! The box by the street has some strawberries and two zucchini plants. We did get some strawberries but that will ramp up quite a bit over the next two years as the plants mature. The zucchini have been producing like crazy. I think we might just do one next year.

The box closer to the house has a few more strawberry plants and six sun gold tomato plants. Having six of the same plant is overkill. I started a few different varieties in the house, took careful notes about which seeds were which, and then ignored all the notes when I picked the six healthiest plants to move outside. Oops.

Here are some changes that we’ll consider for next year:

• Two zucchini plants is a lot. Maybe do one zucchini and one rhubarb?
• I think it makes sense to put all the strawberries in one box. They are going to overrun whatever container they are in.
• The drip tubing worked great, but maybe instead of carefully placing each emitter, I could use the small area sprayers.
• Don’t try to start plants. It sounds like a great idea, but I did a terrible job guessing when we’d be ready to move plants outside. Warm weather came much later than expected and it was tricky to manage the big plants inside the house.
• Tyla wanted to plant flowers but I think we waited too long for the seeds to take hold (too hot and too much shade from bigger plants.)

But all in all I call this year a success!

(This post will probably make more sense if you read part 1 from yesterday.)

Before I start talking about our new system, let me back up and explain what I want out of our home security system in order from most important to least important.

1. If there’s a fire, get the fire department there as soon as possible whether I’m home or not.
2. If someone tries to get in while we are home, I want to know immediately to have a little extra time to react and get the police headed in our direction. (In my dreams, the police pull up just as I’m throwing the bad guy onto the lawn and holding him there with a shotgun to the back of the head.)
3. If someone breaks in while we are gone, at least we’ll know about it. This is probably the most common reason people buy a system, and while I like the feature, it’s not a huge selling point for me. Frankly, we live in a very undesirable theft target. If you’re crazy/smart enough to break into our house, you’re going to do whatever you want regardless of whether I have an alarm system installed.

Ok so back to my quest to dump my landline ($55/month) and replace my landline monitoring ($10/month) with cellular monitoring…

I chose SimpliSafe. They’ve target my exact scenario and they’ve been around for long enough that I trust them to provide me with a good product.

The setup process is extremely simple:

1. Create your system by figuring out how many of each type of sensor you want. I recommend that you start small because it’s really easy to add more later and the only additional cost is that you pay shipping each time you make an order.
2. SimpliSafe will configure your new base station for the sensors you ordered and ship you a box.
3. They say that setup takes 30 minutes and they’re right (depending on how many sensors you bought.) Setup is SOOOOO easy compared to what I went through before! Basically, you plug the base station into the wall, activate your account online and stick your keypad on the wall. For each sensor, remove the tag to connect the included battery and stick it on the wall.

You’re done!

Unfortunately, my case wasn’t quite that simple. My base station came with a T-Mobile SIM card in it and the T-Mobile signal was so bad that I could only rarely get a connection from a single point in my house. After a lot of trial and error, SimpliSafe agreed to send me a replacement board for the base station that uses Verizon’s network instead of T-Mobile. That worked a lot better.

Our monitoring is now $15/month but we dropped $55/month for the home phone and $10/month for our old monitoring company. So we are saving $50/month! We’ll recoup the ~$400 hardware cost in 8 months.

I love these projects that cut out huge monthly bills! It’s much more fun to spend money when you know that you’re going to save that much in a short amount of time.

I also feel good using an alarm system that is easy to expand and modify whenever I want. I suppose there’s a chance that it’s less secure than my old system, but remember my priority list. I’m ok with that. I also don’t have any evidence that it IS less secure. My old system had plenty of wireless sensors and the landline was very easy to cut. A determined and intelligent burgler is going to know how to get through most consumer grade alarm systems anyway. The trick is to just be a more uninviting target than other people in your neighborhood. It’s kind of like hiking in bear country with somebody that runs more slowly than you.