Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Home Improvement

Furnace Replacement

It’s so nice to have contractors that you can trust. For any heating question, I call up Chelsea’s Dad who owns PMG Mechanical (206) 624-5040. When we bought the house, I asked him to come over and inspect our equipment. He recommended replacing the water heater immediately and said the furnace would last us through the winter but not much more. These recommendations lined up directly with what we heard from our inspector.

We already added a new tankless water heater and this summer it was time to replace the furnace. Beyond the question of what kind of furnace we should install, we also wrestled with the question of whether or not we should add air conditioning to the house. That might sound crazy to friends and family east of here, but very few homes around here have AC. it’s a luxury because you really only need it maybe a week out of the year. Temps rarely get above 85 degrees so fans and open windows are almost always enough. But on the flip side, we’re hoping to be in this house for a long time, so if we’re going to do AC, now is the time when we can get maximum enjoyment out if it.

We ended up with a Carrier Infinity 80% efficient two stage furnace and a Carrier Infinity suitecase air conditioner. Brent recommended that we go with the 80% furnace over one of the high efficiency models because they just haven’t nailed the reliability of those models yet. The two stage furnace will give us a big boost because it only runs at partial power most of the time, but for the rare occasion when it gets really cold, the furnace kicks in full power. The fan is also incredibly efficient and costs almost nothing to run. The air conditioner is an extra small and quiet model that is normally installed in commercial locations where size and noise are a factor. In our case, it we only had about 5 feet to our property line and I wanted to still get yard waste bins and the lawn mower through. After it was installed, we still have 3 feet of clearance to the fence. It’s definitely a splurge but I’m betting we’ll think it was worth it as time goes on. Plus, we’ll be the party house when it’s hot outside! The final bit that we added to the bill was an electronic air cleaner. It increases air flow through the system, creates an allergy free environment, and is very easy to clean.

Thanks to Brent for getting this all installed for us! Normally when I do a job I call around to a bunch of different places and haggle for the best deal. It’s such a blessing to make one call and have it done!

benmartens May 2, 2012 Home Improvement

Where The Green Grass Grows

For the first time in my life, I own dirt! Yard care is a chore for some people, but after years of living in apartments and the condo, I’m excited to have a chance at taking care of a yard. We’ll see long long that feeling lasts!

Since Tim is literally a pro at this, I started peppering him with questions. I was afraid I’d drive him nuts so I fired up Amazon and ordered the top rated book about yards: Scotts Lawns: Your Guide to a Beautiful Yard. It was a winner! I was afraid it would end up being a catalog for Scotts products but they only mentioned Scotts a couple times.

The book was incredibly detailed and I suspect that there are some courses that use it as a textbook. But even though it contained a lot of technical information and science, it was still accessible to a newbie like me. I now feel prepared to mow at the right time (never mow more than 1/3 of your grass height), mow to the correct height (about 2-2.5” for my types of grass), water properly (once or twice a week totaling 1” per week) fertilize with the right nutrients at the proper times, dethatch and aerate when needed, and fight weeds, moss and pests. Along the way I picked up a ton of interesting facts. Did you know I read the book cover to cover and will be going back to it regularly as a reference. Come check out my yard after a year or so and see if it worked!

benmartens April 26, 2012 Home Improvement

Theater Room Paint

The “final” step in the theater room is complete. Logan came over a week or two ago and helped me paint the walls. I was going for a dark gray color with a little blue but I ended up with a dark blue color with a little gray. It still looks great though so I’m not planning to change it. The darker color really looks nice when we’re watching movies.

I put final in quotation marks because there is always more that I want to do to the room (ie. better drapes), but this is the end of the list of top items (furniture, screen, mounting the speakers, running cables up the wall to the projector, etc.) I hope you get to stop by and enjoy it soon!

benmartens April 11, 2012 Home Improvement, Projects

Network Closet

We recently increased the geek level of our house by adding a network closet! Ever since moving in, I’ve thought about how I would get network cable to every room of the house. It was going to be a pretty daunting task so I shopped around for a bit and finally found a great contractor (recommended by the guy who did our church parsonage remodel) with a great price. He gave me a bid and two days later was in the house to do the project. He worked with one other guy from about 8:30 to 4:30 and got it all done. We now have drops in all four bedrooms, the theater room, the family room, two in the living room, and one above the kitchen counter right next to an outlet. That kitchen drop is the planned site of our kitchen computer that will display recipes etc.

But Ben, what about wireless? I’ll just say flat out that I hate wireless networking. I long ago gave up on trying to make it work reliably so any piece of equipment that doesn’t move gets hardwired in to my network. Additionally, with the Media Center PC, all the TV in our house gets distributed over the network so if the room doesn’t have a network drop, there’s no chance of putting a TV in there. Since I don’t know exactly what we’ll be using each room for over the next 10-20 years, I just put a drop in every room. I also had him run CAT6 instead of CAT5 or CAT5e. This should take me through gigabit and beyond with no problem.

As you can see from the photo, this was a very low budget “network closet.” Instead of a fancy patch panel, I just had him add wall plates. And they aren’t even all on the same wall because of the layout of the house. He added a power outlet in that room too. It’s clearly not being used very much right now, but soon I’ll get to work moving all of our network gear, the home server, and maybe even our Media Center PC into that room. It can be as loud as it wants and it won’t bother anyone.

Right now we leave the door open to that closet, but if we ever want to start closing it, the back wall of the closet is the garage wall, so I could easily rig up an exhaust vent to blow hot air from the computers out into the garage.

All in all I’m extremely happy with this project. The price was right, and I know this would have taken me multiple weekends to complete. He and his co-worker did it all in a day and they didn’t even have to cut any extra holes in the drywall to get through the fire blocks on the tall walls.

If you need any electrical work done, call Greg’s Electrical Services (425) 957-4630. I have my eye on a whole house surge protector and power conditioner. I’ll be calling Greg!

benmartens March 26, 2012 Geek, Home Improvement

Center Channel Speaker Mount

My center channel speaker doesn’t have a place to accept a wall mount on the back of it. I originally tried using a couple 6” shelf brackets to support the speaker, but it didn’t look great, especially when compared to the other speaker mounts.

After some thought I ended up building a small half box out of 1/4” MDF. The construction was pretty simple and then I finished it off with flat black spray paint to match the speaker. The end result is that don’t really notice the box around the speaker and it looks great!

In the photo below you can see the undried fill holes from the old shelf brackets. They stuck down pretty far below the speaker.

benmartens March 20, 2012 Home Improvement, Projects, Woodworking

Dimmer Switch

We like to eat dinner while we watch movies in the theater room. For some movies the light bouncing off the screen is enough to illuminate our food, but for darker movies, it can be a challenge to scoop up those tricky peas.

Since it’s pretty difficult to do anything with the vaulted ceiling, I added 12 feet of rope lighting behind the couch. It’s mounted to the wall but in such a way that you just see a glow emanating instead of direct light.

To top it off, I added a dimmer switch. We started with a Leviton dimmer switch extension cord. That worked ok but I thought I could do better so I picked up a Lutron MIR-600THW dimmer switch. It took a little more work because the outlet I wanted to use wasn’t on an outlet yet.

I cut into the wall yet again (this was the 9th time I’ve used the drywall saw in this room) and made a hole for the switch in the same stud bay as the outlet at the standard switch height. After flipping the circuit breaker off, I removed the outlet, removed the connection between the top and bottom outlet so only half would be switched, fed some Romex up to the new hole and then wired in the switch. Perfecto!

Now we have a dimmer switch that we can use to give us just the right amount of ambient lighting. But it doesn’t end there. This switch has an infrared remote control! It was a piece of cake to set up our fancy Harmony One to control the light switch.

The dimmer switch worked out so well that I’m thinking about adding one in the bedroom too. No more getting out of bed when we finish reading and have to decide who gets out of bed to turn off the lights.

benmartens March 19, 2012 Gadgets, Home Improvement, Projects

Projector Screen

The next step in the home theater project was getting some sort of projector screen in place. I’ve been using a blank wall since we moved in, but this really isn’t a wonderful solution. There are a couple nail holes that screw up the picture, there is texture on the walls, and the paint isn’t pure white.

There are a number of articles online that describe various ways to create you own screen. After doing a lot of research, I decided to opt for a cheap pre-made screen instead. I purchased a 120” Elite Screens Sable Fixed Frame screen. One of the reasons this screen is less than one third of the cost of most screens is that it packs down into a reasonable size box for shipping. That translates to “some assembly required.”

It took me about 1.5 hours to get the screen put together, but I could probably cut that in half now that I know what I’m doing. You basically assemble the frame with a few screws and then methodically stretch the material with clips to provide a smooth flat surface. Tim and Chelsea came over to help mount it on to the wall and it took all four of us to get it on there.

I’m fairly pleased with the end result The black velvet border really sucks up any light from the projector that flows over the edge of the screen. That is important because it allows you to easily fill the whole screen with the picture. The screen does have some imperfections and a noticeable hot spot when the picture is a solid color. I’m playing around with a few ideas to minimize the appearance of the flaws, but for the price, this is still good deal.

Next up: mounting speakers on the wall and running speaker wire inside the walls.

benmartens February 23, 2012 Home Improvement, Projects

Tying Trees

We have a row of arbor vitae trees in the backyard. They provide a nice visual block between us and the neighbors, but during the recent snow storm, they took quite a beating. The tops of the trees were bent down so far that I could hit them with a broom!

Thankfully they rebounded, but I thought I’d take a little action to hopefully help the situation next time. I purchased 100ft of 1 inch tree chainlock. That is now wrapped around all the trunks so that instead of individual trees, I now have one mass of trees that support each other.

While I was up there, I noticed that the previous owner had used some small rope to attempt the same thing on a couple of the trees. While those trees didn’t have quite as much trouble with the snow, the rope was really destroying the bark. In some places the tree had tried to grow around the rope and in others, the rope was rubbing the bark off. This plastic chain should do a better job and keep the trees healthy.

We’ll have to wait until the next snowstorm to see how well it works!

benmartens February 21, 2012 Home Improvement

Projector Cables

Very shortly after buying the projector, I built a simple shelf mount for it. It was easier and cheaper than hanging it from the ceiling and the Epson 8350 has awesome lens shift so I was still able to get the picture in the right spot. However, the cables were left dangling down the wall. I finally got around to fixing that this past weekend.

The key to the project was finding a good way to get power up to the projector. I didn’t just want to add an outlet up there, because I want the projector to run off the battery backup system in the AV rack. Enter the PowerBridge. It’s effectively two outlets connected by a piece of Romex. The special thing is that one outlet is male and the other is female. That means you can connect your extension cord to the outlet at the bottom and run it to whatever power source you want. There is also an opening for HDMI cables to come out. This is a great way to wall mount your TV without paying for an electrician! The kit had everything I needed except that I needed to buy more Romex because the included 6’ length wouldn’t reach up to the projector.

The other trick to this projector is mounted near the ceiling and this room has vaulted ceilings. That means that there is a ceiling joist between the projector and the floor. I had to cut an extra hole in the drywall just above the hole and drill through to feed the cables down to the floor.

The extra cut is the part that took the longest. I did a pumpkin cut on three sides, folded it back and then made my holes. After running the wires, I folded the drywall back in place and applied spackle and sanded until it matched nicely again. I sprayed on some orange peel wall texture and it’s almost as good as new. Obviously it needs a coat of paint to completely match, but I’ll do that later once the rest of the project is done.

Next up: mounting a projector screen.

In picture #3, the drywall wouldn’t quite stay flush so I applied a little glue and taped it in place until the glue dried. And in picture #4, yes, that’s a trash bag taped to the wall. I had it there to catch most of my sanding dust and any of the spackle that I might drop.

benmartens February 16, 2012 Home Improvement, Projects

Cistern at Gates Foundation

I’ve been pestering TimS with a lot of questions now that I actually have a yard. His landscaping expertise has already come in very handy. We were discussing various ways to improve water runoff from my roof. It tends to drain back down into the crawlspace making extra work for the sump pump and the previous owners already had a little bit of an issue down there. I think I’ll probably end up installing one of these dry wells, but we started talking about cisterns. He mentioned that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters here in Seattle has a 1 million gallon cistern that is used for flushing toilets and irrigation! The runoff from the paved areas and the roof of the building is collected there and reused.

I know it’s completely impractical for a lot as small as mine, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Sure I’d have to dig up most of my yard to fit a decent sized cistern in it. Sure I’d have to do a lot of work to get all of my downspouts to funnel into it. Sure it would cost orders of magnitude more money than I would save. But none of that means I don’t dream about it!

benmartens February 7, 2012 Home Improvement