Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Home Improvement

Summer Plans

relaxsummerI feel like I missed last summer even though I spent more time outside than I have in a long time. Nearly every evening for two months was spent outside with Tim working for 4-5 hours in the evenings on the front and back yards.

So what’s on tap for this summer? What monster house project will I tackle? NOTHING. We’re specifically saying no big projects this summer. We want to leave our time free to enjoy the weekends and get outside as a family.

But home improvement is kind of a hobby I guess, so there will be some smaller projects. For example, I’ve got an endless list of woodworking project ideas, and there will be a day coming soon when Tim and I will put plants all around the house. I bought a basketball pole that needs to be installed and Tyla wants a desk in her craft room. So I’ll still have projects to do but nothing will be so important that I have to put it before normal fun summer activities.

We’ve been getting lucky the past couple months with temps well-above normal. I’m sure we’ll be in for more cool, rainy weather, but these past couple weeks have given me a strong case of spring fever. The grass is growing, the cherry and magnolia trees are blooming. Bring on the summer of nothing!

benmartens February 27, 2015 Home Improvement

Wall Mount

Lots of kids are injured every year from falling TVs. The number is increasing rapidly as people have moved from big heavy CRTs to light LCD TVs. The best number I could find was 12,000/year back in 2011. That’s not a huge number. There are plenty of riskier things to worry about first, but wall mounting the TV is something I’ve wanted to do anyway so this was a good excuse.

I picked up one of the more popular models from Monoprice for only $37. And I know some of you are content to leave your cables dangling down the walls, but that would drive me nuts in my own house. Running them through the wall is pretty simple with a kit like this for $40 from Amazon. It complies with code by splitting the box for the power and the low voltage cables.

Installation was pretty quick and simple: find two studs, drill the holes, and attach the mount to the wall. The laser level was a big help for this. That’s a paper bag you see taped to the wall to catch some of the dust.

wallmount1Next I used the included templates to trace out the holes for the power extension kit and cut holes in the drywall. Yes, I could have just added a new outlet here, but doing it this way means that I can connect this outlet to my battery backup and add some extra protection for the TV.wallmount2The final step was attaching the mounting brackets to the back of the TV, removing the old base, and then hanging it on the wall. The mount pulls out pretty far from the wall so that the TV can swivel 90 degrees in each direction (nice if we are watching from the kitchen), and it also tilts in the other two directions. My mount is really level, but the 5 degrees of tilt would help you correct most mistakes.wallmount3I’m very happy with how this all turned out. It was pretty cheap and only took about 2 hours to finish. If you’re comfortable wiring an outlet and operating a drill, this is something you can accomplish. Just make sure you’re in the center of those studs! I used a stud finder and then pounded a small nail in multiple times across the entire face of the stud to find both edges. It’s all covered by the mount anyway so the extra holes don’t matter (and they are easily patched if needed.)

I’m still debating if this is a little too high. There’s plenty of adjustment in the mount that screws to the back of the TV so I might lower it just a bit.

benmartens February 13, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Fixing Christmas Lights

When I finally decided on Christmas lights last fall, I decided to go with the professional grade wires, sockets and bulbs so that I could have the bulbs be interchangeable. That worked well and allowed me to do alternating red and soft-white C9 bulbs. It looked great except for one bulb that didn’t work. Testing it with the multimeter showed that the socket itself was bad. With a normal set of lights, I’d either have to live with it or pay another ~$40 for another 100ft strand of wire with sockets. But what I bought was repairable! (Pro tip: put some tape on your strand to mark both ends and any of the dead sockets. It’s a lot easier to find them when you have it all balled up on your workbench.)repairinglights2I ordered replacement sockets from Amazon. They come in pretty big quantities, but oh well, this will last me forever and I could use them to create my own custom strands if I wanted to. Make sure that you look to see if your light strand is SPT1 or SPT2. That notation specifies how thick the insulation is on the wire.

Doing the replacement is pretty straightforward except that getting the old socket off was tricky. I ended up just cutting and prying away on the old socket until it broke apart. Then I lined up the new socket and clamped it on. As usual, YouTube has a video to explain it.repairinglights1While I was doing all this, I figured I might as well make my strand be exactly the correct length. You can just clip the strand wherever you want and have it keep working, but be sure to clip the two wires at different lengths and then wrap them individually to make sure they don’t short out. Or you can add a new female plug to one end and a male plug to the other and bam, you now have two strings. I chose to add the new plugs. You can buy the male and female plugs on Amazon and learn how to properly install them via YouTube.

Sure this is a lot of trouble to go through for Christmas lights, but you know by now that I like things to work properly. This also makes me feel a LOT better about spending extra money on the professional grade lights. Every individual piece of this setup is replaceable. Whether sockets, plugs, bulbs, or even the wires go bad, I can replace just what’s needed. The worst (most expensive) thing that could happen would be if all of the LED bulbs broke but I’m storing them in a hard plastic container to help protect against that. Next year? MORE LIGHTS!

benmartens January 29, 2015 Home Improvement

Workbench TV

A lot of my projects have how-to videos on YouTube so it’s not uncommon to have my laptop sitting on the workbench while I work. That’s not terrible, but it would be nicer to have a more permanent installation. After a chat with KenC and some swapping, I ended up with a 32″ LCD. It’s a bit bigger than my initial thought but it ended up working quite well.

He included a mounting bracket with the pile of goodies and since the studs are bare in the garage, mounting was a breeze. The next concern was protecting it a little bit from the saw dust. Using scrap lumber, I whipped up some shelves to cover the top and the sides. They’re not beautiful but I didn’t have to buy anything extra to build them so the price was right.

I’ll have a future blog post with more details but to get content to the TV, I’m going to be using an Amazon Fire TV. For the sound, Ken mentioned that the speakers weren’t great, and indeed, they are not. They would be sufficient for this purpose but I’m going to try to hook up some old computer speakers to the headphone port and see if that sounds better. They can sit right inside the new shelves.

Thanks Ken for helping me upgrade my shop!

tvoverworkbench

benmartens January 23, 2015 Gadgets, Home Improvement

Rain

With all the drainage that we installed in the yard this year, I’ve been wondering how much less water ends up in our yard. Subjectively, it seems like it must be a lot because our yard is usable in the winter now as opposed to the mudhole we used to have. But what’s the actual number?

Our house is 2660 square feet and two floors. If we estimate that it’s split evenly between the floors that’s about a 1300 square feet footprint, or 187,200 square inches. If we get one inch of rain, that’s 187,200 cubic inches or 800 gallons. In November, we got more than 10 inches of rain which means that our roof collected more than enough water to fill the pool at my parents house twice! But there’s more! We also installed French drains in the yard to catch water that runs down the hill into our property and to protect the retaining wall. And we also plumbed the sump pump into the yard drainage so the water that does make it into the crawl space (much less than before!) ends up off our property too.

The bottom line is that yes, adding this drainage is moving a huge amount of water off of our property. If we had more room, it would be cool to collect this in a basin and then pump it back out for irrigation, but we just don’t have the room to make that happen.

benmartens December 26, 2014 Geek, Home Improvement

DIY Irrigation Winterization

Now that we have an irrigation system, I have one more chore on the fall list: winterization. All the water needs to be blown out of the lines because I sure don’t want to dig them up again! You can pay a company $50-70 to come with a huge generator and blow out all your lines in a matter of minutes. Or you can be a cheapskate like me and do it yourself. I’ll caveat this by saying there a lot of different ways to accomplish this. What you see below is how I chose to do it.

The first piece of the puzzle is an air compressor. The bigger the tank, the better you’ll be. I have an 8 gallon one which is pretty small but worked ok for my yard.

The next challenge was hooking the air compressor up to the irrigation system. When we put it in, Tim installed a quick coupler valve. I went to McClendon’s and built the contraption in the photo below. It’s the quick coupler connector, a ball valve, a reducer and then the quick connect for the air compressor. Shove that into the valve, hook up the air compressor and you’re ready to go.

I used a combination of manually opening the valves and using the control clock. The clock kept me drier but the valve box let me be closer to the action to see when I was done. The basic idea is that you pump air into the lines, open up one zone, and let it blow until all the water is gone. The ball valve on the coupler keeps you from getting water pushed back into the air compressor after the first few blows.

Some zones only took a tank or two while others took three or four. This is a two beer job so get comfortable. You don’t want to rush it and leave water in the lines.

benmartens December 8, 2014 Home Improvement

Front Yard Project Recap

It was a wild week, but 9 days was all it took to polish off the front yard. We had taken a break after finishing the back yard to recover and also because Tim was re-siding his house. Here’s a rough breakdown of the front yard project:

  • Dad and I started on Friday the 19th by digging a trench under the sidewalk. We picked up the tractor, truck and trailer. Then we used the tractor to fill up the trailer, make a run to dump it, and then scraped off some more sod.
  • On Saturday, Don, Logan and Tim joined in and we made huge progress. The trailer made non-stop runs all day long getting rid of the sod and the dirt that was being scraped off with the tractor. While that was happening, three dump trucks arrived with the new dirt that was replacing the old dirt.
  • By the end of Sunday, all of the old dirt was gone and the new dirt was pretty much in place. We also rented a trencher and in just two hours, we had trenches for irrigation. It might seem silly to trench through new dirt, but we still had a couple more inches to go under the new dirt and it was almost like digging in concrete.
  • Tim and I spent Monday through Thursday evenings out in the yard plumbing for irrigation. It was a wet, soggy mess as we got over 2 inches of rain. I bought a hand pump to help clear out the trenches but there were big sections of the yard that were just completely saturated.
  • We took Friday off in hopes of letting it dry out just a little more. All I did was pick up a few more yards of dirt and left it sitting in the trailer for later.
  • Saturday we started by spreading the remaining dirt to really level everything out. 2600 square feet of sod was delivered, and, with the help of two guys Tim knows, we had it almost all in by 2pm. We returned the tractor, spread one more truck load of dirt, finished off the sod, and then tested out the irrigation.
  • I spent Sunday by myself cleaning up the yard, washing the truck, returning tools, etc.

It’s incredible how much work got done in such a short amount of time. Here are some stats:

  • The front yard added up to 117 hours of labor (compared to 310 in the back yard.)
  • Each load from our house to the spot where we dumped the sod took about 75 minutes round trip
  • 14 trips with the dump trailer to remove the old sod, and there was 3-4 yards in each load
  • 53 yards of beautiful new “supreme mix” dirt added, including three 15-yard deliveries via dump truck
  • 500 miles on Don’s truck for this project
  • 10.6mpg average for the truck while we were making the runs to dump the old sod
  • 3.4 gallons of diesel used in the tractor over the many many hours that it was running

Because our scheduled was so compressed, I didn’t stop to take as many photos or do fancy timelapse videos. Thankfully Tyla and Mom snapped a bunch of photos and one of my security cameras caught some of the action.

THANK YOU once again to all of the friends and family that helped out! We had exactly the right amount of help to get this done. And a huge special thank you to Tim. Without you, this project would never have been attempted. We couldn’t have afforded to pay a contractor to do this, and I don’t know nearly enough to attempt something like this on my own. I loved learning about all this stuff and it was awesome to spend so much time out in the yard working with you. Thanks for putting up with all of my questions, my stress, and my mistakes!

benmartens October 3, 2014 Home Improvement, Projects, Timelapse

Outlets

You can never have too many outlets in your shop. I finally got fed up with running extension cords all over the place so while Dad was visiting, we got our electrician on. Three new outlets were added inside: one near the bottom of my shelves to power the air compressor and the battery tender for the motorcycle, one by the irrigation clock, one up in the rafters by the IR light and the security camera. We also added two more outside that are on the same timer circuit as my outdoor lights: one is near the ground and one is up under the eaves. Why do that? For Christmas lights of course! I’ll have easy places to plug them in and then I’ll be able to control them with our fancy timer switch from inside the house. Thanks for the help Dad!

benmartens September 22, 2014 Home Improvement

Front Yard Plan

My neighbors have had to look at quite a mess for the past couple months. The back yard is beautiful but all we did in the front yard was tear out all the plants and leave 4-5 yards of dirt piled up in the side yard. We took a break from that project to give Tim time to put new siding on his house. The siding is done so it’s back to the yard project!

The front yard should go much quicker than the back yard did because we’re doing a lot less work. Here’s what is on the agenda:

  • Scrape off all the sod and the top ~6” of dirt
  • Bring in new dirt
  • Add downspout drains out to the street
  • Extend the back yard irrigation system into the front yard.
  • Install new sod

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be done in two weeks. I can hear you laughing now. When’s the last time Tim and I worked on a project together and had it go “according to plan”?

benmartens September 16, 2014 Home Improvement

Irrigation Cost

As I ran the irrigation system for the first few times, I had no idea how much money it was costing me. We’re only billed every two months so it would take a while to find out and I didn’t want a big surprise. To get a rough idea, I ran each zone for a few minutes and then took a reading from the water meter. Thankfully we have very accurate water meters so I was able to get good readings.

Coupled with that effort, I also put some jars around the yard as the irrigation ran to see how much water it was putting down. The books and web sites I’ve read say that you should give your yard 1” of rain per week spread over either one or two sessions. This encourages the grass to build up a better root system than they would if you watered a little bit every day. Each zone in my system needs to be on for 30 minutes to give the grass 1” of water.

Putting all that info into a spreadsheet tells me that it costs about $4/week to water my lawn. That will probably be closer to $10 once we get the front yard done. For a huge portion of the year, it’s either cool or wet enough that I won’t need to water, but during those few hot dry weeks we get in July and August every year, it will be awesome to have a healthy green lawn.

benmartens July 30, 2014 Home Improvement