Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Tyla laughs whenever I start talking about light bulbs, but here we go again. Our living room, eating area and kitchen are now completely incandescent free. When we bought the house, that area contained 11 60-watt bulbs, 2 100-watt bulbs, and 5 40-watt bulbs. When all the lights were on, that was using over a killowatt every single hour! We spend most of our time in that area and if we left all those lights on for 5 hours a day, that’s $193/year in electricity bills. With the new combination of CFL and LED bulbs, that same usage would cost $32. Not too shabby. By my calculations, it will take us about 2-3 years to recoup the cost of the bulbs and then we’ll be saving money.

The tricky part of this was finding good 40 watt equivalent LED candelabra base bulbs. There aren’t a lot of them out there yet. I tried three different types:

• Costco sells a 3 pack made by Feit. These were the cheapest at about $10 for three bulbs, but they were also the lowest quality. The light wasn’t the standard 2700K color that you get from incandescent. It was significantly whiter and it also has a delay when you turn it on.
• Torchstar sells a bulb for $7 that turns on instantly but is a bit too white. It’s better than the Costco bulbs, but still not acceptable for a lamp that we use all the time in close proximity to other lights.
• The winner was a bulb from Sexy LEDs. It has the right color and comes on instantly. If I had to knock it, I’d say that it’s not quite as bright as a 40w incandescent bulb. It was close enough for our purposes.

Unfortunately those Sexy LED bulbs are also the most expensive. I chose to use them in that main light fixture above our eating area and then use the cheaper Costco bulbs in the other areas of the house like the stairwell and the upstairs hallway. Color and delay don’t make as big of a difference there.

This will all pay off as long as the bulbs are reliable since part of the savings is that you basically never have to replace them. We’ll have to wait a while to figure out if that holds true.

I don’t know when Ikea started selling cabinets, but I’ve been hearing a lot about them lately. Sure they sell very cheap melamine cabinets, but they also sell cabinets that look very high-end. We have a homeowners mailing list at work which is usually full of high end remodels, but even people there have been buying the cabinets and having their contractors assemble and install them.

I recently purchased seven cabinets for the project in the man cave and it’s worth sharing a few tips I picked up for getting the cabinets from Ikea. Like all the furniture in that store, it comes unassembled in a about 4-6 boxes per cabinet. You can pay $40 to have an employee pick all the pieces for you off the shelves, but it’s not too hard to do it yourself if you have the right preparation.

Let’s say you want to buy Akurum wall cabinets. First, go to the website and choose the exact size and color options that you want. That will give you a specific “Article Number” located under the price. Write that down. Near the bottom of the page, there’s a section that says it comes in 4 packages and has a link to view the sizes of each package. In the popup window, each package is listed twice (once in imperial and once in metric.) Write down the article numbers here and note how many of each one you need. The text of the website will also suggest if you should get other things with the cabinets like legs for the base cabinets and suspension rails for the wall cabinets. Finally, create extra blank columns for aisle and bin numbers. Now you have a table that looks like this:

Print this off and take it with you to Ikea. Take a look at the map when you walk in and skip straight to the warehouse. Head for a computer and type in the main article #. That will pop up a screen showing each of those pieces that you listed and the aisle and bin where you can find them. Fill those numbers in on your sheet.

From here on out, it’s just manual labor. Visit each of the aisle/bin locations and grab as many of the items as you need. At the end, add up how many pieces you expect to have and then count the items in your cart. Keep this sheet around because when you’re back home, it will help you remember which boxes go with which cabinet style.

The $40 service from Ikea is expected to take 30-40 minutes. I did this in just under and hour, and that includes wasting about 15 minutes miscounting the items in my carts and trying to figure out why it wasn’t what I expected.

My father-in-law kindly loaned me his truck for this, but it turns out I could have fit everything in the Escape. But given how far Ikea is from us, I didn’t want to drive all the way down there and then not be able to get it home.

How easy are they to install? That will have to wait for another blog post. I’m still figuring that out.

Have you ever used Ikea cabinets? I’ve heard really good things about them and I’m thinking about using their cheapest version for a project in the man cave. We’re going to make an entire wall into a bunch of storage and a long desk. Playing around with Sketchup and a premade library of Ikea cabinets gave me this rough idea:

This is probably going to be one of my big projects for the month of September when I’m home on paternity leave. Next steps are to finalize the design and pick up the cabinets. I’ll get those installed and then figure out how to make a desk top and the shelves. If you’ve done anything similar and have advice for me, I’d love to hear it.

We’re about four months past the end of our bathroom model and I’m still very happy with the result. There’s not much, if anything, that I would change if we were doing it again. One of my favorite features is turning out to be the Moen Posi-Temp shower valve. I didn’t think much about it when I picked it out, but this thing works wonders.

If you’re in our other shower and someone turns on the hot water anywhere else in the house, you get a shot of cold water and the opposite is true for them flushing the toilet, etc. With the Posi-Temp valve, you can’t tell at all! I’ve been searching for a good diagram to show how it works, but this is the best answer I’ve found so far:

The balancing spool may be either within the cartridge or in a separate spool cartridge. If the pressure of water coming in on the cold side suddenly drops it will cause the spool to shift and reduce the incoming hot water thus balancing the pressure (and the temperature).

I’d love to take one of these apart some time and see how it’s put together. But regardless, this thing is magic and I highly recommend it if you’re changing out your plumbing valves.

To save some money during our bathroom remodel, we decided to do the painting ourselves. The contractors left three months ago, but it took us a while to get to the painting. But now it’s finally done! We were shooting for a straight gray color but it definitely has a blue tint to it now that it’s on the wall. It looks good though.

I also had to paint the ceiling (white) because of some drywall repair they did when installing the new vent fan. That turned out to be a bit tougher than anticipated because of the sky light. It’s really hot up there when the sun is shining!

The last piece of the puzzle is some kind of drape or valance for the window. Tyla had one picked out but when we put it up, we decided it was a little too short so we’ll look for something else.

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been painting doors. The closet doors for the nursery were stored up in the rafters of the garage when we bought the house and they were all scratched up. The door to the nursery had a bunch of screw holes in the back of it and then we also didn’t pay the contractor to do any painting when they worked on our bathroom so the new door was unpainted.

All four of those doors are now painted and installed. Looking back at the project, I can see how a paint sprayer would have been a big bonus, but I got by with paint brushes and rollers. My strategy was to use a brush for the inset parts of the six panel door, roll over the rest of the door, and then use the brush to take the texture out of the rolled areas. I started each door with a coat of Kilz primer and then added one coat of white paint. If you try this, remember to check the angled areas of the inset panels on each door. They can collect paint globs.

I’m not 100% thrilled with the end result. We have two different types and colors of white trim in the house so these doors only match half of that, but it’s the best I could do without tackling all the trim as well. And there’s no way I have time to do that monster project right now!

When we started getting some warm weather at the beginning of April, I jumped the gun and tried to start the garden. A tomato plant and two strawberry plants which I put under a homemade hoop house and some volunteer cilantro and rosemary plants from last year are doing very well, but none of the seeds I planted came up.

It was time to give up on those seeds and start over so a few days ago I planted more tomatos, lettuce, zucchini, beans, another cilantro plant and my experiment for the year: cantaloupe. The garden area doesn’t get much sun so I’m trying to put the tomatoes back against the fence where they can catch some radiant heat. With the ~80 degree weather that we’ve been having for the past few days, I’m hoping the seeds are getting off to a good start.

If all goes well with the yard remodel, next year the garden should get a lot more sun. I’m also thinking about working in an easy way to cover the garden in a simple greenhouse during the early part of the year.

Last year, Mom and Dad were out here during the tulip festival so we headed up that way. I purchased a few tulips in a pot for Tyla who wasn’t able to come along with us. When I purchased them, I asked if they could be replanted. She said there wasn’t much chance of that working because they were raised in a greenhouse, yada yada yada.

I decided to try to plant them anyway so I followed the various instructions I found online. After the flowers died last spring, I trimmed off the stem, pulled out the bulbs and placed them in a paper bag which I kept in the garage. In October I put the bags in the fridge for about 30 days and then I planted them out in the yard.

Much to my surprise, about half of them actually came up and produced flowers this year!

We’re planning a big yard remodel and I think I might try to work in a section of tulips. Nothing is as beautiful as those endless fields of tulips up north, but it’s a good reminder of the fun times we’ve had up there.