Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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.

Shopping for CFL or LED bulbs instead of incandescent light bulbs can be confusing. Do you want bright white, warm white, or one of the other white colors? Forget the names. There’s a more precise way to know what you’re getting and it’s called the temperature of the color. Color temperatures are measured in kelvins. A standard incandescent bulb is between 2700 and 3300K. So if you want a CFL or LED bulb that matches that color, look for the color temperature on the box. Some of the bulbs are much whiter, and to my eye they’re very unpleasant.

LED bulbs have been around for a few years but they’ve been cost prohibitive. They’re better than CFL and incandescent in pretty much every way. They use less power, warm up instantly, produce less heat, are dimmable, and last forever (or ~25,000 hours, whichever comes first.) You can find good LED bulbs for $10-15 each at your local store so there’s still a pretty big premium.

On Earth Day, my employer teamed up with PSE to off us a four pack of LED bulbs for $10. It seemed like a good way to test the waters with LED bulbs. I put one of them in the lamp in our living room and three of them in our outdoor lighting since those are the lights that are on the most in our house. It’s really an anticlimactic event. I excitedly screwed in the bulbs, they work, and we rarely think about them.

But it got me to wondering, are they finally getting cheap enough that I should be replacing all my bulbs with LEDs as the old bulbs die out? What’s the break even point? It’s time for some math!

With our fancy GPS-based outdoor light timer, I know that my lights are on specifically between sunset and sunrise every day, even as those times shift. I looked up a full table of rise and set times for Seattle and then calculated how long the sun is up. That in itself was interesting. It turns out that in Seattle over the course of a year, the sun is up 51% of the time. But for our purposes, we just need to know that the sun is down for 4290.75 hours in a year.

Here are how 60 watt equivalent bulb costs would play out over the course of 10 years. Note that I’m prorating the cost of the bulbs that are used so the cost of the remaining lifetime of the last bulb is not included in the total cost.

I didn’t know what to expect when I started those calculations, and I’m impressed that the LED bulb came out ahead! It takes many years for the LED to overtake the CFL, but eventually it at least breaks even. Also note that I was basing the LED numbers on this bulb. Different bulbs have different power requirements, but this is a respectable model/brand.

So from all this we can conclude that at the current prices, CFL and LEDs are just about a break even on cost at least with the models and prices I used in my calculations. In terms of actual use, the LEDs come out ahead because they don’t have the same warmup period as the CFL bulbs and they are dimmable. And the cost tradeoff will vary depending on what you’re comparing. The other caveat is that I don’t know if these bulbs are rated for the temperature swings associated with outdoor use so it will be interesting to see how long they last.

Don’t go running around the house throwing away CFL bulbs since that’s a waste of money, but as they die, you can replace them with LEDs and know that you’ll get your money back over time assuming the LED bulbs live as long as the makers claim. If you want to see it for yourself, check out one of the many online bulb price calculators. We have a stockpile of various sized CFL and incandescent candelabra bulbs, but as those run out I think we’ll be switching to LED.

With a munchkin arriving soon, I figured it would be a good idea to have the guns behind some kind of a lock. I don’t have anything special enough to worry about theft, so I went with a fairly inexpensive cabinet from Stack-On. Cabelas had it on sale so be sure to check them out.

The safe isn’t anything fancy, but it has room for eight guns as long as they aren’t too bulky and there’s a shelf on top. The bottom is padded and the barrel rests are made to not scratch your guns. The unit has a few points where it can be bolted to the walls and/or the floor. I thought that was just for security, so I didn’t care too much, but you really do need to bolt it in to keep it from falling over. The holes didn’t align with the studs so I drilled my own holes through the metal. It only took about 30 minutes to finish the assembly on the unit and get it installed.

It’s not going to keep out someone with a crowbar who’s really determined or anyone with the most basic lock picking skills, but it’s more than enough to keep a toddler from getting into it.

Additionally, I haven’t been blogging about one of my biggest recent projects, but let’s just say that I’ll be hooking the cabinet up to my new security system. So even if someone gets into the cabinet when I’m not around, they’re going to wish they hadn’t.

The room we picked for the nursery seemed perfect except that the floor had a HUGE squeak in it. It was so loud that Tyla walked in there one night and the squeak woke me out of a deep sleep. I want our baby to be able to sleep through anything, but that squeak might have been asking too much.

I decided to try the Squeak No More Kit. It’s a nifty solution (video demo), and $20 was worth a shot. I found all the floor joists, used twine to mark them all, and then added every screw that the kit came with. There was no difference. D’oh! Note that even though it didn’t work for me, I do still recommend it. I read tons of reviews that said it helped and read some reputable magazine articles about it.

After thinking a bit more and listening more carefully to the squeak, it sounded like it was always emanating from the same point and that point was at the base of the wall between the nursery and the bathroom. I took off the baseboard in the bathroom (making a mess of the paint which the previous owners had overlapped onto the baseboard… ugh) and drilled some 4” screws down through the drywall, through the bottom of the wall, and into the subfloor. Or at least that’s where I’m guessing it went. After just one screw I could already hear a difference. After 10 of them the squeak is almost completely gone!

This was one of those annoyances that has been on the back of my mind for quite a while so it’s awesome to have it fixed without calling in any outside help. Something tells me that won’t be the last loud noise I hear from the nursery in the middle of the night…

When we lived at the condo, the association scheduled dryer vent cleaning every two or three years. Our current house was built in 1990, and after seeing how some other maintenance was done, I wondered if they’d ever taken care of the dryer vents. Left untouched, it will reduce your dryer efficiency or even provide a great starting point for a fire.

I didn’t love the idea of paying someone ~$100 to do this so I picked up a $30 kit from Amazon. There are a few ways to configure it,and since I didn’t know how dirty ours was, I chose to be thorough. I started by pulling the dryer out and using the included adapter to hook the shop vac up to the inside end of the dryer vent. I flipped it on in vacuum mode and headed outside with my drill and the rest of the kit. I’m sure you get the idea so I’ll skip the rest of the details, but basically I went back and forth with the brush from the inside and the outside and eventually ended up with a huge pile of lint. The pipe is only about 14 feet long, but I there was easily 2-3 gallons worth of lint.

The process liberated some Lego pieces that must have been in there for a very long time. The previous owners had five girls and the original owners had five boys. I’ll be sexist and assume the Legos came from the boys which means it has been too long since this was done. But now that I have a kit and know how easy this is, I’ll put it on the regular maintenance schedule. Make sure you get your house cleaned out too!

When I bought the condo, I wanted to change the locks so I called a locksmith and paid him something like $100 to change a couple locks. Since then I’ve learned that this is a super easy project to do on your own.

1. Remove the lock from your door. Our house has deadbolts that are separate from the handle and there are two screws on the inside that hold the entire thing together. Take it apart slowly so you can see how it all goes together. It’s pretty simple.
2. Take the locks to Home Depot and ask to have them rekeyed. If they are too old or the wrong kind, you might have to buy new ones for around ~$30-40/lock. If they can be rekeyed, it’s only $5 per lock. Then take your new key and have them make as many copies as you need.
3. Reinstall the locks at home and you’re done!

So for about $15 and a half hour of work/waiting, I can have our whole house rekeyed. It’s so convenient that we’ve done it multiple times since moving in. For example, after the contractor was done, I rekeyed the house. We completely trust the contractor and his employees, but if someone breaks into our house, I don’t want to even think about calling to ask him about it. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.

I’ve had this pie chart floating around in my head for a year and finally got around to making it. Does it look accurate for your own projects?

The room we’ve picked for the baby took it’s first big step towards that goal. Tim and Chelsea stopped by to help put new paint on the walls. Previously it was a couple shades of yellow (like almost every single room in the rest of the house when we bought it) but we covered it in a nice baby blue. It really looks nice with the white trim and the dark wood furniture. Tyla has a lot more decorations in mind and I have quite a few projects remaining like putting shelves back on the closet, but here are a couple photos to show you what it looks like now. I wish we lived closer to Jackie so she could do one of her wonderful murals in this room!