Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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!

When I wrote the “before” post for our bathroom remodel, I said I’d have finished pictures in a couple weeks. That was being very generous in case there were mistakes that I found to have them clean up, etc. I’m happy to report that the job is finished and I will make the final payment tomorrow. This room is perfect! As a reminder, here’s the before photo:

And here’s what it looks like now!

It’s difficult to get good photos in such a small space but hopefully you get a decent idea of what it looks like now. Everything is in the same place and the cabinets are the same, but everything else is new. You’ll notice that we didn’t pay the contractor to paint for us. We’ll do that ourselves later. Tyla also wants me to point out that the “ugly curtains” are being replaced too. Here’s a list of some of the more visible changes:

• We had a half wall between the shower and the tub. That’s gone now.
• The tub deck juts into the shower creating a little ledge for bottles or to help Tyla shave her legs. That’s actually where the wall used to be but now it’s even with the top of the tub so the shower floor is the same height. That extra ~6” of space makes the shower feel quite a bit bigger.
• The frameless shower glass is probably my favorite feature and one of the bigger splurges in the project. Three brackets and two hinges hold the hole thing together! The door swings both ways and auto-centers when it’s within 20 degrees of center.
• You already know the story behind the tile. I’m thrilled with the way this looks. I was really trusting the designer on the first round of tile, but I love what we ended up with and I feel much more confident that it will still look nice in 15-20 years.
• The countertop was another good score. The original plan was to use a product called Caesarstone but the counter guy suggested another product that was half the price and about the same. (The difference is that it’s not from Italy and it’s not as eco-friendly.) Because of the size of our counter, we had to buy a full slab so the cost savings was enormous.
• We went with undermount sinks. Tim and Chelsea put those in their bathroom and I love the look. They should be easy to clean too.
• All of the plumbing fixtures and towel bars are new. They are the Moen Brantford line in brushed nickel. Tim suggested that we wide mount the sink faucets given the length of our counter and they look great.
• There’s a door to the bathroom! It’s one of the changes that’s easy to overlook because it seems like it should have been there all along, but it’s new.

There are also some great changes that aren’t quite as obvious:

• The shower uses a Moen Posi-Temp pressure-balancing valve. They say that it won’t let the water temp vary more than 3 degrees if someone turns on a sink or flushes a toilet. From our limited testing so far it seems to work very well.
• The shower is built for a big man! In almost every shower I use, I have to duck to wash my hair, but not in this one! The bottom of the shower head is 6’6” off the shower floor and the shower glass is extra tall too so I don’t splash over the top.
• We swapped out our noisy 50 CFM vent fan for a super quiet Panasonic 110 CFM model. It’s so good that it makes me want to replace our other fans with this model.
• Our other big splurge on this project was a heated floor. It’s on a 7 day programmable timer and feels wonderful.

The project all went remarkably according to plan. They finished a couple days before planned and our total overrun was less than 2%. The only surprises in the project were:

• The vent pipe for our fan was a smaller diameter than normal and just ran to a soffit vent instead of going through the roof. I kept this one simple by having them put on a reducer and leave the pipe as it was. I can fix that separately if needed, but it will probably be fine the way it is. Since I kept that simple, it didn’t cost any extra.
• The old shower head was never lined up with the shower drain and the new shower pan made that even more obvious. Of course there was a stud in the way so they had to carefully remove it and do some new framing.
• When they plumbed the supply lines to the tub, they went from 1/2” to 3/8” and back to 1/2”. The plumber fixed that up. The tub was also not set in mortar or framed in. It was simply hanging about 3” off the ground. I can’t believe it never cracked! The nice part was that we were able to reuse the tub since it just pulled right out. The next people who remodel won’t be so lucky because it’s now set in a mortar bed.

Now that the project is done, I can give a 100% recommendation for Ron Palmer Construction. He was not the cheapest bid, but he was super detailed. The other contractors gave one page bids. Ron’s was 9 pages with only one page of boilerplate content. Everything was completely broken down so I could see exactly what he was charging for each task. We had a schedule listing what they would be doing every single day. His whole team was very professional and friendly. We had no problem leaving them a key to work in our house each day. From day 1 until they end, they did a marvelous job of protecting the rest of our house and cleaning up after themselves. They had plastic down on the carpet all the way out to the front door, padding on the hardwood floors, and even a huge plastic sheet with a zipper door separating our bed area from the bathroom dust. And as I said before, he was almost spot on with his cost estimate and beat his schedule. Once we save up our pennies for the next remodel, I’ll have a hard time picking anyone but Ron.

So there you have it. The project we talked about the very first time we saw the house is done! Given the same budget, there’s nothing I’d do differently.

When Tyla and I walked through this house in the fall of 2011, we loved a lot of things about it, but the master bathroom was not one of them. It was almost a deal breaker. In the end we bought the house with a plan to save our pennies for a remodel as soon as possible. When that positive pregnancy test came around, I tossed out my hopes of doing some of the work by myself and started the search for a general contractor to run the project. The project should be completed in the next couple weeks, but before I get to the pictures of our new bathroom, I figure it’s worth spending a post talking about what was there before.

I’ll start by saying that I know some of you have these features in your current bathrooms. That’s fine! Everyone likes different things and has different priorities. Just because we changed out something in our bathroom that you have in yours doesn’t mean we think you should do the same in yours (or that we even notice!) But I do think it’s useful to talk about this kind of thing. When we were shopping for houses, we learned a lot about what we like and don’t like. That info was supplemented by talking to friends about their preferences. The only way you can really form your own opinions is to see lots of ideas and hear what other people think so I’ll give you one more data point.

This is one of the few projects where I actually remembered to take a bunch of “before” photos. The one below gives you the basic idea of what we started with. This photo looks towards the sinks with the reflection of the tub and shower in the mirror. The door to the right goes into a small room with a toilet.

Actually this isn’t exactly how it was when we bought the house. There was originally carpet on the floor, but we knew that was one thing we wanted to change. When we had new carpet installed before we moved in, we didn’t put carpet there and I laid some vinyl so we didn’t have to walk on the subfloor.

The entrance to the bathroom is to the left of this photo. What you can’t see is that there is no door to the bathroom. Some people like that, but it felt so odd to us (in addition to being too noisy when we got up at different times) that we have been using the guest bathroom the entire time.

I’ll include a full project list when I post the “after” photos, but some of our top goals were to add a door to the bathroom, get rid of all the yellow synthetic marble stuff, and tile the floor. That meant that the bathroom was pretty much taken down to the subfloor and studs. The contractor estimated this at as a six week project and he’s on track to hit his estimate almost to the day. His cost estimate is coming in right on target too. I’ll reserve a full recommendation until the final tasks are crossed off the list, but we’ve been very happy with our choice so far.

While the project is six weeks on the calendar, the last couple weeks are mostly waiting around for the counter top and the shower glass to get templated, cut and installed. It’s hard to pay somebody for work that I could do myself, but I would have had to subcontract chunks of this out anyway. It was also hard to contract this out after watching Tim redo their bathroom by himself. His end product is extremely impressive and comes with a huge sense of accomplishment. All I get for contracting our project out is a hole in our bank account. But after I see how much work they put into it, I know it would have taken me forever and there’s no way I would have finished before the baby arrived. The bid included 236 hours of work. If you assume that it would take me twice as long as a professional and if I could find 15 hours a week to work on it, that’s 31 weeks of work!

I know this post is kind of a tease, but we’re hoping to have the second, more interesting post ready by mid-February. Stay tuned!

We’re a couple weeks away from having our master bathroom remodel finished. I’ll do a full write up on that with lots of pictures when it’s finished, but I wanted to share one small slice of the project with you now.

Going into this project, one of the biggest question marks in my head was how in the world we were going to decide on what tile to used. We needed to pick out a new counter top, tile for the floor, and tile for our soaker tub and the shower stall. I looked around at the websites of a few tile places and was scared away by what I thought would be extremely high prices. Looking to save a buck, I headed to a discount tile store in Bellevue. They’re small but they have a nice showroom and the employees were fantastic in helping me design our bathroom. I took in a door from the cabinet and walked out with samples to show Tyla. The floor was white with some gray and brown in it and the shower/tub tile was 8×20” sage. The counter was a gray color. She loved the look so as soon as we signed the contract with our general contractor, we placed the order for the tile. Everything was scheduled to arrive two weeks before the contractor started any work on the bathroom. Perfect!

The tile arrived so I picked it up and set it in the garage. We had the 8×20 wall tile, 20×20 floor tile, and rocks for the bottom of the shower. The next day I realized that the wall tile and the rocks were wrong.

No problem. I called, they ordered the new stuff and said it would arrive in a couple days. A couple days turned into a couple weeks but they were sure that it would show up on the exact day that the tile install was scheduled to begin. The correct rocks did show up pretty quickly but I had to wait for the tile.

While I waited, I got more and more nervous about what would happen if the tile didn’t show up. Additionally, I wasn’t sure I even wanted it to show up. Was that sage green going to look ok? Would it still look good in 10-15 years?

The magic day came with silence so I gave them a call. They had to check on it and get back to me. “Your tile isn’t here. It’s not coming. It’s never coming. It’s discontinued.” Apparently the warehouse they work with had been sending mixed messages and here I am at the end of the chain with a contractor waiting to install tile that I don’t have. Yikes.

Thankfully my contractor was super helpful. He suggested a couple places in this huge complex of tile warehouses in south Seattle that kept a lot of tile in stock. They looked pretty fancy but what could I do? We were in a hurry. Tyla and I headed down there with our contractor and asked to only see tile that was in stock. We pretty quickly settled on a 12×12 tile that was gray with some brown in it. And the price? The price about 40% of what the original tile cost! We picked up the tile that same day and we were back in action. On top of that, I felt a LOT more comfortable with our less ambitious design. I figure that gray, brown and white are going to be at least sort of in style for a long time.

I eventually got my money back from the original tile store, the new tile got installed, and it all has a happy ending (minus a few weeks of little sleep, but that’s just prep for a baby, right?) If we ever need tile again, I’ve learned my lesson and will head back to one of the big tile warehouses like Daltile where we ended up getting our tile. The prices were excellent and a lot of it was in stock. What does the new tile look like? You’ll have to wait a couple more weeks until the bathroom is finished!