Mind Numbing

Similar to what we've selected for the basement

I HATE shopping. Man, I really hate it. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but each time I do it I am reminded of my loathing.

This weekend's journey's have been focused mainly on furniture -- a process that started in earnest a few weeks ago. As we've started to unpack and work ourselves in to the new place our needs have become better defined. There are several rooms that need to be addressed.

Furnishings end up influencing all of the other decisions so it's a pretty big deal to get it right, especially since furniture isn't all that easy to dispose of if you don't. That's a lot of pressure. And then...there is Fort Wayne. Oh, Fort Wayne, your demographic's tastes in decor just don't match ours very well. Chicago is great. I'm sure we can find stuff there (although it's expensive), but that's a trip we don't have time for right now. Very hard to get a solid grasp of details and build quality on-line, though it works for some things.

We go to place after place and find maybe one or two things that kinda', might, sorta' work. It takes a lot of determination to keep at it. Eventually, as with so many decisions relating to the decor, we eventually become beat down enough that getting it done outweighs our desire to get what we really want...assuming we even know what that is.

We've become quite puzzled about the mechanical characteristics of bedroom furniture. It's function is primarily for storage. So logically one would think there'd be good attention to that aspect in the design, and specifically in getting drawers open and closed. But we find that even in many of the very expensive high-end products the drawers are just wood sliding on some plastic thing. They don't really have a nice, fluid feel when opening or closing. Often times we find the really cheap stuff actually feels better to use due to something as simple as rolling slides. Admittedly the quality and fit of rolling slides can vary widely, but why would anyone pay $2000 for a dresser whose drawers are hard to open and close? When I observe a trend like this -- where my sensibility clearly doesn't match the market's -- I begin to wonder if I'm weird.

Bedroom: Tough to decide how important this is. WE see it and use it a lot, but hardly anyone else will. The storage aspect is important though. We ended up with this because it was one of the very few we liked the look of. The price was right,  but the drawers don't have rolling slides. I compromised.

Grinding Through the Minutiae

Everything has a depth when you dig into it.

One thing about being a busy professional is you learn it's often more efficient to pay people to do jobs you could otherwise do yourself. To that end I have hired an A/V integrator for the system at the new house. I knew I just couldn't devote the hours (and my sanity) to getting it all to work the way I want it to.

Of course, even with an integrator it's a challenge to just cull all of the possibilities down to a concrete and actionable spec they can follow. It's been going well, and the system is basically functional now -- it will be very cool when we finish it all.

In the meantime I'm in the process of defining the next steps for them. As the e-mail below that I sent a few days ago reveals...everything has a depth to it.

Paul, I hope your trip in Florida was enjoyable. Here is the current To Do list (below) just so you can have it all in one place.

One problem we are having is that the remotes are still intermittent. It definitely got better when Carlos installed the second C4 box, but the performance is still unacceptable. Strangely, the most troublesome spot is in the Hearth Room (the remote closest to a C4 box). It works fine most of the time, but it doesn't work enough that it gets quite annoying after a while. Operation of a DVR requires a fair amount of fast forwarding through commercials...so far these remotes are not reliable for that.

I've also noticed an intermittent failure on the TiVo on the Master Bedroom. It seems to go through spells where the audio and video will be interrupted for a second. Audio drops out and the screen goes to noise (not black as was happening on the Blu-Ray).

I also need to talk with you a bit for more clarification on the iPad/iPhone license. We'll soon have two iPads in the house, and we already have two iPhones.

Can we map anything useful to the red 4 button on the remotes, or is that dedicated to C4 specific stuff?

Carlos was never able to get the C4 box in the rack to learn IR commands. Not sure if it's defective or if he didn't have the procedure right, but it's something you should be aware of for the future.


To Do items In no particular order....

• Mount Surround Speakers in basement
• Install and program Sony receiver in basement
• Connect TV in Hearth Room to Marantz receiver for whole house audio. I have the cable for this, but if there is a way to give the same function by routing the audio directly out of the C4 box it seems like we should do that -- maybe that's even more flexible. Need your expertise and opinion here.
• If applicable use the Hearth Room C4 unit to send IR to that TV (freeing up a Cat-5 I can use to put a Mac Mini there eventually)
• Install HDMI cable in basement wall between computer and TV (it doesn't need to be any great HDMI cable so go cheap here)
• Update remotes to cover the following commands and functions

TV

Sleep Timer Menu - I want a button that will run a Macro that will set the TV sleep timer while using any of the five sources (counting the TV itself). We'll have to decide about the best button for that, taking into consideration some of the requests below. Also, I've noticed that when I set the TV to go to sleep manually the C4 never knows about it, so I have to end up powering it back on manually as well. Is there a way to recover from a state where the C4 gets out of sync with the actual state of a device?
Colored buttons (also on BluRay) - Verify these are mapped to same colors on C4


TiVo - TCD-648-250

Live TV (tuner swap) - map to BLUE COLORED BUTTON on C4
Page up and down buttons should do the same function as the channel up and down button (but only when in TiVo control mode)
slow motion -- Put on STAR * button on C4 DONE --- EXCEPT WE MAY NEED TO MOVE THIS TO MAKE ROOM FOR ANOTHER FUNCTION (SEE BELOW). I'd rather slow motion be on the stop button, but Carlos couldn't make that work.
Thumbs down & thumbs up --- Put on Red & Green buttons on C4 (red = thumbs down; green = thumbs up) DONE
TiVo button -- map to MENU on C4 remote
Chapter ff and rw - chapter/track advance buttons - On the Harmony Remote these buttons are called skip back and skip forward. In harmony's software interpretation of TiVo commands it is referred to as Replay and Advance.
Cancel and Enter commands for TiVo need dedicated buttons - we could use star (*) and number (#) for those. I am open to other ideas. Maybe the CNCL button can suffice for one of them.



Motorolla

Tuner Swap (called "swap" on Mediacom remote) - Map to same button we use for Live TV on TiVo
List -- YELLOW BUTTON DONE
Favorite -- GREEN BUTTON DONE
Also need the skip forward and skip back mapped to the same buttons we use for TiVo
There are "day" up and down buttons on this remote, which presumably makes finding shows more efficient. Not sure how important it is, but we may want to map those somewhere as well. If we do then we'll probably want them on the Red and Green buttons, which means we need to move the Favorite command over to the Blue button.


Not sure how much of this you can do ahead of time, but I'm happy to make arrangements to be at the house if you want to do it there.

Let me know your schedule when you get a chance.

Thanks,

David

...and I realized a few hours after I sent this I forgot a few things...

Part Number XJCS3.4rLYFGIF or XJC3.4wLYGWY?

Back to work today. Every day I have errands and phone calls to make at lunch. Today's errand was to go find a specific brand of wall plate computer connectors for the office. To make a long story short (well, at least a little shorter than it could be) the house was pre-wired for ethernet (computer), coax (cable TV), and POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). The POTS ultimately just feeds into a cable modem anyway, but as far as the rest of the house is concerned it's simple wiring (although there is wiring for four separate telephone lines on the same type of connectors used for the computer network!). Anyway....in the room we've designated as the office there were two RJ-45 (Cat-5 computer) connectors on the wall. Most of the rooms have this, but in all the others one of them is actually the POTS. In the office they are both set up and routed as computer network lines. Knowing phone lines had been run all over the house I had a hunch one was run to this room as well, and upon pulling the plate off the wall I found it. Good, at least I don't have to repatch or rewire anything. But getting the phone signal distribution working at all proved to be a challenge. I spent nearly all of Saturday or Sunday morning (I honestly don't remember which at this point) figuring all that out and rebuilding some of the cable terminations. So now there are two network lines (we'll ultimately need both of those) plus a phone feed to the office, but the wall plate only has room for two jacks. So I set out to find a four jack plate. Simple, eh?

But they don't

give you any

compatibility

data on this

or the plates.

I had already learned from the labor intensive dropping of an extra network cable into the master bedroom that there is no standardization of these parts -- each brand is different and they will not work together. So, to avoid having to rewire the two computer jacks already in the office I decided to find a plate of that brand. Well....suffice to say that in hindsight it would have been much more efficient to buy all new parts and rewire them. After an hour of navigating a confusing maze of cryptic part numbers on-line looking for compatible parts I decided to just head out and see if I could find and look at them in person. So today at lunch I ended up (after a few stops) at Kimble Electric. They are more of a contractor's electrical supply outlet located in what is basically a warehouse, and not really set up to deal with shirt and tie people like me buying a few dollars worth of plastic parts when I don't even know the correct part numbers. But they were patient and we worked through it. And to illustrate how confusing it is, I got all the way out to the car to leave before I realized they sold me the wrong stuff. I went back in and talked to the same guy and he admitted he got confused and blew it.

So, pending the actual installation of the panels and a couple of extra connectors I think the network is nearly complete. Er....at least the HARDWARE side of it is.

Whew!!! I'm tired.

WANTED: Frog Hunter

We've lived in the new house a little over a week now and I'm finding that I'm not a fan of frogs. They are waking me and keeping me awake at night.

I knew with the water there would be frogs around and I figured at night they'd be doing their thing. But the relatively soothing nocturnal noises I've associated with them in the past are not the noises that are made by my frogs.

No, I seem to have the angry, moaning, barking, gagging variety of frogs. The sounds they make are quite unsettling. There's one who moans really loudly all night long -- almost sounds like a cow in distress. Several others make a loud gagging/gulping noise every so often.

These guys are going to have to go.

A New Chapter -- Closing Continued (Reflection)

(Continued from previous entry)

I did briefly think on a couple of occasions about all the time I spent in that house, and what it has meant to me. But being so hectic with everything and always being rushed while there prevented me from exploring those feelings as much as I would have liked. In the end that's probably a good thing, but it kind of irritated me at the time.

That was only the second house I've ever owned (even though I have purchased several since then for one reason or another). It was a big step for me to buy it and move in there. I was in Fort Wayne for only three years at the time. I was single, and still wasn't sure how long I would be there, or at my job, or...  I just really didn't know yet how my life was going to turn out. I was 32 years old. Now, of course, everything is much different. I'm married, and my life is largely carved out at this point. That house was home base for all of those transitions -- from young adult to adult, and into middle age. I've written that I lived there longer than any other single place, but I've also covered a lot more ground personally than in any other easily demarcated period in my life.

But somehow in all the chaos I got out of there without getting bogged down in the sentimentality of it all. I wanted to reflect on it all more.

That line has been crossed. It's on into the future now. We have a huge pile of stuff to do on the new house, so expect some entertaining posts to come.

DS

More Closing

We closed on the old house Friday. There was less drama with this one than the last one, but it was not entirely without its share of excitement.

Probably my biggest frustration was over the inspection. They came back with a list of items to be corrected before the sale. Nearly all of them seemed frivolous to me. It seems to me that when you negotiate the price of a house, and you know going in how old and used it is....well....it just seems like you'd understand that there are aspects that aren't going to be perfect. You can negotiate those things up front with the price, but to come back after that's settled and niggle more things -- especially subjective things -- out of the seller seems kind of questionable to me. None of them were major, but they were things that cost money and time to do, and collectively that stuff does add up. One of the items was to clean the furnace filter. Okay, fine, but why wast everyone's time with something so trivial? Others were nearly as trivial, but really did take me some time and effort to get corrected.

My realtor advised me to just deal with it and move on. I agree, but it's a few hundred dollars in labor and materials that are for things that I honestly wouldn't have given a second thought to.

I've mentioned before that there were a few furnishings they were interested in from the house. At the time when this came up I asked for them to narrow it down so I could price some things for them. They said they'd be interested in anything we'd sell -- they are starting over. Okay....so Liane and I took the time to price a bunch of stuff. They came back as interested in a few of them -- mostly the ones that we priced really, really low because we were on the verge of discarding them anyway. They tried to counter offer me on the small TV's (loft and kitchen), but said that if I didn't accept the offer to leave the mounting arms holding them. "Uh...NO." Those arms cost almost as much as the sets they are attached to, and we specifically wrote that they are not included into the listing. So they paid my price for that stuff, which was still a really good deal.

Then there is the desk debacle. They wanted the desk and credenza, which after seeing it in the new place we were pretty sure we wanted to unload it. I offered $125. They countered with $100, and I took it. I offered to take it back over and set it up for them. It's fragile and tricky enough that I wanted to do this in part to avoid any complications with it. I knew if I did it then it would be done right and it would just work for them. Of course, knowing they are an older couple I really believed it would be helpful for them if I took care of it. We had to move it anyway, so not that big of a deal to set it up. Of course they accepted that offer and wanted it up in the loft. So on the last day my brother was up here helping to move we piled it all in his truck and took it over. I set it all up a few days later. Then, two days before close, I get a message that they don't want it after all. Whew! I had just about had enough of all this.

My response...

Cc: Dave & Liane Stewart

Subject: Re: seller's desk and credenza

Frankly, this is not acceptable. I've already spent the time, energy and considerable effort to take them back over there and set them up in the loft. I never dreamed any of this stuff was still open to interpretation. Can we just change anything we want, right up to the last minute? Heck, maybe I want more money for the house now.  

At some point my capacity to bend over backwards to make this happen comes to an end, and we are right at that point now. Sorry to be a jerk about it...I want to be reasonable and cordial, but I literally don't have a vehicle that I can use to move them. If the seller wants to compensate me for hiring movers to get them back out of there I suppose I can try to find time to do it.

Short of that....they are there, and I expect the buyers to fulfill on their commitment to buy them.

Sorry, 

David 

From  my realtor

I totally agree.  Spoke with buyers Agent.  She apologized, and said to leave it there.  You will be compensated for it as per our agreement. 

The closing itself went without incident. I told Liane the night before that after all this my goal is to just get out of there and on with my life as quickly as possible. Just like the closing on our house the husband was very kind and friendly. The wife was cordial enough, but I could tell she was kind of a bitch, and without a doubt was the source of our little problems up to this point. It's always the women...

I had wanted to go over to the house right before closing to do my final walk through and gather up any last minute items, but the realtor called and said they wanted to do a final walk through. Whatever. So I just did it on my lunch break, which cost me an extra trip over there since the title office we used for closing is right down the street. 

(Continued in the next entry.)

I Made a Dingy

A friend of mine who helped us move brought his two kids along. Ideally we'd have been able to keep them busy, but as I've mentioned before we ended up so far ahead of schedule that by the time people starting showing up to help we were most of the way done. 

At the new house my friend's son, who is one of those kids with a lot of unharnessed energy (if you know what I mean) came up to me and proclaimed, "I made a dingy." I wasn't sure what he meant by that. It seemed so random and out of any context. "Do you mean a boat?" It turned out he did mean a boat. He took a piece of cardboard and used a stick for a mast, and set it to sea...

For the next 20 minutes the dad and sister tried to retrieve the lost vessel. It may have been no big deal, but being new to the lake (or pond, whatever it is) I didn't want to show up and in our first day pollute it with a big piece of cardboard.

Finally my brother came to their rescue and got it with a moving strap.

Cade, the kid, who was of course off playing elsewhere five minutes into the rescue operation, exclaimed, "We got the dingy."

Rob, broom in hand, tried in vain to retrieve the wayward dingy.

U-Haul

Even though we moved a lot of stuff ahead of time we came close to filling this big truck.

Moved

Well, we moved. It was surprisingly...easy? U-Haul was very efficient and timely with the truck (the last time I rented from them it took hours to get the truck), and between my brother and a couple of friends we had the truck 95% loaded an hour before the pro movers I hired were scheduled to arrive. We were just sitting around at the end. I sent one of my friends home because it was just a waste of his time to be there. I felt bad for having him come.

My brother dutifully made sure the household plunger made it to the new location in tact.

Ghost Town

We move tomorrow. The house isn't empty yet, but it feels empty. Nothing on the walls, or in drawers and closets. Lot of boxes sitting around. Last night I took the final and largest step of pulling apart the A/V system. It was reduced to a pile of cables and little boxes -- so complicated, all for the sake of making the use of it simple, yet flexible. All that work, just ripped apart. 

I realized recently that I have lived in this house longer than any other place in my life. That seems weird, in part because it's only been the last several years that I've truly felt settled here, or in Fort Wayne in general. Now I'm moving away. I've chronicled some of my apprehensions about this right here in this blog, so there isn't much need to write it all down again.

I feel strange...disconnected...like a stranger in an alien place.

Mediacom

While I wouldn't characterize myself as a disgruntled customer of Comcast (cable TV, phone, internet) I have been significantly less than gruntled for a long time. One of my only good experiences with them was the phone call (and their return call to me -- yes it does actually happen sometimes) to have the service discontinued in a few days.

Now I will have to use Mediacom, which is the provider for Columbia City. My early experiences with them have been about the same as Comcast -- generally not very good. There are things they presumably have no control over, like the fact that I can't keep my old phone number, even though I'm moving just a few miles up the road. But then there are the other things:

Of course the install window was from 8:00 to 12:00 AM. And they were supposed to call before coming so I could make sure I was there. At 11:30 I decided to call them. A guy arrived shortly before noon.

They couldn't tell me the model of DVR they were going to install, so my A/V integrator had to do all of the programing for it on-site after they brought it. I am paying him by the hour -- on site programming is always harder and takes longer.

The first DVR they brought didn't have HDMI outputs (only component video). The guy had to leave to go back and get a different one. All the while I am waiting there to sign off on the work, instead of being at work where I belong.

They didn't bring the two cable cards I ordered, so no way to get the TiVo up and running. After asking about my schedule the guy made an appointment for them to come back Wednesday between 8:00 and 12:00 for that. Another day of me missing some work and having to drive all the way out there.

On Wednesday morning (10:30) I called to check the status. The lady saw the order in the system, but could not confirm when the tech would be coming out.

At 3:30 PM I called again. The lady who took this call told me the appointment was for Thursday. "So they changed it without calling me?" "No, it looks like it was always set up for Thursday?" "But as I explained to the tech who made the appointment, I am not available on Thursday. He told me he made it for Wednesday..."

Sigh...


Update Thursday 5/12 -- Got the cards installed in the TiVo. It appeared to work. I had to rush over there from work so I didn't have time to get all the new A/V stuff on line, which made it hard to check everything quickly. Turns out lots of channels don't work, on both the TiVo and their DVR box...and it's not all the same channels. Called them, went through a horrendous automated troubleshooting genie over the phone, finally got to a CSR. Have an appointment for them to come back Monday.

Sigh...

Pipes

Spent hours yesterday going looking at and going over details relating to the bathroom remodel, particularly the fixtures and plumbing. Plumbing?

What we want in the shower seems simple enough, if a bit extravagant. We want two shower heads -- one at each end, a hand wand, and a rain head above. It turns out that it requires some Rube Goldberg plumbing extravaganza to make this work, and even then compromises must be made....unless you're willing to spend a truly insane amount of money (like automobile sized dollars).

It's remarkable how proud some of these companies are of their pieces of metal. With one high-end company the plate that sits behind the control knob in the shower costs $1,000. I am not kidding, and this is considered acceptable for some reason.

I know we'll eventually get there, but man all of these little decisions are mind numbing.

Moving in One Week

Inspection is done. I haven't seen the results yet, but I'm told there were only minor issues. We're on track.

And...we're buried. Still so much to do. Prior to the inspection the buyers asked us to price any furnishings we'd be willing to sell. Well...okay...I mean, really, anything is for sale if someone wants it enough to pay for it. I could put a price on anything and everything with enough thought. I asked if there were any things they were particularly interested in, just trying to limit the scope of it. What we got back was that they were completely starting over so it's all fair game. So we spent a good part of Wednesday evening trying to come up with prices on things. We were more motivated to move some than others, and so we priced them accordingly. Early feedback is they aren't interested in any of it. Okay fine, but gee, what a waste of time we really could have used for other things. Thanks.

Today we must empty the storage unit we had rented. We've been pulling items out of it and driving them straight to the new house for the past couple of weeks. The rest of it is just coming back to the old house and will get moved with everything else next Saturday.

One Decision Made

Well, we finally picked out slabs of granite for the kitchen last night. Liane got what she wanted. I'm a little uneasy about the color and how it will fit in with the rest of the decor, but I am getting so worn down in the process of all this that I'm starting not to care about the details as much. I'm in favor of JUST GET IT DONE.

The inventory of granite some of these places have is impressive. It's an expensive material, but I'm learning that most of the cost is in the treating, preparation and installation of it after the fact. It's counterintuitive to me that the excavating and transporting is not the major cost as it is quite a big operation.  Our slabs come from Brazil.