September 2008

This post is from from my other blog here

Amazing stuff. When we finished our deck, which is made of IPE it was smack in the middle of the rainy season so we never got it oiled.  Then, the time to do it just never seemed to come up.  I finally got out the pressure washer and got it and the house cleaned.  This is what happens in the Pacific Northwest.

You really have to keep up on the moss growth.  In the winter the deck gets too slippery to use. The pressure washer works great but it really hard on the wood.  I had to do some sanding before I oiled it.  You can really see the contrast here where the decking had already turned gray the oil brought back all the beautiful colors. IPE is basically red but has greens and purples and even some yellow in it.  It is very hard wood.

I started putting the oil on with a roller which was one of the suggestions but really it worked best when I put it on by hand with a wool pad.

Now the wood looks like it did when it was new and with the slippery moss cleaned up the deck is way more usable.

I used one gallon and got the floor and some of the railing done.  I need one more gallon to finish the steps.  It really was not all that tough to do and took about an hour to put down once the cleaning was done.

This post is from from my other blog here

I can't believe we are heading in to fall and I don't really feel like I accomplished anything this summer.

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the details involved in building your own house that are so easily overlooked when the process gets going.

It's very exciting when you decide to build you own home.  Our house plans went through a lot of changes before we got started.  We were lucky as we had a family member drawing our plans up for us so it didn't cost us an arm and a leg every time we decided to add a window or change a wall.  Those are pretty major things though, I am talking about the little stuff cable outlets, location of wall outlets types of lighting etc.

First off lighting.  It's like buying a printer.......make sure to see how much the bulbs are before you get set on lighting. 

I love this track lighting.  I of course bought it on the clearance tables.  I think it was ten bucks at final clearance and I bought two of them and a round one that matches that we put in the kitchen.

Each one takes 4 halogen 50 bulbs at eight bucks each.  Let me to the math for you.....thats $32 every time I have to change out the tracks.  Three 4 bulb units will run me just under a hundred bucks to fill with bulbs.  I have done that twice now since they have been installed.  They now sit empty because I am not gonna do it again.  So I am looking for track that takes a "regular" bulb and preferably one I can put a compact fluorescent in.  Sometimes a bargain is not a bargain if it costs you so much to keep it going.

In floor outlets.  I'm gonna get some grief for this one but when the house building is in full swing there are about a million things going on at once.  I had to pick the location of where those outlets would go in our living room.

Now I am not one of those people that arrange the furniture and it never moves for 20 years.  I rearrange it constantly.  I tried to imagine all the ways in which I would have it and where best to put the outlets.  I remember when I was making this decision I was doing a bunch of other stuff and really I should have spent more time on it.  They are really too far from the fireplace which is where I do tend to center the living room furniture although I have had the dining room table over there.  I really only use them when I put the couch there with a table behind ...