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Written by Mike Barton
Sunday, 05 August 2007
Well, now it's time to get the inside of the house straight Because I said so. After getting Katie's Bedroom and Playroom done, we tackled our bedroom and now, the downstairs office: Before it was the rich brown of Pre Sales Taupe. But I like Royal Blue. In fact, I never really thought about colors or any of the designing aspects of home ownership until I started watching HGTV and the rest of that nonsense at the In Laws. Now I want to make this house my own. Putting up pictures and paint is a good cheap [$100 a room] start at putting my stake in the ground. So blue walls, new blinds and a new light fixture and the room is ready: It's Brown Much Better! I'm pretty happy with it. Along with some of the other changes such as getting a laptop and docking station as my only computer I think that we can take this room and make it more versatile. Maybe start by putting a futon and end table in there so we have a reading area. At least the blue is pretty. And when we get souvenirs we can put some shelving up for display purposes. A good start. Write Comment (0 Comments)
Last Updated ( Sunday, 05 August 2007 )

Another Project Completed

Written by Mike Barton

Tuesday, 24 July 2007

Needs Paint

The whole house needs painting so we finally decided to tackle a room- our bedroom. After choosing Kilz paint with primer mixed in [on a one-coat promise] we got the room painted painted last Saturday:

Before

After

Ignore the curtain. It has been replaced with a subtle gold/red/green paisley.

Next weekend- time to paint the office with a Royal Blue.

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Better TV

Written by Mike Barton
Monday, 23 July 2007
Not the biggest change . . . but worth mentioning. We switched TV providers from Time Warner Cable to DirecTV over the weekend. After some initial confusion about whether we could make it work or not, everything went in hitchless. Trees are the enemy The van was late in arriving. Apparently we were last in the rotation and the installer spends a lot of time on his stops to make sure that everything is super duper A-OK. I though they had been out, looked at the trees on the south side of the lot and gave up. For anyone who has been in KCMO, you'll know what I am talking about. If Johnson County KS is built on prairie grass, KCMO is biult in a forest. The south side of our lot is nothing but trees and we thought there would be issues. The installer though the SD channels would go in without issue but the HD channels would be compromised because you have to capture signal from a larger constellation of satellites to make that work and the trees might make it impossible to shoot unobstructed. A solution The solution they arrives at was to put the dish on a pole. Not elegant but it worked. When he performed the final site survey, our signal was full strength from all satellites and this was a very positive development for the cost of a dish in our yard. Living in an older neighborhood meant no homeowner association fascists to deal with: Dish on a Pole . . . but more headaches Although the shot went fine it turned out that local sports channels are not included in the base package so that was an extra $12 a month- very disappointing. On the plus side I should get a lot more college football games this fall which will be a boon. I love the college football. Odds and Ends The UI is gorgeous on the big TV and the compression looks better than Time Warner though it suffers more from macroblocking - the blocking of seemingly solid colors- than the pixellation of bordering areas that I saw from TWKC. Locals and HD locals are part of the package so I'm happy in that regard. And the entire TELCO package will likely save us $30 to $50 a month. That's a good thing for a service I don't even use much. And we get HBO, Skinemax and Showtime fre for 3 months. Write Comment (0 Comments)
Last Updated ( Monday, 23 July 2007 )