About a week ago now, my parents were out visiting, so my dad and I were doing numerous home improvements. One of the home improvements was to fix my dripping shower head. Unfortunately, we got the knob about half off and weren’t quite sure how to finish disconnecting it all. After a little searching, I realized that there wasn’t any good way that I could think of to figure out what shower handles I have. At that point, I decided to try a different tactic. I found a plumbing web forum that had similar topics, posted the picture above and had an answer in about 8 hours. Sometimes, the web is nice.

Note: For the impatient people that just want to browse photos of my renovations, you can go to the Flickr photoset.

As you may or may not know, while I was in between employment, my parents drove out from Nebraska to “help” me remodel parts of my condo (where “help” means that my dad was doing the real work and I helped out where I could. I had decided to skip the kitchen for the moment because of the amount of up front work that was required in terms of ordering cabinets and such combined with the fact that it was probably going to be a lot more expensive. Therefore, the initial idea was for my parents to come out, assess the place, and determine how much of the living room, dining room, and guest bathroom that we thought we could do. By the time they got there, I had gotten a ceiling fan from Lamps Plus (a store that I would highly recommend) and some in ceiling speakers for the kitchen, but that was about it.

After my parents got out here, we settled into a routine of getting up for a real breakfast somewhere, heading to Home Depot and/or other places to pick up any necessary supplies, and working until around 8pm before getting dinner. In the middle of the week, Mike was kind enough to let my mom and I come along to the NCAA basketball tournament in Oakland since he had a couple of extra tickets become available at the last moment. We decided that we probably had enough time to do painting of the main areas (living room, hallways, dining room, and guest bath) along with crown molding, baseboard, and light fixture replacement. The ceiling needed to be painted as well, and there were multiple other little projects along the way.

As a result of all of this, I learned some valuable lessons about home repair.

• Bathrooms are expensive (a lot of money was spent at Restoration Hardware)
• Crown molding really does make a big difference (I underestimated the amount of the effect until I saw the difference).
• Ikea is cheap.
• The service at Home Depot is lousy.
• Paint may not solve everything, but it certainly helps.

Anyway, as I posted in the beginning, there are a lot more photos here arranged loosely in a before and after format.

For the past couple of days, my parents have been in town. This means that there have been trips made to places like Home Depot, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Ikea, Office Depot, and Best Buy in search of supplies for some condo remodeling. One of my first purchases was a 4′ x 6′ whiteboard from Office Depot for my office. It is the first whiteboard that I’ve actually bought, and I think that it will make a nice addition to my office. However, right now it is leaning against the wall of my hallway so that I can scribble on it in an attempt to figure out where I am going to work next, which is the primary reason that I’m up at 2AM (well, that and watching tonight’s episode of The West Wing which was kind of disappointing because nothing in the episode moved forward the Josh and Donna romance).

Now that I have my own place, I decided to take advantage of it and put holes in the walls. :-) The first project involves getting a home theater audio system, wiring the speakers through the walls, and mounting my plasma tv on the wall. The results of the day (after some cleanup), are in the photo seen here.

To prepare, I got an entry level Yamaha system, speaker cable, and other bits and pieces from Best Buy along with a tv wall mount from Fry’s. JB was kind enough to offer to help out with the project so we got started around 1:30 on Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t long before we discovered that there were screws for the walls that were no longer in the box. I had seen another wall mount at Target that was a little cheaper (I know that you’re thinking, cheaper is all well and good until my plasma falls off the wall), so we took the wall mount back to Fry’s and got the other wall mount from Target. At Target, we saw a man wearing an umbrella hat (before you ask, yes, it was a grown man wearing a hat that looked just like the one in the link). After we got back and opened up the new wall mount, we found that it was missing some washers that we needed, so we just bought some replacements at a nearby TrueValue.

At this point, we put up the plasma and started wiring the walls. It went fairly smoothly. Some of the high points included discovering that the wall we were cutting into had 2 half inch sheets of sheetrock on it, crawling around coughing on fiberglass insulation, JB fishing wires out of the walls with wire coat hangers, and finding out that my neighbor’s bedroom shares a wall with my living room when I got a knock on my door at 11pm. From this experience, I learned a few things: JB is a good person to have helping you fish wires through walls, picture hanging wire is pretty handy to have for a project like this, insulation in walls sucks sometimes, fiberglass poles are pretty nice for pushing wires through insulation, and a fiber optic viewer would really come in handy when you’ve got no idea where inside your wall that a wire is.

Now that I have the condo, the next step is lining up all of the home improvement projects and supplies. First thing on the list is the selection of a color scheme to make sure that I don’t purchase anything that will look out of place when I’m done. After some web browsing, I ended up on behr.com, which had some nice tools for picking out colors and putting together a color scheme. Here’s the colors from one of my current favorites. Starting at top left and going clockwise, the colors pictured are

• Sled
• Raging Sea
• Billowy Clouds
• Laurel Mist