Zibblog » Condo

Who needs search when you have forums?

zibbler — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 05:37:16 +0000

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.

Condo renovations

zibbler — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:22:00 +0000

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.

Really Big Whiteboard

zibbler — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:08:00 +0000

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).

Wiring the condo: Day 1

zibbler — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 04:48:00 +0000

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.

Color schemes

zibbler — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:40:00 +0000

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

First look at the new condo

zibbler — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 17:49:00 +0000

For all of you that have been wondering what the new condo looks like, here are some photos that I took of the place on Friday night. You can either click on the photo or click here to see all of the photos tagged with “condo” in Flickr.

On a side note, I finally set up Flickr awhile back and liked it a lot since you can link up your yahoo account and it’s mostly free. Anyway, they give you the ability to upload images, tag them, and set up a logical permanent url path. The other thing is that with it’s popularity, you can probably find a nice upload program if you don’t want to just use the web form. I used FlickrExport, which allows you to export directly from iPhoto.

Finally a Homeowner

zibbler — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:01:00 +0000

Last night I signed all the paperwork necessary for the title and loan, this morning I dropped off a check at the title company for the remaining balance of the escrow account, and by noon today, the loan was funded. I am now officially a homeowner.

Trials and Tribulations of Buying a Home

zibbler — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 21:46:00 +0000

If I haven’t talked to you recently, you might think that I would have finished with escrow by now and have my condo in Los Altos all purchased. Well, this process has been slightly more trouble than I had imagined. For awhile, I was worrying about getting a document from Mercury stating that I had worked there for 5 years since I’d only been working at my new job for a week or so. Once that was done, the mortgage broker that I was going through found out that because a certain HOA doc was missing (guidelines for arbitration), the Fannie Mae guidelines state that it is “unwarrantable”. This meant that the lender wouldn’t come through with the loan, and it was already Wednesday afternoon before the Monday that I was supposed to close escrow. The loan broker was scrambling to find me some rates that didn’t completely suck, and I took the advice of my real estate agent and Leslie and talked to someone at Bank of America to try and get a new loan. At this point, I am one day past the original closing date, and it is looking like I’m going to be able to sign docs for the BofA loan today. I’m crossing my fingers that nothing else crazy happens, but hopefully, in a few hours, I will be a homeowner.

Mortgages (or Fun with Numbers)

zibbler — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 00:13:00 +0000

As I get ready to leave my current job, I have been given less and less real work to do with a lot of it being transitioning things and being around for people to ask questions of. While I was waiting for my server to build and restart, I was surfing the web for good mortgage payment calculators. After a little surfing, I found calculators.interest.com which has a few different tools for calculating things like monthly payments based on interest rates and the amount you are financing.

Real estate part 3

zibbler — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:32:00 +0000

Thanks for all of the well wishes from everybody. It’s cool to see that people are still reading the zibblog after some long gaps between posts.

For anyone wanting more information, it’s an 1100 ft condo with a garage. At some point, there will be some pictures posted of the condition before I move in. Sometime in December, there will probably also be a housewarming/xmas party complete with geeky xmas tree and fiberoptic wreath (yeah, I still have the fiberoptic wreath). That way everyone can see the condition of the place before my dad and I put in hardwood floors and redo the kitchen. :)