We got the call Friday morning—our first showing will be Sunday morning at 11:30 am. I’m sure you can then appreciate how I went into hyper-drive to finish up my list of outstanding tasks that I wanted to complete before our first showing. Let’s just say that I’ve pretty much been working all day, nearly non-stop to get it all done.

I still have a few minor things that aren’t that big of a deal, but most of the major stuff is done, including cleaning the garage, doing some touch-up painting here and there, getting our garden (particularly the front yard) presentable, sweep the patio area, deal with our yard waste, put recessed light fixture trim back in, install new blinds, and a few other things.

So, yeah, I’m exhausted. A few things left to do and then I’m headed to bed. It’s been a good day—I hope that our guests fall in love with our home and decide to put down an offer. I’m quite proud with our house and how much we’ve improved it. If I were in the market all over again for the first time, there’s no way I would pass up our house with how nice and livable we’ve made our little home.

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Tips from a weekend warrior on installing your own laminate flooring

Our existing wood floor was less than desirable—and we really didn’t have it in us to sand it down and refinish it, especially with two cats who need their freedom to roam about. In addition, I wasn’t up for the chemical smell nor the labor involved in sanding down the floor. So my wife and I decided that we’d do IKEA’s laminate flooring—it’s inexpensive (averaging $1.29 per square foot) and we’ve been told it’s both durable and easy to install. Don’t be too quick to believe everything you hear. Installing it wasn’t easy… at least at first.

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With the most recent events surrounding the results of Natalie’s application for the PA program—that is, the result that she won’t be attending—we’ve switched gears and have begun the process of getting our house ready for market. Part of that process involves me getting the rooms painted up and doing any necessary remodeling to make things look GREAT.

I took this past Friday off from work to start our bedroom—to paint it, install our new bed frame, replace an old outlet and put in some new switch/outlet covers. It wasn’t an easy task to say the least. I spent 13 hours alone on Friday just painting (two to three coats on all walls and the base board) as well as attempting to install the cool bed frame we bought at IKEA.

This is the first time we’ve bought anything substantial from them. Up until now, I’ve only purchased a few lights and smaller things for around the house. But this is the first time I’ve bought something from them that was substantial and required a heavy amount of installation.

I got the frame and got all the way to the point where you install the mid-beam and begin attaching these small steel bars (pretty flimsy…so don’t think they’re too sturdy) from the center beam to the side beams. It was pretty hit or miss if the screws would actually FIT into the holes and when all was said and done, I just wasn’t convinced that they offered any structural support whatsoever.

It was at about 11:00 last night that I realized (and in the midst of a great deal of frustration with this bed frame) that our box springs would NOT fit in our frame. No, they just wanted to fall through and offered no hope of being able to use them. I also realized that I must be missing something important here…namely some sort of cross-section support. Sure enough, after hopping on IKEA’s website, I saw that I was missing the slatted bed bases, which offer true support to your mattress, effectively eliminating your need for a box spring.

So Saturday morning I picked up one of those and a few things for around the house and that ended up working just fine. I just have to put our box springs into storage [we'll probably set up a guest room or something and use them for such a purpose].

I also got some clothing storage containers that slide under the bed and that effectively eliminated our need for dressers and saved us a TON of real estate in our already-tiny bedroom. So now we can walk through our bedroom without tripping on anything or having to squeeze past a piece of furniture.

I don’t have a true wide-angle lens, but here’s a pic of the new colors and our new bed frame:

I still have a little touch-up work to do on the ceiling, the wall, and the baseboard and we have to get some new carpet installed (the current stuff looks pretty ratty) and then our bedroom will look quite nice and ready to show.

Paul and I also braved the blustery conditions of Downtown Saint Paul and did a photo shoot to update our marketing materials (and website) with the changes that have gone down with Crash Effect as of late. I don’t think I’ve blogged about it or really talked about it much beyond my immediate friends and family, but both Kris (bass player) and James (guitarist) left the band because of “musical differences.” I expected Kris to pack up and leave the band, but certainly not James. Admittedly I’m disappointed, but Paul and I have a renewed vision for what Crash Effect is and think that it’ll be much better this way.

So in the coming months, watch crasheffect.com for information about this metamorphosis that is taking place within the band.

(from the photo shoot this afternoon)

Filed under: General, Home Improvement, Music
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Man, great day today. Last night I finished the basement project (I just need to figure out where I’m going to put stuff) and I also received “Mystique” today. Crap sandwhiches, it’s a Hallefallujah!

Anyway, I threw together a cheap-n-dirty flash pseudo-panoramic view of the basement from two different angles. I was displeased with how the floor trim turned out….that isn’t exactly one of my strong suits. So that aspect of it isn’t that awesome. But the basement looks much better than it did before though.

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As soon as I got home from work I started working on laying down the tiles. It took a lot longer than I was hoping to and only got a little over half way done. I still have the west side of the basement to finish yet and have to pick up different floor trim. The rolls that I picked up did have an adhesive back, but it might as well have been left without it. That stuff didn’t stay stuck on the wall for anything. So I have to take the crappy trim back and get something else instead.

Hopefully I’ll have the basement finished by Thursday or Friday and will pick up some stuff to help make the basement a bit more inviting and cancel out some of the live noise in the room.

It’s looking pretty good though.

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I’ve really come a long way with the basement — but it’s also taken a long time to get there, relatively speaking.

I’ve put in about five hours on Thursday evening, close to eight hours on Friday and at least ten to twelve hours today. Today’s accomplishments included getting all of the walls painted and touched up, patched up some bad knicks in the walls, patched up the top edging as you walk downstairs, and even painted the legs on my beer brewing shelf to help it not look so out of place. Looks a little better now.

I still have a bit of work ahead of me. I have to lay all the tiles yet and then have to go on a quest for some curtains and cheap curtain rods for the laundry rooms and the water meter area. I decided not to put the doors back up because they’re pretty ugly and very clumsy to deal with. I saw some nice heavy full-length curtains on Bed Bath & Beyond’s website that I may pick up. That should also help reduce the overall liveness of the room, too…since there’ll be no carpeting down there.

I might also pick up a cool area rug or two to make it a bit more homey.

It’s getting there. Time for a beer and some TV. Enjoy the photos:

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Well, with the storms that we had Tuesday night and into Wednesday, our basement flooded and only caused some damage to the base of the walls and the carpet. Well the carpet sucked to begin with. It was this nasty, skanky blue-gray color and was anything but inspiring. That may have been one factor why I just don’t enjoy spending a lot of time down there unless I’m glued to my monitor.

After moving important gear out of the way, we began ripping up the wet carpet and throwing it outside. Later I went over to Home Depot to buy some subflooring and some cool vinyl tiles—totaling almost $470 in materials.

Well this evening I went gang busters on the floor and have much of the subflooring installed, save for area by the stairs and along that wall. But all of those pieces that I have to put in require some custom cutting…and it was getting a little too late to keep at it.

I’ve also picked up some cool paint…adding to the overall bill of course. But it’s pretty cool. Two of the walls will be a nice rich, milk chocolate color, two of the walls a nice light tea green, and the ceiling a nice light khaki-green. Of course, because our house is so small, I have to do things in the basement in stages.

I had to do part of the floor, move things over, do more of the floor, shift things over, etc.—kinda like one of those puzzle things that has nine spaces, but eight picture objects and you have to shift things around in order to get the puzzle solved. Kinda challenging.

But this will also be a cool opportunity to make the basement cool and an enjoyable place to play, write songs, brew beer, etc.

Anyway, it’s going to be a busy weekend filled with things that I didn’t really intend to do…like remodel the basement.

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Well, being a home-owner sure is taking a toll on my geek status. Last week I think I spent maybe an hour cumulatively on the computer last week (at home). In fact, the past few weeks I’ve been outdoors more than I have the past four years that I’d been living at the apartment. Now that’s bad. Er, good.

Take a look at the newly landscaped front yard. Of course I’m not finished with it yet, but the area underneath the pine tree is really shaping up. I planted a ton of hastas, added some cypress mulch (which is quite inexpensive — six huge bags for $10.00 at Home Depot), and hung some bird feeders of varying varieties.

But I won’t have too much to worry about losing geek status—I’ve got a rather large project ahead of me, updating a website with over 6,000 recordsets to update. That’s over 80 hours of labor. Uh, ouch.

Filed under: Development, Home Improvement
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It seems that I’ve been spending less and less time on my PC at home these days now being a home-owner. Lately I’ve been focusing on getting the yard into shape, taking a bit of a break from finishing the bathroom. A lot of landscaping ahead of us—we wanna get the grass back into shape and get a flower garden going this year.

I’m doing some interesting Actionscript-related things at work these days. That module selection application that I eluded to in a prior entry is taking an interesting turn. I’m trying to do some moderately-complicated form work within Flash—form work that could be done in a heart-beat using JavaScript… but not so easy in Flash.

I’ve got two UI (User Interface) component objects and am trying to transfer selected data from comp1 to comp2 and remove data from comp2 based on which button you choose.

To transfer from one UI comp to another:

on (release) {
tempArr = new Array();
tempArr = _root.selectionBox.getSelectedItems();
for (i=0; i _root.targetBox.addItem(tempArr[i].label, tempArr[i].data);
}
_root.targetBox.dataProvider = tempArr;
}

Slap that code in a “transfer” button and it will copy the data from selectionBox over to targetBox. Now where I’m stuck is removing the selected data elements from targetBox. That’ll be todays’ project.

Filed under: Actionscript, Flash (Macromedia), General, Home Improvement, Home Ownership
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