We had a productive weekend in the theatre room. All of the electrical (lights and outlets), PVC pipe for wires, and the last of the framing (around the window) is complete.
All of our wires should be arriving later today so we can glue the PVC and string the wires through later tonight.
We’re hoping to start dry walling mid week if the budget can hold up to it.
Here’s our first update on the status of the theatre room. Over the last week or so we’ve managed to complete the following:
The screen arrived yesterday so tonight we’ll do our first test run with the screen and projector. Sunday we plan to finish the last of the framing and run all of the electrical so we can start dry wall sometime next week.
I also just placed an order for all of the electronics related wiring through monoprice.com:
Our Foreman after a hard days work:
When we were searching for our house I made sure our “want” checklist contained an unfinished basement so I could eventually build a theatre room. After getting our fence and 3rd bathroom complete we’re moving onto tackle the theatre room as our next project. We started out by doing what a lot of DYI’ers do; staring at walls. We eventually decided that we’d best put all of our ideas down on some sort of sketch, naturally I turned to google’s sketchup application and we eventually came up with these (note, we have no previous sketchup experience so these are pretty basic, click for larger image):
Our room dimensions should be 12.5×17 once we frame everything in.
Our checklist consists of:
Before pictures:
Shortly after purchasing our first home we decided to fence our yard so we could easily let our dogs out and not worry about keeping an eye on them. We began by checking around for some local fence installation companies and settled on “Quality Vinyl Fence & Gate LLC”. We scheduled a time with the company to have them come and give us a quote on how much the fence would run. Our appointment was set for 8:30 but after half an hour of waiting with no one showing up we decided to give him a call and he said he was on his way and finally showed up at 10:30. He seemed friendly and professinal (apperances can be deceiving) so we decided to have him do the work and setup another appointment for when he would come and install the fence posts.
Installation day came and he was no where to be found. After waiting a few hours we called him and were given an excuse that his equipment broke down (strange, there was a group of guys who came to dig the holes, must have been shovels they used that were broken…) so we rescheduled for the next day and they showed up, dug the posts and said that they have to sit for a 3-4 days before the paneling could be installed. A week went by and we didn’t hear anything from them. My wife attempted to call the person who we assume owns the company (Terry) but after answering her first phone call he sent any of her following calls to voice mail, we know because immediately after she attempted to call him and didn’t get an answer I called using my cell and he picked up right away. This same process was repeated with my phone until we used a new phone from a family member and he answered first try. I’m not sure why you would try and dodge a customer phone call… I guess he already had our money so we weren’t a huge priority.
Two weeks later they finally came to install our pannels, installed the gate, and cleaned up dirt piles they had left behind from the poles (which had killed our lawn by this point).
We thought we were done with this ordeal until we came home one day to find holes dug around two of our fence posts. Upon closer inspection we discovered that the people who mow the lawns for the HOA had noticed heavy water saturation near the fence posts and dug the holes to expose that the fencers had broken two sprinkler lines. We repaired these breaks but ended up finding two more broken sections at another two post locations. Out of six posts they had broken the sprinkler line in four places.
I don’t understand how someone like this can stay in business and I hope that by sharing our experiences we can save someone else all of the headaches that we’ve had to deal with.
Stay clear from Quality Vinyl Fence & Gate LLC.
Edit: After looking for a place to add my review I noticed that we’re not the only ones who have had a bad experience with this company (first review is mine): Yellow Page Reviews
Over the last few weeks I’ve been using VMWare Fusion to run a copy of XP on my Macbook Pro so I could do some C# development. This has been working pretty well but VMWare sometimes suffers from my lack of memory (all my money goes to Jeep upgrades so I’m running with 2gb). I was mentioning this to a friend on IRC when he stated that Boot Camp is free and I should give it a try. I was under the impression that Boot Camp had a cost associated with it so armed with the knowledge that running XP natively on my mac wouldn’t cost me anything I dug up my Leopard and XP install disks and set about the install process.
The supplied Boot Camp instructions are pretty clear and the process seemed pretty straight forward… little did I know. Shortly after launching the Boot Camp assistant it reported back with some cryptic error about how I should backup my data to another Mac and reinstall then launch the assistant again. I did a few google searches and found out that to remedy this I could defragment my drive. This was news to me since I was under the impression that OSX automatically defraged my drive but after a little research it turns out it only auto-defrags files under 20MB… anything above is considered abnormal usage.
I did a little more searching and found a tool called idefrag that would clean up my drive and even compact it so Boot Camp would have no problems when it came time to partition. For some reason I was unable to create a bootable idefrag disk and after much frustration ended up backing my important documents and photo’s up to Mozy and blew away my installation of OSX.
Once I had a fresh OSX copy the Boot Camp assistant worked like a charm and within a few minutes I was happily browsing around in my new XP installation. I was very pleased that Boot Camp handled all of the driver installation, if only it was smart enough to partition my original drive.
For our first Thanksgiving as husband and wife Jamie wanted to have both families come over and have Thanksgiving dinner at our house. The dinner went pretty well (somehow we managed to stuff all those people into the living room of our townhome…) but after it was all said and done we decided we needed to take a break and what better way then to pack up and head to Moab for the weekend?
We spent the day after Thanksgiving with Jamie’s dad until around 3 PM when he had to head to the airport to catch a flight home. We packed up and were on the road by 3:30. We weren’t in a hurry to arrive since we already had hotel reservations so we made a pit stop in Price on the way down to grab a geocache and some dinner. By the time we hit Green River it was completely dark outside which added an extra element of difficulty to finding a few geocaches on the side of the road (though the stars were beautiful). We pulled into Moab around 8:30-9 and checked into the hotel.
The following day we packed up the Jeep and hit the road headed for Elephant Hill. This trail is probably my favorite I’ve been able to run thus far, the scenery was amazing and even though the trail wasn’t the most challenging trail it still provided some great photo opportunities.
The following day we decided to give Onion Creek a try followed by Rose Garden Hill. Onion Creek is a very mild trail that has numerous water crossings (we counted 25~ by the time we finished) and it was a nice way to start the day. Near the end of Onion Creek we took the turn for Rose Garden Hill. The trail starts off easy enough and from the guide we had picked up we weren’t expecting anything on the challenging side. This all changed once we arrived at the main obstical from which the trail gets its name. We started up the rocky hill and were near the top when we ran into a 4 foot ledge. Try as I might I wasn’t able to get the Jeep up the ledge (no lockers), once the front tires were up they’d just spin. As we decided to bag it we looked back and noticed a group of Jeeps had gathered at the bottom of the hill. Once we turned around and reached the bottom again we chatted for a bit and then they decided to take a crack at it. These guys were very impressive and after awhile they all made it up and offered to provide their Jeeps as anchor points so I could winch onto them and pull myself up. After debating about it I decided to go for it and with their help managed to get up and over. The rest of the trail was pretty timid compaired to what we had just managed to accomplish but it had excellent views. Near the end we wanted to try Top Of The World but we were running out of daylight so we decided to save it for our next trip down.
On our way back we decided to make a quick pit stop just over the border to Colorado and grab a geocache to add the state to our “cached in” list.
Overall it was a great trip and we can’t wait to get back!
After a serious bout of inactivity on the blog I decided to put up our latest Jeeping trip and pictures. Last Saturday we paid a visit to American Fork Canyon with Jamie, her step dad, and myself. This canyon is gorgeous! The temperature was about 47 up in the canyon and we even ran into a bit of snow fall while eating lunch but it was very enjoyable (completely different from our 5 mile pass trips that have hardly any greenery and where it sticks to the higher end of the temperature scale).
We drove up to Silver Lake and did some geocaches and explored a few small trails but we didn’t have time to get fruther up into the canyon where the good 4×4 trails are, maybe next time.
This was also the first real trip for our new GPS unit (the Garmin Colorado 300) and we put it through its pases. Thus far it has been a pretty good unit (canyon reception was a little bit rough but I expect that with any unit) and the geocaching features are amazing!
Kerry Petersons Blog
