Over Christmas break, we decided it was finally time to upgrade our kitchen computer and bought a new 21.5″ iMac.  Our old computer had been an original Mac Mini, which was getting really slow even for simple stuff like browsing the web.  We were also really tired of the mess of wires, power bricks, etc. that it required – especially since it was on the kitchen counter and really attracted the crumbs and dust bunnies.

The new iMac has been a huge improvement.  The display is big and beautiful and I love the fact that there’s no rats nest of cables on the kitchen counter anymore.  It can even stream HD TV without getting bogged down, which never would have been possible on the old Mac Mini.

The only negative we had with the new computer was an issue with it not being able to stream music to the Airport Expresses that we use for a kind of whole house sound system.  It was the strangest thing – the iMac could connect to the Airport Express to update the configuration, etc. and it would show in the list of remote speakers in iTunes, but when we’d try to stream music to it, there’d be a progress bar for a while, which would eventually disappear, and the music would never start streaming.  Since the Airport Express still worked fine when I streamed music to it from my laptop, I figured it was a problem with the iMac rather than the Airport Express or our network setup.  I started looking online and found a real variety of things to try, many of them changes to settings on our router or firewall and none of them seemed to make a difference.

Last week, though, I found an article about iTunes 9 and Airport Expresses not working correctly and the problems it described sounded exactly like what we were experiencing.  As it described, I tried disabling the iPv6 setting on the iMac and that corrected the problem so that we’re now able to stream music from the iMac to speakers elsewhere in the house.  Strange thing about this is that iPv6 is not disabled on my MacBook (which runs OS 10.5.8) and it works fine … guess it must be an issue with Snow Leopard.  Thought I’d share, though, in case anyone else is experiencing similar troubles.  Here’s a link to the article that describes how to fix the problem.

A couple tables for our living room were delivered on Friday to go with our new couch and chairs:

New Living Room Furniture

The coffee table and credenza (behind the couch) are from the same collection as the furniture we got for our family room.  We’re thinking this will be good later on if we decide to move furniture around between the two rooms since everything should match.  Like always, the furniture seemed bigger than I expected when it arrived.  I’m not sure yet if it’s just because I’m used to seeing the room basically empty or if we’ll wind up moving some of the pieces around once we get everything.

New Credenza

We’re still waiting on a small round end table to go between the two chairs, a bigger round game table, two chairs to go with the game table, and a leather chair & ottoman.  Last I talked to our sales lady, she said we should expect the rest of our wood furniture to be in next week or the week after, so hopefully it won’ be too much longer!  The chairs are likely to take longer since they’re upholstered furniture, so they’re estimating the week after Christmas for those.  I can’t wait!

We finally got our new couch and a couple of new chairs for our living room delivered yesterday!  Here’s a picture of them:

Our New Furniture

We think the new furniture looks a lot nicer in the living room than our old couch did, and it’s pretty comfortable too.  The only thing we’re really noticing is how out-of-place all the rest of the furniture in the room looks now that we have the new pieces.  I can’t wait to see how it will look with the new, less-orange, tables when they get delivered tomorrow!

We’re so excited to finally have a couple of furniture deliveries scheduled this week for items we’ve ordered over the last few months.  We have a new sofa and a couple of upholstered chairs coming on Wednesday … and a new coffee table and credenza (for behind the sofa) being delivered on Friday.

The Furniture Being Delivered This Week!!

After this, we’re still waiting for the leather chair and ottoman that’s likely to not be in until next Spring (ug!), a couple more tables that are expected to be in next week, a dining room set that’s supposed to be here just before Christmas, and a couple more upholstered chairs should come the week after Christmas.  We’re so excited to see the new furniture in our house – I hope it looks as good in our house as it did in the stores!!

We ordered some new furniture for our living room back on September 19th.  At the time, they told us that the fabric pieces we ordered would take 60-90 days to come in and the leather chair and ottoman would probably be more like 90-120 days.  Since it had been almost 2 months, I called yesterday to ask about the status of our order and see if they could give me some firmer dates for when our furniture would be in.  Turns out the fabric furniture is in the local warehouse already, but the leather stuff (which wasn’t considered custom) has been back-ordered and probably won’t be in until the end of February or beginning of March – almost 6 months after we ordered it!

Because it’s going to be so long before we’d get the leather furniture, they’re giving us the option to take the same chair and ottoman in a lighter brown color.  They have the chair in the lighter color in the local warehouse already, but we’d still have to order the ottoman and that would still take until the end of February to come in, so I’m not sure we’ve gained much.

Even for the fabric furniture, which is already here (actually a little ahead of schedule), it sounds like it will be a couple weeks before it will be delivered … and that’s if I go in tomorrow to pay the balance for that furniture.  Once I pay for the rest of it, they said they’d release the order to the warehouse.  Then, within 3-5 business days, I should expect to receive a phone call from the warehouse manager who will schedule delivery sometime in the following 5-10 business days.  That means there’s still a chance we won’t have the furniture before Thanksgiving … and it’s probably no more than 10 miles from our house right now!  Insane!

I think the thing that bothers me the most about the whole thing is that every other industry is working to become more efficient and speed up their manufacturing and delivery time – except for the furniture industry.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you order it from or how custom it is – it just takes forever … and even when the furniture comes in, it’s likely to have something wrong with it.

We’re still deciding what to do about the leather chair & ottoman that won’t be in until February/March.  Even if we cancel the order and go find something we like at another furniture store, we’re starting the process all over again – and it might still be February before we actually get the furniture …  Ug.

It’s been almost 4 months, but the updates to our dining room are finally done!  Thought we’d share some “Before & After” pictures of the changes we’ve made:

The "Before" Picture

The "After" Picture

We started work in the dining room back in July by removing the old wallpaper.  Once the wallpaper was down, we ran new wiring for the wall sconces to replace the old knob-and-tube.  We then had the walls skim-coated with a fresh layer of plaster to fill in some holes and cracks and smooth everything out.  With the plaster work complete, we installed picture frame molding below the chair rail and then painted the upper portion of the walls gray and the bottom the same shade of white as the rest of the trim in the house.

We still think the room needs some work from a decorating perspective, but we’re so happy to finally be done with the other updates.

This year, we decided to try something different for leaf removal and bought a John Deere Power Flow bagger for our lawn mower.  They come in 7 and 14 bushel models and we decided on the larger of the two.  So far, it’s done a good job of picking up the leaves and grass clippings and we’re pretty happy with the purchase.

New Power Flow Bagger

The power flow piece is a fan powered by the mower deck and helps to blow the clippings into the three mesh bags.  To empty the bags, the hopper is hinged and the bags slide out.  There’s even a gauge to show when bagger is getting full.

Power Flow

Open Hopper and Mesh Bags

Air Flow Indicator

We’re starting to think about replacing our water heater with a new tankless one.  The water heater we have now is still working fine, but it’s started making all kinds of loud cracking and popping noises as it’s heating the water.  It also looks like it was manufactured in 1996, so it’s getting pretty old and we imagine it won’t be too much longer before it stops working completely.

The main reason why we’re thinking about installing the new one now, though, is because the water heater, which used to be located near the old boiler, is now in a room by itself.  When the previous owners replaced the boiler with a new furnace, they also relocated it to a more central location in the basement.  As part of the project to replace the water heater, we’d like to move it to the new utility room also to free up some space where it currently is and help to clean up the mess of plumbing in the basement.  Because we’ll be relocating the water heater, we expect there will be more plumbing work involved than what would be required for a typical replacement, so we think it might be a good idea to get started on it while our water heater is still working rather than waiting until we have no hot water at all.

Our current water heater and the mess of plumbing that goes with it.

For the new water heater, we’re thinking about getting a tankless one that can be mounted on the wall in the utility room.  We like this option because of the increased energy efficiency of a tankless water heater, but also because of the space it saves.  Our plan is to relocate the water heater to the new utility room and mount it on the wall near the furnace.  Access to gas and water lines will be fairly easy from this location and routing the exhaust out the side of the house shouldn’t be a problem either.

The location for the new water heater.

We’re still researching the different brands of tankless water heaters to try to make a decision on what we think would be best for our application.  As long as we pick one with an efficiency greater than or equal to .80, though, we’ll be eligible for an income tax credit equal to 30% of the total cost of the water heater and installation (up to a max of $1500).  We’re also looking into any rebates we can get from our local utility provider that might help offset the cost and help us make the decision about whether or not now is the right time to start this project.

After being in our house for about 2 years and having basically no furniture in our living room during that time, we finally decided it was time to start furniture shopping.

Our living room is pretty large (about 30′ long x 16′ wide), but really long and narrow with lots of doorways that make furniture placement a challenge, so I started by putting together a floorplan for the room to have a better idea of the size and scale of furniture that would work in the space.  Here’s the plan I came up with:

Floor Plan for Living Room

We’ll have a small, apartment-size sofa (about 78″ in length) and a pair of chairs in front of the fireplace with a coffee table in the middle and a sofa table behind the couch for lamps and a little additional storage.  Since the room is so narrow and there are doors on either side of the fireplace that require us to leave a couple of paths through the room, we had to pick some smaller pieces for this conversation area.  On the right side of the diagram (the front of the house), we’ll have a chair and ottoman in front of the built in display cabinets to add some additional seating and we’re planning to move the piano to this half of the room as well where it will fit better along the wall common with the family room.  On the left side of the diagram (back of the house), we’re thinking of having a standard height table large enough for playing board games or reading a newspaper, with a couple of upholstered chairs that will be easy to reposition around the table.  We’re also thinking of having some taller bookshelves / display cabinets to help balance out the built ins on the other side of the room.

We already had the piano, but all of the other pieces in the floor plan are things we needed to shop for, so we started looking around at the local furniture stores a month or so ago and we finally decided on some upholstered furniture that we thought would be the right size/scale for the room.  Here are some pictures of the pieces we bought:

New Furniture for Living Room

The new apartment-size sofa (upper left) will be covered in a brown linen fabric that’s a little darker in person than it looks in the picture.  The matching chairs (upper right) will be covered in a coordinating textured fabric that’s a blend of tan and ivory.  We also purchased a dark brown leather chair and ottoman that will go in front of the display cases and some coordinating pillows in the fabric on the lower left.

Everything we bought is pretty neutral, but I think it will look nice in our living room once it finally comes in.  We were really hopeful that we would have the furniture before Christmas, maybe even in time to have a Christmas party now that we’ll have places for people to sit, but it sounds like it will be a good 60-90 days before we should expect to receive the new furniture, so we might be lucky to have it by Christmas.  We’re still working to pick out some coordinating tables and a couple more chairs.  Hopefully we can get those on order soon as well!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working to paint the dining room (finally!)  It’s taken a lot longer than I expected, but I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

New Dining Room Paint

I love the color gray we finally decided on for above the chair rail.  It’s Sherwin Williams Pavestone (SW7642).  I was a little worried to start with that it would come off as too blue or too tan, but it definitely looks gray without being too dark or too stark against the white.  The bottom half of the room is Sherwin Willams Modest White (SW6084), which is the same as the trim color in the rest of the house.

I started by priming all of the freshly plastered walls with a tinted Loxon primer that’s meant for concrete block walls.  At first, I thought this was overkill considering that the walls were only skim coated, but we’ve since had a problem with paint peeling off of the walls in the foyer because they weren’t primed properly, so we’re hoping this will prevent the same problem in the dining room.  The biggest challenge with the Loxon primer was that we hadn’t planned on using a different primer for the walls than for the new wood trim pieces for the picture frame molding, so I would up having to cut in around all of the trim , which was pretty time consuming.

After the primer was dry, I’ve put one layer of top coat on all of the walls.  The gray part above the chair rail is a low-sheen eg shel finish.  I really like how deep the color looks without being shiny.  One coat on top of the tinted primer gave us really consistent color and finish, so I think I’m done painting above the chair rail.  For the portion below the chair rail, we decided to paint it in a semi-gloss enamel like all the rest of the woodwork in the house.  One coat looks good color wise, but I’m still deciding if I want to put another coat on to try to even out the finish.  I’m not sure if it’s anything anyone but me will ever notice, but I’m afraid it’ll drive me nuts if I know it’s not perfect and I don’t fix it.

I can’t wait to finally be done with all of the painting, get the light fixtures and outlet covers back up, and move the furniture back in.  I think it’s going to be a huge improvement over the old wallpaper!