Scary Cabin

Valentines Day and a 3 day weekend for President’s day, what could me more romantic than spending it at the cabin raking leaves, painting and installing flooring? We did take a break to have a nice prime rib dinner at the local eatery so it wasn’t all work.

We’re now in a phase of the project where we’re doing a lot of detail work. It all needs to be done and it does provide the finishing touch that makes everything look right. But it feels like we spend a lot time for not a lot of accomplishments. It’s not a room changing event like texture or paint.

The weekend started with finishing up the bull-nose on the stairs. It was just cutting and gluing down 7 or 8 pieces, but now the stairs are done. And they look pretty good. Then we moved on to painting cases and installing baseboards. The living area baseboards have been stacked (creating a tripping hazard) for a few months now. We were waiting for the right time to work on them. Since we’re starting with 16ft. long boards it made the most sense to have the miter saw right outside the front door, but we want to be working in the rain (or cold). The weather was perfect so we moved the furniture out of the way, cut and installed the baseboards in the living area and the final piece in the kitchen. With the kitchen floor a bit higher than the living area floor (1/4” or so), the baseboard in the kitchen needed to be cut down to match. The living area and kitchen now look almost finished! All that’s left is a bit of caulking.

We started painting the door/window casing upstairs, but that then limits what else we can do up there since the casing is laying on the saw stand and we don’t want generate sawdust while the paint is drying. Well, with good weather outside… We built a couple of sawhorses from the old deck/ramp wood and moved the painting outside. This allowed work to progress up in the bedrooms. The front bedroom window inside casing was installed (and measured for blinds). A couple of pieces of door casing were installed. Most of the door casings will need to have the width trimmed down so that’s a job for the next visit. Laminate was installed for the kneewall floors in the front bedroom. We have the laminate and since a lot of the area behind the kneewalls will be used for storage, using the laminate there will make it easier to move stuff around and easier to keep clean. Plus, it looks way better. We worked on preping the back bedroom kneewall area by adding a bit more subfloor and cutting out the unused vent pipe.

Genny got the bathroom door painted and that’s back up so all the doors upstairs are ready for hardware. Speaking of the upstairs bath, we installed the niche.

And since it was so nice outside, we spent a few hours racking leaves/pine needles. The area around the cabin is clear and we’re creating a nice large pile that will need to be hauled off to the burn pile.

We finished up our last trip the cabin by cutting a couple of the laminate boards for the stairway. Finishing up the stairway was the goal for this trip.

Both the rise and tread are too wide for a single laminate board so each is composed of two laminate boards. The process for each rise and tread goes like this:

1. Cut two laminate boards to appx. 31 inches long (cutting off both ends so they’re square) on the miter saw upstairs
2. Glue the two board together to form one 31” x 11” board
3. Measure and rip the board down to proper width for the step (rise or tread) on the table saw in the back room
4. Set the angle for one side of the step using a sliding T-bevel gauge
5. Use the T-bevel to set the miter saw to the same angle and cut one side of the board
6. Set the angle for the other side of the step using the T-bevel and measure the width of the step
7. Use the T-bevel to set the miter saw to the same angle again and cut the other side of the board slightly over-sized
8. Test fit
9. Trim a small amount from the board until it fits
10. Check the board depth and possibly rip it on the table saw to get it sized correctly
11. Glue the board to the step
12. Pin nail the board to hold it in place

That process takes at least 30 minutes and is needed for every single rise and every single tread. There were only a couple of steps where the angle was 90°, the rest were just a bit off up to about 2°. The one thing when doing stairs like this is that you don’t want gaps between the laminate and the sides, it just looks bad.

I did get a bit faster towards the end, but most of that was because I rough cut and glued up a bunch of boards Saturday night so that I didn’t have to do that on Sunday.

There’s still a bit of work left as not all the steps have the bullnose trim installed. We just ran out of time. But finished stairs look soooo much nicer than unfinished.

Genny spent a bunch of time outside checking over the yard and cleaning things up. She swept off the entire deck, which was covered in pine needles.

We took up the upstairs bathroom niche and it fits perfect. Genny painted it with a couple of coats of paint and started painting the inside window casing parts for the front bedroom window. We put the rest of the painting on hold as there was just too much sawdust while working on the stairs.

Some questions from a colleague about home automation got me thinking. Maybe I should document what I use and why. Well, this entry is an attempt to do so. First some background.

When Smarthome first introduced the Insteon line of devices and protocol they made it fairly easy for developers by providing full documentation and development kit. The price point was less than the equivalent Z-Wave and UPB products but more than similar X10 products. However, it also would work with X10 products. I had some X10 products (dimmer switches, lamp/appliance modules). Since I preferred to have a Linux based control system, getting started with the Insteon SDK seemed like the way to go. I jumped in with the development kit (PLC & lamp module) plus a few additional switches and lamp modules. Using the documentation, I started writing Insteon tools for Linux. I developed a fairly robust set of tools to control devices, dump link tables, save and compare topology. Then Smarthome changed the protocol. The differences were substantial and you had to support both.

It was about this time that a company called Universal Devices Inc. came out with the ISY26. The ISY26 was an embedded controller for Insteon. Since they were dealing with all the special cases needed to interact with all the different devices and both protocols and provided a nice network based API to interact with the ISY26, it seemed like a good way to go. I jumped on-board. About this time I was also looking into ways to get touch screen controllers in the house. I started playing with Cinemar’s MainLobby home automation software. This software is Windows based, but allowed for custom plug-in’s to support various HA type devices using Visual Basic or C#. I wrote a couple of simple things to get familiar with it and then developed a plug-in to interact with the ISY26. Because of this, UDI approached me about developing something similar for HomeSeer, another home automation software company. A lot of what I created for MainLobby was applicable for HomeSeer so I decided to go for it. It took about a year to fully develop a plug-in for HomeSeer, but I was able to create a core library that interacts with the ISY and front-end code for both MainLobby and HomeSeer that made use of it. The HomeSeer plug-in is available in the HomeSeer store. Attempts to get Cinemar to officially recognize my MainLobby plug-in failed. When a new player in the home automation software field emerged, Code Core Technologies Elve, I switched over to that for my home control system. Developing touch screen interfaces was easy and they fully supported third party developers creating additional drivers. Using the same base code that was used for the MainLobby and HomeSeer plug-ins, I quickly created an ISY driver for Elve. I’ve also created and modified a number of other drivers for Elve. Being able to customize it for my environment was a huge selling point. Unfortunately, Code Core Technologies was unable to survive and has mostly shutdown. The good news is that the latest version of Elve is still available as a free download. I’m currently working on a driver for the RainMachine irrigation controllers.

My current system is:

A UDI ISY 994i controller with Z-Wave module
Elve 2.2 running on a Windows XP virtual machine
Insteon light switches throughout the house
Insteon keypad switches
Insteon lamp modules for various stand alone lamps
Insteon LED light bulbs for a couple lamps
Insteon motion sensors for garage, side door light, and den light
Insteon garage door sensor/control module
Insteon Venstar thermostat
One Z-wave dimmer switch
Two Z-wave lamp modules with beaming support
Kwikset Z-Wave deadbolt
DSC alarm panel
Russound CAV whole house audio controller
Roku 2 media streamer
ASUS All-in-one PC touchscreen computer for monitoring & contol

With another long weekend, we decided to forgo our normal new year’s festivities (asleep by 11pm and maybe wake up for the fireworks/gunshots) and spend New Year’s Eve at the cabin. It was nice and quiet there.

Not a lot was accomplished in our 2 1/2 days there, but we did catch up on some sleep.

The drywall work from last weekend was dry and ready for texture so that was first on the list. I used a hand operated texture splatter device instead of breaking out the full sized texture gun. The advantage with the hand operated one is that it only covers a small section at a time so much less masking is needed as the texture isn’t flying all over the place. The disadvantage is that it is hand operated so my arm got a good work out. The results were acceptable. I’d definitely use it again for small texture jobs. After the texture mostly dried, we primed and painted.

The stairwell needed a couple of remaining trim pieces to fully box in around the landing. Those were cut, fitted, painted, installed, and touched up with filler. So a lot of time was spent waiting for paint to dry and filler to dry. The stairway trim looks pretty good now. Almost like I knew what I was doing. With the trim in place, we started work on the laminate for the stairs. The first few a probably the most work since there are a couple of unique cuts that are needed to get them to fit. But in general the process goes something like this:

1) Cut a couple pieces to rough length.
2) Measure the width needed and then rip them to get that width.
3) Get the angle for the left side, mark it, set the saw to that angle and cut the left side.
4) Measure the inside stair width, mark that on the boards.
5) Get the angle for the right side, mark it, set the saw to that angle and cut the right side.
6) If it fits good, glue the two boards together and move to the next.

This is for each riser and each tread. The miter saw is upstairs and the table saw is in the back room, so this process involves going up and down the stairs multiple times. I think the first stair (riser and tread) took over an hour to get right. None of the pieces cut so far have been attached to the stairs because it seems like a good use for a pin nailer and my pin nailer was not at the cabin. Now that I know the process, I think I’ll need to do batches at each step to avoid turning this job into a stairmaster routine.

The upstairs bath got some attention. The sink is almost fully functional. It can be used as long as you don’t fill up the sink and let it drain. After shifting the vanity and sink left by about 6 or 7 inches, the drain line needs some re-arrangement to line up. We brought up a bunch of different p-trap/drain parts and although close, they didn’t bring things into alignment. A trip to the hardware store for a plastic flexible drain tube helps, but it doesn’t seal well enough to the sink and if the water backs up from the trap high enough, it leaks out. The right solution probably involves moving the drain and water lines over in the wall, but at this point, we don’t really want to do that. So maybe more bits of pipe will allow for better alignment? We also installed the door so that there’s a bit of privacy now. The door was a pain in the you-know-what to install. We probably should of expanded the bathroom a bit more, but we were trying to converse space in the bedroom so left just enough room for the vanity and a door opening. Well, the door opening and the door frame were so close that the frame fit but didn’t allow for enough adjustment to get the door to close. We had to hack about 1/4 inch one side of the frame with a saw to gain enough clearance. I think it took a good 3 hours to get that door hung. Just to make everything a bit more functional, we installed the toilet paper holder and hand towel ring.

We installed the back bedroom inside window casings. They were ready to go after being painted last weekend. We had hoped to do the front bedroom window too, but there was a slight miscalculation. All the windows in the cabin are 4 ft. tall. Well all the windows except the one in front bedroom, that one is 5 ft. tall so the 4 ft. pieces didn’t fit so well. We did install the front bedroom window sill, as that was ready.

We were pleasantly surprised to see that there was still snow, almost as much as when we left last weekend. However, by the time we left, a lot had melted. Hopefully there will be more as it looks quite beautiful when everything is covered.