Saturday, May 24, 2008

Misc apartment stuff

My apartment is finally starting to feel a bit more like home and less like a place to store boxes. I'll be spending most of the weekend moving some things down to basement storage, and making final decisions on furniture and timing.

The office is the closest to being "finished". The big issue in the office is that I need to order (6) 72" tall shelf units. Four of them will be put back-to-back and placed perpendicular to the long walls on each side. The office is about 10' wide, so this will leave about a 42-48" gap between the ends of the shelves. The effect will be to isolate the office from the walk-through section along the back end of the room (between the two doors). The other two shelves will go along the back wall, making the walk through section lined by shelves. Unfortunately, because I want all (6) shelf units to match, I need to buy them all at the same time.

The other thing I may do in the office is window treatments of some sort. It's not a high-priority item, however. I'd rather have the (6) shelf units; because that will let me unpack a lot of boxes. Plus it will give me a place to put a floor fan to push hot air out of the office and into the kitchen (where the A/C unit is).

The kitchen still needs a bit of work. Probably a 30x36 table and a few chairs for the middle. I haven't quite decided what I want in there. I also need curtains in there, but it's also not a high priority. I need to put up a few coat hooks behind the door and assemble my 2nd utility shelf in the corner. Both will give me a bit more organization then I have now. I'm also considering putting some sort of fabric / shower liner around the taller shelf unit (48" x 24" x 72") to hide the storage boxes that are there. And, of course, to hide Lucille's litterbox which is at the bottom of that shelf.

The bathroom needs the new towel racks mounted on the back of the door. And I have a wardrobe hook to be mounted in the one corner behind the door. Other then that, the bathroom is in pretty good shape.

My hallway still needs a 52" tall shelf unit right inside the door. I'd like to buy it at the same time as the office shelving, so that it's of a similar style. The closet door sticks, so I need to sand down that corner (too much paint).

The bedroom still needs a pair of 4/5 drawer chests. My clothes are currently just sitting in piles on the floor, which isn't a long-term solution. I also need something across the opening of the closet, or I need to get doors mounted. There's also room for another piece of small furniture or a chair. The bedroom is pretty tiny, so there's not a lot of extra room in there for extra items.

Lastly, I've started tackling the living room. When I moved up here last fall, I had the movers dump any and all extra boxes into that room as a holding area. So I've spent 6 months slowly working through the boxes out there and have unpacked about half of them. Now I think I can start tackling moving things around in there and starting to make it useable.

I ordered the window treatments for the (4) windows in there last night. I'm going very conservative, with a plain tab-top navy blue curtains with plain white sheer panels underneath. I debated taking the curtains down to the floor, but with the baseboard heaters I chose to only go down to the window skirt. Besides, I plan on putting the two DVD storage chests under two of the windows, the TV below the third window, and the fourth window has the A/C unit with baseboard heat under it.

The walls are a cream with white trim and the floor is a medium wood flooring. Sort of a light walnut or oak color. So I plan on going with dark navy for the couch cover and the curtains. That should give me a nice solid set of base colors to work with in there without making it too dark.

Ah, which reminds me, I need to get the electrician back out to replace the one outlet along the south wall. While I don't absolutely need that outlet, I want it fixed in case I want extra power in there.

Eventually, I plan on having (2) queen-sized futon couches in there, but to start I'll just order one along with a footstool. Which will give me some place to sit company besides folding chairs. I'll probably move the TV and cable box back out to the living room until I can afford to buy a 2nd TV for the living room.

I have to decide what to do for lighting in the L/R. There are no ceiling fixtures out there. I know that one light will probably be a japanese style lamp that sits on a piece of furniture, but the other piece will probably be a floor lamp of some fashion.

So I need to go shopping for the lamps and the one couch at some point this weekend. Because that's the absolute minimum needed to get the L/R in somewhat functional shape.

Labels: 2008, Apartment

posted by Wuphon's at 12:14 PM (0 comments)

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Prepping for the cat

As I've been preparing my office for use, I've been keeping in the back of my mind that I'm going to get a cat. So rather then trying to keep him/her off of the equipment rack shelf, I'm going to dedicate a shelf or two for their use which will hopefully keep them out of the works.

When you look at my desk area, I've setup the desk so that it faces the window along the 10' wall in the office. I'm putting a pair of 24x36 Nexel wire shelving units on each side to hold equipment. The left rack is my network rack and contains equipment that needs to stay on during a power outage. The UPS there is a silent unit with no audible alarm, so it won't wake the neighbors. The right side rack is my desktop rack and will hold the Mac Mini, my gaming PC and my video editing PC.

It's geeky, but it looks okay if you keep the cords neatly wrapped with velcro cable wraps. And it's very functional and sturdy. Plus, the shelving is fairly inexpensive (figure $250-$300 for the left-hand rack, including the 2 extra shelves and the fiber board shelf liners).



I also put together a cat tower last night. The idea is that it will give them something to climb on in order to get up to that middle shelf with the sheepskin padded resting area. The sheepskin unit is actually from a cat-shelf that is supposed to go in a window and attaches with velcro to the base of the window. I didn't like the design, so I tied the shelf pad to the wire shelf in my equipment rack. I also plan on putting the small cat carrier up there on that shelf with the door wedged open.





I've also dedicated the very top of the equipment tower for the use of the cat, but I did not make it as comfortable as the middle shelf. If she's on the middle shelf, she'll be easy to reach / pet / keep an eye on. The upper most shelf is a lot higher (the posts are 74").

I think the cat tower was a decent find at Petco. It's not covered in some ugly carpet and it has a sisal scratching post. It'll give her more places to perch and watch me work during the day without having to be on my desk or lap all the time.

(From what I've read... carped-covered scratching posts don't do it for cats. There's not enough resistance in the carpet for them. So a lot of books recommend a different texture like cardboard / sisal / or inside-out carpet. Plus, I'd rather that she get used to scratching something other then carpet.)

Labels: 2007, Apartment, Cat

posted by Wuphon's at 8:05 PM (0 comments)

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Electrial Issues

So, after over a year of searching I finally landed in my new pad. Back at the beginning of November, I spent a few days up here at the new place to check things out, make my list, measure rooms, and to deal with the electrician.

Why? Because one of the major sticking points with apartments on Long Island is that their electrical wiring is usually something out of the 1950s. Having one electrical outlet in each room was seen as all that was needed. And a grounded outlet was an expensive luxury (or so it seems).

So I made an agreement with the landlord that he'd hire an electrician to come out, put outlets where I specified and run at least one additional circuit up from the basement electrical panel. Which is also something that I had done back at the York PA apartment. We agreed to split the costs 50/50. That all worked fairly well and the electrcian put one additional outlet in each room and gave me a new circuit in the office area. So I have two dedicated 15/20A circuits in my office on opposite walls. Which matches what I had back in PA.

Sounds good right? I figured I was all set - until later that week when I installed a fancy-dancy Belkin surge supressor. Upon plugging it in to the nice grounded dedicated circuit, the "site wiring fault" indicator lit up. But I didn't have any sort of test equipment on me that week, so I had to just let the problem lie. So I've spent the last few weeks wondering whether I just signed a one-year lease on a place that isn't going to be suitable, or whether I could get it fixed, or even afford to get it fixed.

So after my move date during the week of Thanksgiving, I ran around with my little 3-light electrical tester. The survey was interesting. All of the outlets were marked as "correct" wiring with no issues - except for two outlets in the kitchen (old wiring) that were hot/neutral reversed.

I then called up the landlord and told him the issue. Rather then try to get him to pay for it, I said to myself "what the hell, I'll pay for it". I figure it is better for me to pay to get it done, then to spend a few years up here watching equipment go boom, or my UPS batteries to wear out quickly, or to risk shock hazard (which hot/neut reverse can lead to). But I was still sweating out the details of whether it would be a fixable issue.

The electrician listened to my summary over the phone and agreed to come out the next day. One thing that he thought it might be would be low voltage from the power company - which isn't really fixable. But since he wired up the new outlets himself, he was definitely interested in looking at it. So I dug out my little multimeter and ran around testing voltages between the two main prongs. It came out as 115-120V, so I have good voltage here (at least during the winter - I hear we get brownouts during summers). But I wasn't really surprised to see good voltage, because my UPSs are line conditioning Smart-UPS units that will light up an indicator LED on the front if they are boosting/trimming under/over voltage conditions.

He comes out, taps the outlets with his little testing meter (not exactly sure what it measures, but it could tell the "hot" wire just by touching it - in addition to reading voltages). What he found was that the voltage differential between hot/ground was only 90V or so. So he went downstairs to check the boxes and wiring and found that the ground connection had been loosened up by the plumbers doing work. Once he fixed that, the surge protector and UPSs stopped complaining about the site wiring being faulty. A nice, quick, 15 minute fix! And it didn't take long to reverse the wiring in the two kitchen outlets either.

(I know just enough electrical work to be dangerous. I can do it and I mostly know what I'm doing - but I need an electrician to check my work. In this case, with older wiring and dealing with a new landlord, I decided to let him take the 5 minutes per outlet to rewire them.)

I'm estatic today. (A) because the electrican came out on short notice (B) because it was a quick fix. Now I can start hooking up my computer equipment without worrying.

Labels: 2007, Apartment

posted by Wuphon's at 8:10 AM (0 comments)

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

New apartment

Signed the lease on my new apartment today. I'm looking forward to moving in as the new lease allows me to have one cat as a pet. There are some other advantages:

- A real kitchen. A goodish amount of counter space along with lots of storage cabinets. Now, the cabinets aren't in their best shape, but they are functional and sturdy.

- Gas stove. I prefer gas over electric because it's easier to see when a gas stove is turned on (and the burner cools off faster).

- All one one floor. The old place was spread over two floors, which meant climbing a set of steep and creaky stairs (making a racket) to get to the upper two rooms. As a result, I rarely went upstairs.

- Individual electric and gas meters. In the new place, I pay for my own heat (gas-fired boiler forces hot water along pipes in the baseboard). So I can decide how hot/cold to make the apartment. One of the places that I looked at (down in Levittown) I'd have had to deal with the other tenant(s) all the time to settle up on the water/oil bill. I much prefer to have direct control over as many utilities as possible.

- Rooms that have doors in logical places. The old apartment was a pain because of door location. It made it difficult to layout a room. As an example, my old office had doors in opposite corners, which meant that you lost a lot of wall / floor space due to having to maintain a travel path. Even though it was a 12x10 room, it felt a lot smaller. My new office (what would traditionally be the dining room) is a 14x10 room where the two doors are on the inner end of the room. So the travel path is restricted to the southern 3' of the room, leaving me with a 10x11 area for office stuff.

- A big living room. Definitely larger then my old L/R. It's probably 16x14 with a bay area that is about 24-30" deep on the front overlooking the street.

- I'm not in the city. When I look out my window, I see single-family houses and lots of trees. The nearest shops are only about 1/2 mile away though, and the grocery story is about 2 miles.

- Off-street parking (a big help).

- Hardwood floors or tile. The kitchen/bath are linoleum / tile. The hall / living room is hardwood flooring. The office / bedroom are a decent shade of medium / dark blue carpet.

- Lots of windows. And they've all been replaced so they are the dual-pane, weather proof, easy clean type. There's very little draft off of the windows here.

Things that I don't like (but can live with):

- Small bedroom. The bedroom is only about 12x10, with a 24x36 closet in one corner. I can fit a queen sized bed in there, but it's going to be cozy once I add in a few chests of drawers for clothes storage.

- Only two small closets. Fortunately, I have the option to store stuff in the (insecure) basement. We're far enough outside of town that nobody is likely to go rooting through the stuff down there. So I'm going to buy some more Nexel wire rack shelving from Global and carve myself out an area.

- Noisy heating system. As the hot water rushes through the pipes you hear that, plus you'll hear constant popping and clicking as everything expands/contracts from the temperature change. For some perverse reason, the noisiest section is in my bedroom. So I may have to create some sort of white noise generator in there (a fan, or a PC, or an actual white noise generator).

- No cell reception. Which is a common issue across most of Long Island. The cell carriers were very skimpy when building out their network here.

- Floor creaks. Some of the flooring (hall / living room) is in very good shape and is hardwood. But the kitchen floor is definitey not level, and there's a section in the office that creaks every time I walk over it.

Pictures of the kitchen:













Pictures of the office / dining room:











Pictures of the bedroom:

Labels: 2007, Apartment

posted by Wuphon's at 5:25 PM (0 comments)