Sunday, March 21, 2010

Wire in the hole!

I have no intention to make this a truly smart house, but some upgrades in that vein have been done. Maybe it is Smart-lite? How about Smart-Ass? We'll go with that.

A few weeks ago we upgraded the amp on the stereo, and had an adventure in drilling through the floor to the basement so that we could run speaker wire through Aimee's room in the basement and the workshop, then up into our bedroom, and have a second set of speakers for available for sleepytime music in there. I only drilled. . .3 unnecessary holes I think. :) It was a great upgrade, and we've missed having music to sleep by since we moved.

Today I finally tackled the next smarter-by-fractions project. I'd had all the parts for a while and had just been waiting for a good day to put it all together:



A little spade bit and saber saw work later, and now we have connections for ethernet, stereo audio, and composite video, from the living room to the studio. This lets me put the Roku (netflix player) on the ethernet rather than our wireless, and lets us route audio from the mixer to my mac (so we can get the radio station back on the web) or the other direction, so we can play any of the copious amounts of music that we have only our computers, out through the stereo into the main room. And into the bedroom, with those 2nd set of speakers. :) I don't see the 3rd RCA jack getting used any time soon, but I figured I might as well wire for it while I was doing the job.

From the studio:




There is a matching pair in the living room, hidden behind the CD racks.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

You down with O.C.D ?

Yeah, you know me.

Framed up some wood today.



Then covered it with pegboard.





This will make the corner of the basement a lot nicer. The plan is to extend out from the right hand side and get some shelves in there for hardware and power tool storage.