Lord Gonchar

Got the U-Verse hooked up with minimal issues. The only glitch was that my desktop used to be wired to the net and with the U-verse setup it makes more sense to go wireless. There were some issues with getting my PC to play nice. Totally on my end, turned out to be a firewall issue, sorted it out with minimal pain.

Loving the service as much as we remembered.

The TV offers more channels (and more in HD) than Time Warner for just a hair more than we paid for a lot less. I still insist the picture is better with AT&T too, but the family looks at me like, “Yeah, whatever. It’s HD it looks really, really good.” They don’t appreciate the lack of artifacting the same way I do. Kids are happy to finally have boxes (and the guides and gazillion channel options that come with it) in their rooms as opposed to the basics of the cable going straight into the TV. This also means HD via HDMI as opposed to the sucky old coax too.

Our internet is now 300% faster up the pipe and about 75% faster down for the same price as TWC’s Road Runner offering. That’s nice too.

The best part is the installers. They always seem to be cool guys. No exception yesterday. They have trucks full of cool gadgets and if you express a knowledge of the tech (especially how to hook it all together) and an interest, all you have to do is ask (or hint) and they’ll leave all kinds of goodies from the truck with you. Hell, I even got the guy to install two wireless access points (gateways – or routers in non-AT&T talk).

All we had previously was the wire coming in under my office desk hooked to the cable modem which I then fed to an old Netgear router I got like 6 years ago. The office is in the front corner of the house, so the signal could be spotty – especially on the other side of the house and especially in the basement. (my little room where I do the podcast meets both those criteria) With U-Verse you need a phone jack to connect the routers (it is DSL after all) and quite frankly, even though we just cut the landline phone cord 6 weeks ago (working out great, BTW), I’ve had it in mind since before we bought this house. Therefore, in the course of our little renovations, I had already covered over two of the phone wall jacks in the house. (in the kitchen and in the sitting room off of the office) In all honesty I didn’t know where or how many others there were. Turns out there are 4 still to be covered over. Master bedroom, daughter’s room, big room in the basement and my little room where I podcast (but eventually hope to renovate and do other cool things – like have orgies). The only problem is that those are like the four furthest corners of the house. So I convinced the dude (and by convinced I mean “wondered aloud about coverage and he suggested two wireless points”) to put in two routers. So not only do we have nice, fast internet, but we have serious coverage. Nice strong signal anywhere you go.

The other notable part of the switch is that when we took the TWC equipment back to the Time Warner place, they never even asked why we were ending our service. Doesn’t that seem like it’d be part of the process? Wouldn’t you want to know why your customers were ending their relationship with you and find out if there was anything you could do to keep them? Not at Time Warner cable. The lady at the counter (we stopped at the retail location at the Dayton Mall) barely even looked up at us. She asked our phone number and name on the account, took the cable box and modem and told us what our remianing balance was. That was it. I dunno, seemed weird to me.

So yeah, loving the AT&T after almost two years without. Hopefully, we’ll never have to go back to TWC again.

Not too many reasons to take pictures of our garage, so this is the best I can do for ‘before’ photos. These were taken the day we got the keys to the house.

This first photo is taken from the far side of the garage looking back at the house. That’s the little nasty workshop nook on the right and the door into the house on the left.

A little closer look at the workshop nook. It was pretty bad, but the nook area was a nice touch. Not too many houses in the neighborhood have that.

I’m not a garage guy. I don’t do much work. I don’t fix things. I don’t touch the cars. The thing is, I can do shit (good enough, at least… or fake my way through it) and my wife is often impressed. I mean, I had some tools and stuff. The act of buying the house made these skills more necessary and our collection of ‘garage stuff’ grow. We just kind of kept stacking things in the garage with no rhyme or reason. I hated the nook. It was dirty and broken and icky. We worked around it rather than with it for over a year.

Then last month on a particularly slow day in early April (right after Easter, I think) I decided that with things warming up and many projects needing done, that I was going to just start ripping shit apart in the garage and see where I ended up. I cleared out the crappy old cabinets and patched all the holes and stuff in the wall. As of April 7th, this is what I had:

I wanted to keep it as simple and cheap as possible, but still do something useable and nice enough. I started with a coat of paint. The same color that’s in the office. Yes, it’s orange-y. It looks really orange until you put something orange next to it and then you realize it’s not nearly as orange as it seemed. Technically, Behr calls it copper. On the 10th I had this:

Oddly enough, that same week my wife scored a bunch of stuff from the hotel. They were finishing up a huge renovation and there were a lot of old items that were no longer needed. She snagged me two cabinets and a little basket/drawer/storage unit thingy. I started to lay out my area:

The next few days I got pulled away as we totally stripped and restained and sealed the deck. It took a bit longer than expected and it was only over those few days that I learned we have almost 450 sqaure feet of deck space. What a pain in the ass. But it looked 1000 times better:

When I got back into the garage I went to work on the door leading outside. I painted both the door and the trim and put new hardware on the door. I used paint we had from other areas of the house and scored the bronze hardware on the bargain rack at Home Depot for under $30. The end result was vastly superior to the white door, white trim, brass hardware combo that was there before:

I also started paining the cabinets (this time with a paint sample we got a few weeks before when considering colors for the laundry room):

I finished the job with the colors from the door and swapped out the plugs and switches with sleek black rocker swtiches and flat, flush plugs and diamond plate covers (look closely). This cost less than $20 – mostly for the diamond plate covers:

Next up was the single biggest purchase of the entire redeux. I needed a topper to create a workbench with the cabinets and figured rather than some specialty thing, I’d just swing by Lowes and pick upa stock piece of laminate countertop, cut it to size and install it. It cost under $100 for an 8 foot piece and an endcap. Oh yeah, that “W” floormat was a christmas gift that we hadn’t had a place for previously:

I wanted a pegboard or something, but I wanted to stay reasonable in terms of cost and I absolutely hate that fiberboard crap that all the stores stock. I wanted something different. After some research I score this clear pegboard for $42 and did a fun Bowser graphic behind it with a piece that no longer had a place in my son’s room since we moved, but I had held on to for some reason:

I new I needed a little more space for stuff than I had and the garage is pretty tall. Seemed like an obvious choice to score a couple of 1×12′s and bracket them up high as shelves. Wood and brackets ran around $30.

I started getting all my crap situated and things started coming together:

At that point, my wife was so motivated by how much better the little nook looked that she said, lets just finish the entire garage. We got rid of the white and went with the khaki/beige color I put on the cabinet doors. I did the attic door and house entry door in the same dark brown/light brown combo as the door leading outside. We had a bunch of shelving from the hotel renovation that didnt quite go together in any useable way, so we picked up some pieces on our own that matched and put together a unit that spanned along the back wall of the garage. We got tools hung up along the far wall, I painted and frosted the windows and still had room for the kids’ bikes and the lawn mower. The almost finished project:

(click for a larger version of that photo)

The total cost to us ended up being right around $300 thanks to using so much “found” stuff to get it done. I still need to get a hook to hang the ladder, pour cement steps and lose the wood ones and put bronze hardware on the door leading into the house. Overall we’re very happy with the results of something put together basically on a whim, a month’s time and a couple hundred bucks.

Before and After:

Verizon is running the 2-for-1 dealy-o on the Droid and I’m thinking of picking up a pair for the wife and myself and playing it off as an early B-Day gift. (when your ego is this big you buy yourself gifts)

Someone tell me why I shouldn’t. (or should)

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Speaking of phones, we’re also considering finally just dropping our land line. Anyone have an opinion there as well?

I made the mistake of returning to an Ikea store today (yesterday, by the posting date on this). We need some curtains and while we’re not sure what we want, we still haven’t seen it and thought maybe we’d get lucky at Ikea and maybe find some other things in the process. My wife digs Ikea. I think Ikea is lame. We left with a wok (yay stir fry!) and two cheap plastic bins my son can put his overflowing lego collection in. It was a total waste of my time and I now know why I only need to visit an Ikea every 4 or 5 years.

I know Ikea stores are a fresh and new idea for a lot of people, but Pittsburgh had one of the first. Way back when I was a kid and didn’t care a bit about home goods, the hillfolk of western PA were getting dumb little chairs and tables at Ikea. The first time I actually stepped foot into one was when we moved back to Pittsburgh in 2004. My wife’s hotel was across the highway from it and we lived like 10 minutes away. Basically, it was quick local shopping for us that people would drive hours to visit – go figure.

I initially thought it was the best place in the world. But I noticed that the more I returned the less enthused I was about what they had. It lost its luster a little more with each visit. We’ve owned a few things from Ikea. We had some chairs that were fine. We gave them away after a couple of years because we really didn’t need them any more. We had some neat big white curtain thingies that we used in front of our sliding glass door. We had a funky-sized artowrk thingy that the movers broke when we came to Dayton. My daughter’s side table in her bedroom as I type this came from Ikea and it does what it does.

In fact, that’s the thing about Ikea – their shit is fine. If you just need to slap together a little table and toss it in the corner, it’s fine. Need a shelf somewhere? Stop at Ikea, their shelves are just fine.

So my wife got me to drive to the Cincy Ikea that opened in late 2008 or something like that. Long enough ago to be established but recent enough to still be ‘new’ and an attraction for people.

I can say that the place offers me next to nothing. In general, I don’t think their furniture is nice. It’s plasticky. Not necessarily literally (although sometimes) but in a more general way. If I was allowed one adjective to describe the furniture in Ikea, I’d choose plasticky. (and I’d spell it like that too) Every thing has a shiny, plastic, retro-modern look to it – even wood items. It’s not that it necessarily looks cheap, it just doesn’t look right. It looks like dollhouse furniture or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it or find the right words to get close. It’s off.

Which is fine when you’re finding something significantly cheaper than you can elsewhere – like the aforementioned fabrics, little sidetables and one-off shelves. That’s the one place Ikea excels…or at least makes some sense to me.

But it just feels like as far a big things go, you can do much better for “same ballpark” prices at any number of furniture stores…and the things generally will have nice finishes that don’t look so plasticky…and aesthetic design, not just functional design.

Speaking of design, the style just screams college dorm room chic to me. Again, I use that for lack of a better term, but it’s like a manufactured, fake sophistication – fauxphistication (can I trademark that?). I can’t imagine furnishing my house with the stuff at Ikea (and I mean in any significant way, remember, I have some of this crap in the corners around here too) beyond the age of 25…30 if I’m generous and definitely at 25 (or less) if you’re in a relationship and cohabitating.

I dunno, it just doesn’t do it for me on any level. I’m less enthused everytime I visit a store. I suspect the same happens to their products in the house (again referring to big things – like doing a room in all Ikea crap). Like at first it’s a shiny and sleek and everyday it starts to look a little plastickier (oh yeah, I went there with the spelling) and a little less shiny until you hate it and realize you bought weird fucking Swedish shit for your house.

I’m sure there’s someone going to read this who swears by the place and has an Ikea house that will be sure to let me know how nice their stuff is. That’s fine. To each their own. It’s certainly not for me, so maybe it’s for you.

Today’s visit was a special treat though because of the extra super special Sunday morning crowd. It was the stop-and-gawk theme park mentality taken to the max. And yes, I realize that’s kinda what you do in a furniture store – stop and look. But it was a wonderful mix of yokels from the southern Ohio, Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky area who were amazed at the shiny visions of plasticky furniture that was “surely from the fyooture” and wannabee hipsters and intellectuals who took it way too seriously and discussed extra-loudly why this piece worked and why it would work in whatever area of their swank pad needed this piece. It was like the fucking Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen so many Ikea-goers with the checklists and tiny mini-golf pencils going around scribbling whatever it was you scribble on those little pieces of paper. My daughter and I picked up a paper/pencil combo about halfway through and kept imaginary mini-golf scores with it…whenever we weren’t pretending a cobra was jumping out of everything that could be opened and striking when we opened it.

Turns out we didn’t find any curtains and their selection of artwork/stuff for the wall was lame at best. I’m convinced at least 50% of it was the same stuff I saw during my last visit to the Pittsburgh store 4 years ago.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – the stupid-ass product names. Arrrgh! I’m convinced it’s just abstract word association with ‘modern’ misspellings. For example, let’s pretend we need to give a clock a product name. Hmmm. Clock. Clocks keep time. Units for measuring time. Hours. Days. Minutes. Years. Decades! Now a funky modern misspelling and voila!

The clock product name is Dekad.

It really feels that shallow and manufactured most of the time….just like the furniture!

(yes, I understand the names are usually Swedish words that are just literal translations or adjectives describing preferred qualities of the product, but’s it’s not cutesy and SKÄRPT – it’s silly and OMTÖCKNAD.)

Whatever. Your mileage will vary to be sure. I’m not a fan of the place and, by my estimation, won’t step foot in another Ikea store until 2014 or so.