April 14th 2018 – House Projects

Now that we're all settled into our house, I'm starting to put together things we can improve on or things that just need to get buttoned up around the house. I'm hoping to make a log of everything I'm doing, just to share what's going on in the house. Overall, there are four major areas that I want to work on within the next year or so.The OfficeMy office is essentially going to be a combination office and studio. I want to be able to do work, like edit photos, videos, or podcasts at a stand/sit desk, stream on Twitch, record videos and podcasts, and take photos from time to time. The office is basically never going to be complete, but I'm going to slowly work on it as time goes on. So far, I've got some cabinets that I think will work well as part of a set and double as a huge amount of storage.Next, I'm going to need a new desk. The desk I'm using right now is pretty tiny, and a little too short. It works, but when you've got two monitors, an audio mixer, and a keyboard and mouse on the same surface, you need as much space as you can get. I'm partial to the Autonomous desks. I really love the idea of being able to choose to stand or sit while I'm at my desk. I spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, and I'm always reminded of when I had a standing desk. Standing for nine hours straight isn't the greatest thing, but sitting for that long is even worse. Without a doubt, I'd rather stand all day than sit.After the desk, I'm going to give my desktop computer an overhaul. For the spec nerds, I'm currently running a PC with an 3GHz Quad-Core AMD CPU from 2008-ish, 16GB of DDR3, and a GTX 960. All of which, as you can guess, is SUPER out of date. Granted, the GTX 960 holds up in this day and age. Not as much as the GTX 1080, but I'm not doing any 4K gaming right now, so I'm not sure that I really need it.Smart Home-ifyingSo, I know this is more of a thing that people are just doing to their dwellings, but I kinda like the idea of doing it. I've already connected up my garage door and it's come in handy a few times already. I also like the idea of getting one of those Nest Thermostats so that the temperature gets set differently throughout the day. The larger portion of this project will be with the lighting in the house.I would like to change out most, if not all, of the bulbs with the Phillips Hue bulbs. Overall in the house, this would be so that light temperatures and brightnesses can be scheduled. However, in the living room and kitchen, I've got more plans for the colored lights. Three words: RANDOM DANCE PARTY.SecuritySome of this might go hand-in-hand with making the house smarter, but... I guess the long of the short of this is that I want to add more security cameras to the house and maybe an alarm system? I may have mentioned this before, but I've got an ethernet drop outside my house for no apparent reason, so it would be great to use it for a PoE dome camera. I also plan on getting a Ring doorbell camera, mostly because our FedEx delivery driver doesn't ring the doorbell, but also because I don't have a peep-hole, so having a digital alternative works perfectly. After all that, I'll probably have another camera inside the house. Overall, though, I eventually will probably get an actual security system installed. We'll see.LandscapingOkay, I hate talking landscaping, but there is a few things that I do need to take care of. First, the bare patch of dirt in the back yard. We have about 2,200 square feet of dirt inside our fenced in back yard, and I need to seed new grass. Speaking of the fence, there are some spots where the ground dips a bit too low for the fence, so I'm going to get some dirt to fill in those spaces and slowly level out the fence area. Lastly, I need to handle drainage.We do have gutters and a drip edge, but I think we need to put in a french drain and maybe a dry well to help carry all the run-off away from our foundation. I'm super not an expert about gutters or drainage or whatever. It took a lot of convincing for me to actually decide to have the gutters put in, but now I'm told that my downspouts aren't doing anything, soooooo... I don't know it's all a mess to me.Oh, also we have a nice little bench to put out front in what's going to be our rock garden.Overall, though, I'm going to keep with the updates of the progress going forward. Next time I'll actually include some photos when there's been some progress. Right now everything is a little plain. Also I probably need to mow my lawn.