Lyndhurst Garden House

Lyndhurst Garden House
Lyndhurst Garden House

Friday, May 22, 2015

Lighting options

Legrand Adorne has a nice looking under-cabinet modular power and lighting system for kitchens.

It took me a little thought a few months ago to realize this sort of thing could not work in bathroom (and why I got compact 8 outlet strip instead).  Bathrooms don't have endless "under cabinet" space.  The front is largely (and in my bathroom it's mostly) covered with a mirror, with a ceramic backsplash below that.  Then there's the toilet and shower/bath.  Then there's the blank wall in back where outlets are useless.  Meanwhile, all of the bathroom gadgets are concentrated right next to the sink, and therefore you need a cluster of outlets right there, not spaced around the wall as in kitchen modular power systems.  There's a limited amount of wallspace you can use for a decent number of outlets.  Nowadays bathrooms (and especially mine) are defined by lots of electric gadgets: electric toothbrush, electric shaver, water pik, hair dryer.

But for a Kitchen, the modular system looks interesting.

I need a nicer looking sconce for next to the front door.  It needs to provide lots of light, though nowadays that can be done with a single 100W equivalent LED bulb (if wet rated).  Here's something that looks interesting from Maxim's Canterbury collection.  I think the requirements are: should take a single medium base bulb, should have seedy or other irregular glass but not deeply tinted glass.  Unlike the front of the garage, there is plenty of space to consider all sconce options.







Saturday, May 16, 2015

Lighted Address Sign

For the gable front of the new carport, above the larger round vent hole?

http://www.comforthouse.com/ovaladdress.html

Lighted address signs work on doorbell power, 24V AC or less, which the code basically lets you do anything with.  You can drill a hole in the wall and run doorbell wire right through the hole.  For 120V AC, code requires Electrical Boxes, which must have covers or access panels.  For a long time I had this idea of having the address light up from within the round or oval vent hole.  I could find nothing of the kind, and of course it would be illegal to do this with 120V AC power.  Where would the Electrical Box be?  Obviously the Electrical Box cannot just be in the vent hole.  However, it would be possible to add a lighted address sign to a gable vent cover IF you use Doorbell Power (I think).

Nobody makes something like this…but once I have my vent cover I could re-manufacture it to have lighted numbers.  An interesting project…

But I have to remember to ask the carport builders to run a doorbell power line through the carport roof structure (I'm assuming there is a ceiling below the roof, not an open roof.  A ceiling provides better insulation and looks nicer).

I had been thinking no ceiling lamps.  The Luddate-Job (which I'm thinking is a great place to start) has ceiling lamps.  But that adds the electrical expense, and I was thinking my new outdoor Happy Trails sconce was sufficient lighting, with or without a carport.  But ceiling lamps are a nice touch, and the comfortable house is all about nice touches.  With ceiling lamps, you can see where you just dropped your keys.  And the ceiling lamps could come on automatically when a car enters the carport.  And it's far harder to add the electrical afterwards.  Afterwards it would have to be external through conduit, which has an industrial look (though I think OK basically).

So I think I'm going to start by asking for the Whole Ludgate, lamps and all, plus the doorbell line to the the front vent (leave it to me to run the rest of the way), 22.5 ft inner distance between the all brick posts, 4 posts for the carport and one for the walkway (just like Ludgate).

Funny thing is, I think I once drove past the Ludgate house. I couldn't believe it, it looked like a hotel here in the middle of a subdivision I had accidentally turned into.  I got in to check it out, and actually my first impression was the carport was too cheap to be the luxury hotel I thought it was, and it wasn't as big as I thought it was.  But it was fine, very fine, for an actual house, as I could simultaneously see it was.  An all metal carport even like the Kirby-Job, which at first I liked better than Ludgate, would not have that same feel.  It's cheap country ranch style, not pinnacle affluent district style.  The Ludgate approaches the affluent district style, but if you look close enough, you can see it isn't the real affluent district style, it's a metal framed carport disguised as brick and wood.  (Here where I live, "the district" would be Olmos Park.  I'm trying to emulate that a bit here, though I more often promote the name East Alamo Heights for my increasingly-surrounded-by-expensive-subdivisions ghetto that I'm struggling to transform.)  But the Ludgate-job is close enough to affluent district style for my house.  In fact, I've generally thought it out-of-reach (and it may be, though I'm going to try, try).  The brick would be new, I might ask if I could also brick the front sides of the garage just like Ludgate (though my sides are smaller, much smaller, but so much the better as it needs far less brick).

I think the Ludgate is Real Brick, though clearly it's a metal pole wrapped in one and one half brick sides.  I think that's a great design, far more narrow than the space wasting Craftsman style supports I often see.

I not only drove past the Kirby carport, I saw it being welded.

When you look at carports at Houzz, you see many people take them very seriously, and they are often built to exactly match the house, with exactly the same or even more heft than the actual house.  Now as far as affluent district look goes, you couldn't do much better than this:

http://www.houzz.com/photos/61519/The-Cliffs-Vineyards-traditional-exterior-other-metro

Now look at the brick sides supporting that carport roof.  They look suitable for a major bridge.  Actually I think this whole house looks obscenely affluent from the outside.  I might partly be the camera lenses they are using (much with the Ludgate-job pictures, I think, which used a very wide angle lens).  The inside doesn't look quite as obscene, and I didn't think the floor space was too far beyond the usual rich folks place these days.

But it illustrates my point.  You shouldn't go cheap on the carport.  That's the first impression right there.  If I can't build my NeoLudgate now, I'll try to get there somehow.

Update: just after writing this, I had my estimates from Stephen's Roofing.  As to my specifications, a metal frame carport like the Kirby, but nested just over the roofline for almost full coverage, would cost $15,900.  This was with standing seam panels, which I would mandate.  With a hand wave he said a wooden carport like the Ludgate would be $29,000, and I don't know if he was counting the brick, which he said was an extra $1000 or more for each pole.  They said the Ludgate was real brick with wood framing.

Well this proved my worst fears, it was actually higher than the high prices I feared.  I feared paying $20,000 for the Ludgate, but I might do it.  At $30,000, it's a clear no.

I suppose I could get other estimates, and I was thinking after reading reports on Stephens that I WOULD get someone else anyway, but now I feel I just won't bother soon.  Although I've been re-thinking the solar idea again.  Not being attached to the house doesn't sound so bad anymore, and it could be little more than a carport now that I've given up the Ludgate.  If it's detached, it might as well be some solar thing.

I got a cement estimate, and I didn't even like that, remembering far less from an hand waved estimate several years ago.








Wednesday, May 6, 2015

First Week of May

Lawn front and back is looking wonderful.  Mowed front and back on May 2 and two weeks earlier.  Irrigation has still not been turned on since November, but good spring rains have done magic.

New tiny (7 inch high) viburnum planted on south side for privacy.  This will ultimately block a view to driveways and doorways across the street through the neighbor's yard.  I had planned to put a viburnum here two years ago, but the big viburnum from nursery couldn't be planted in this spot because of dense array of (mostly obsolete and unused) telecom wires that run along the south side of my yard.  So a tiny viburnum which wouldn't interfere with the wires (while being planted anyway) was needed, and obtained last week from mail order through Gardener Direct, which apparently got it drop shipped from Liner Source Inc.

New 2 zone temperature monitor was installed on top of the blank switch cover in the King's Room.  The blank cover was originally where the room light switch was, but 6 feet into the room and around the corner it was useless, and controlled an outlet on the opposite side of the room where I've never wanted to put a light.  22 years ago I removed the switch and put on the blank cover, but that cracked the sheetrock below the cover, so there was always a small gap.  It looked bad.  I replaced the cover with a jumbo size cover that covered up the gap.  I also filled the gaps around the plastic electrical box behind the cover with Duct Seal, the specific fireproof compound approved for this purpose.  I vacuumed the box but must remember to do that more carefully next time…despite the vacuum my shirt got covered with sheetrock dust and debris as it was being sucked out of the box.  I used a new 1 1/2 inch 6-32 stainless steel screw for the upper screw holding the cover.  That screw was long enough that it could be exposed sufficiently to fit into the hanger hole in the temperature monitor.  The screws go into long slots on either side of the box and do not endanger wires.  The other screw is 1 inch because of how the box is recessed, that is the minimum length.  The temperature monitor shows the temperature in the room and also in Lyndhurst Garden House, with min/max displays for both.

A very fancy wreath hanger was fixed and hung on the door of the hall bath.  The way the hanger came from the factory it was useless because the front plate rose above the door top support.  That way you couldn't close the door because the front plate would hit the door trim.  What were they thinking??? I had to re-bend the metal to a very small radius going straight up from the front by 1/2 inch, and the only way to do that was with a small hammer.  Then I had to re-bend the top and back of the support metal but that was easier and I simply put the metal in a vice and bent it.  I had to do this a second time because the first time the wider radius of the top bends prevented the hanger from resting on the top of the door.

I installed the Dual White LimitlessLED bulb in the back yard flood light reflector, replacing the RGB bulb.  The Dual White allows me to play with color temperature, which is interesting in the back yard, instead of pure hues, which are not very interesting (though they might do for the patio light).  I need some kind of remote control bulb to get the light output just right to make the back yard look relatively evenly lit, which has a cool effect.  I hadn't been able to get the Dual White bulb synced until I went to a computer club meeting on Saturday and fiddled with it some more.

The Dynatrap mosquito trap was set up in the exercise (garage) room.  I had to clear a small space on top of the two drawer wood filing cabinet for it.  In so doing, I cleared away junk that had been sitting there for years. Every little thing there required deliberation or special handling or testing before it could be properly dealt with (that's why the mess had staying power--every time I looked at it I found stuff that needed to be worked on first).

I will need to be doing a lot more organizing/sorting/discarding like that this year.  Finally!  I have two almost useless rooms that need to be cleared out, and I'd like to clear out my $80/mo storage unit also.  I have a big storage building (Lyndhurst) but it's already filled up and needs cleaning and organizing too.  So this clearing of the wood filing cabinet was a little start.  I need to be doing this every week to make progress incrementally.  I know from experience that when you start clearing, it's far harder than you ever could imagine, but it gets easier.