Monthly Archives: March 2015

Work Trips

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I’ve been on a some work trips lately.  One of them was to Hood River Oregon.  We had a little bit of time one afternoon, so we decided to go up to the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.
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On our way out, we stopped by the Vista House.  As the name suggests, it has a fantastic vista of the Columbia River Gorge.
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I even made it back in time from my trip to catch Kathryn’s TSO concert!  IMG_0548

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Another trip was to Huntsville Alabama.  We stopped by the US Space and Rocket Center.  They have several rockets on display, but the king of them all is the Saturn 5 rocket.  This thing is massive!
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They also had a space shuttle there.  It was a replica shuttle that they used to practice hoisting and attaching it to the rocket boosters.  This thing is also massive!
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Lastly, I took a trip to the NPE convention in Orlando Florida.  It is the country’s largest plastics convention and is held every three years.  Basically, if you have anything to do with plastics, you come to the show.  The reason why we went is that we recently purchased an injection molding machine so we can start making plastic enclosures for some of our electronics.  We went to learn more about the industry and make contacts.  We didn’t have any downtime on this trip really.  We arrived late on Monday night and left at 6 am on Friday morning.  It took us Tuesday through Thursday to walk the entire convention.  It filled up the entire Orlando Convention Center, that’s 2.1 million square feet.  It was split across the two convention centers.  The West building is a half mile long!

I put together this video with some trip highlights.

Here are the pictures from the video plus a couple more.

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This was an eye opening trip.  As you can probably guess, the plastics industry is massive!  It was like being on set for a How It’s Made video.  So much fun.  I am very glad to be back home though and to give my feet a rest and be with my girls though.

 

Basement Remodel Part 4, Redirection

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Time to do some more demolition.  This time, it’s the laundry nook.  Here is what  it looked like with the washer and dryer removed.
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Here it goes.  Destruction is so much fun.
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This is good anger management.
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Down with the wall.
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Once we got to this point, we had a crazy idea.  With the walls down, the basement felt so nice and open.  All of the sudden both Kathryn and I had visions of an awesome family room here instead of in the adjacent bedroom!  We could forgo the bathroom in this room, leave all the walls down, and have a nice open room where we could put the couch, tv, and the computer.  Basically, this would become our replacement upstairs bonus room.  Anyway, it’s fun idea to think about.

We pondered on it for a little while, and had a plumber come and give us a quote on what it would take to add another bathroom into the laundry room.  It all seemed doable, so we decided to go for it.  This is the new plan we drew up.

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And the old one to compare against.
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Supplies!  We’re starting to look like hoarders in our garage as we’re stockpiling supplies.  So far, most everything has been ripping out stuff and taking loads to the dump, but there has been quite a bit of new stuff gathering as well.  We really pushed Darbus to the limit with this load.  The trunk was also pretty full with the toilet and other things from this run.
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We’re trying to be responsible citizens by installing a backflow preventer  on the line that feeds the sprinklers.
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Unfortunately, by adding the bathroom over into the laundry room, we had to do some rework.  One of the major jobs was to add in another vent duct for the bathroom fan.  In order to do this, we had to pull out and redo parts of the dryer vent as well.

We’ve got the second hole cut on the old coal chute door.
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We needed to notch one of the floor joist braces in order to run the new duct line.  Kevin was amazing and volunteered to crawl in the old coal chute and do the job.
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Here they are, ready to be pushed in and hopefully never opened up again.
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Here is what it looks like on the inside.  In order to make room for the bathroom, we needed move around the washer and dryer hookups.  The dryer vent is now one stud bay to the left of original.  The washing machine drain will get moved over one stud bay as well when we do the rest of the plumbing in the room.   In the ceiling, you can see the new vent duct ready to be hooked into a bathroom fan (which is stockpiled in our garage).
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