Projects

I've done a couple of fun projects around the house recently. Here are a couple:

Garage Door Insulation


Its always so hot in the summer and cold in the winter in there, and when I'm, well, working on projects in there, I am at the mercy of the elements. So, I went to Home Depot and found a garage insulation kit. Way too expensive. It would cost something like over $200 to do it! So, I turned to 2" thick 4' x 8' sheets of exterior styrofoam insulation, a mere $18 per sheet (it took 4 sheets).

For cutting it to fit in the door sections, I have to thank the genious of my Dad. Long ago, he made a foam cutter that uses a hot wire to melt through the foam (you can see it on the table in the photo). Its basically an old soldering gun (I think its as old as me, actually) with two copper electical wires twisted around each other to make one big one. The twisted pair replaces what would normally be a soldering tip. It's a bit smelly, but it cuts foam with no mess. I decided to try one cut with a cordless circular saw - big mistake! Micro styrofoam particles every where, and from just one cut. I used the heat cutter from then on.

Cell Phone Charging Station


We have a mess of cables on the counter around our phone. It's all due to the cell phone chargers. There's only two of them, but between all the length of each cable, plus the wall wort for the house phone, there's a lot of junk there. I saw a neat under-cabinet cell phone charging station in a catalog that hides all the big ol' AC adapters and gives you a nice, neat shelf where cell phones can not only live, but be charged. "I can make one of those" I said to myself. So I did. It's basically a box you attached to the underside of a cabinet with an "L" shaped tray that slides in, hiding the AC adapters behind it.

Decorative Window Film


Jen wanted to put some 'clouds in the sky' decorative window film on the big window at the first landing of the stairs. Its pretty high up there, probably about 6.5 feet to the bottom of the window. The fun part about this project was that I assembled my own make-shift scaffolding so I could do the window film application much more easily than just hanging off a 12 foot ladder leaning against the wall. The film does look good, though...

New Wireless Headset


I use a wireless headset at work, and I love it. Its a GN Netcom 9120. It has amazing range, is super light and comfortable, but fairly expensive (retail is around $250). I'm a big headset user at home also, but ours is wired to our cordless phone (kind of ironic, eh?) and is kind of bulky. I managed to find one of these on eBay and won an auction for $89! Super rad. The thing about this headset is that it only replaces the handset, in other words, it does dial or even pick up the phone for you. It has to be plugged in to an existing phone with a corded handset. I just happen to have one of those, strangely enough. The wireless headset also has a handset lifter. When you want to use the headset, you normally have to pick up the phone handset and set it aside, leaving it off the hook until you're done talking. With the handset lifter, once you put the headset on and push one of its buttons, it lifts the handset for you!

I needed to set up a place for all of this stuff to live, a place that wouldn't take up any current counter-top space and would also be out of reach of the kids. So I added a mini shelf in my office for it and re-routed the phone line to one of the CAT6 jacks on that wall. Works great!