Sheep Guarding Llama

Another super cold day today.  I can’t believe that we are in Texas.  This is quite a bit colder than I have seen it here and definitely colder than I imagined that it would get.  It is so bizarre that Texas, the home of heat, gets so dramatically colder than central California or Florida.  We have quite the wide temperature range here, but very little snow.

It was so cold today, we assume, that the electricians decided not to come over.  That meant no work being done on the house today since the contractor is stuck waiting on them to get their electrical done and out of the way.  The house is stable at this point so we are not unable to live in it, it just would be nice if we had more stuff done so that we could get to work putting the house in order.  What a disaster the house is right now.

From all of the work going on, the carpeting in the entire house is a huge mess.  I don’t really want to start cleaning it until the work in the garage is done because once you clean it it needs time to dry or else it attracts far more dirt than it would have otherwise.  But that means that it is just getting dirtier and dirtier right now.

I didn’t need to go into the office today.  The roads are just as bad today as they were yesterday.  Solid ice and everything around Dallas is closed.

Very little to say about today.  It was quite a slow day in the grand scheme of things.  Souder came over and did a lot of work both with me and on the house.  He got tons and tons of data cabling done today.  There is now a bundle of cables running from my office (the soon to be nursery), from Liesl’s room and from Dominica and my bedroom to the garage.  We counted and we are going to need a forty-eight port patch panel to support all of the cable runs that are being put in around the house.  This is going to be one seriously wired house.  All of the wiring is being done “right” as well and goes up into cable management in the attic.  It is quite impressive up there.

Our master bedroom is going to get six cable runs.  We ran out of cable on that room so only four are in so far.  The nursery has four.  Liesl’s room has two.  That is a dozen runs from that part of the house alone.  The bar is going to get a minimum of two and the kitchen already has one.  That’s fifteen or more for the parts of the house that need to get their cable via the attic.  The den or play room where Liesl is going to have a television in the main part of the house will need a minimum of two and, I suspect, will get four as the runs are so short and it is such a handy spot to have several runs.  So that takes us up to nineteen with twenty being a safer number and does not include a dedicated wireless access point run to the laundry room that has been discussed nor does it include my new office!

The new office is getting a minimum of eight ports installed and I think ten is more likely.  That takes us to thirty.  That room is going to be awesome.  Then comes the server room which will need tons of ports on its own.  Filling a forty-eight port patch panel should be easy.  Topping twenty four is unavoidable.

We will end up needing an addition switch too, it seems.  The twenty-four port switch that I have now isn’t going to cut it for long.  I will need a forty-eight port (or possibly more) in almost no time.

We got pizza for dinner from the good place up on Frankford.  Brian actually stayed for dinner, which he almost never does.  It was really late before he managed to head off for home.  We are expecting that we will not see him nor the electricians tomorrow.  There really is not much point working on the house until it warms up outside since we are now at a point where everything works and we are not struggling with everyday life.

My guess is that the house won’t see any additional work done until the weekend.  Then, I hope, we should see tons of progress.  I’m sure that I will be working from home tomorrow – it is still crazy cold here in Carrollton.

Wow is it cold this morning.  The house was fifty two degrees this morning when we woke up.  It could have been worse.  Sitting in the living room you can feel the icy air moving through the house as there is so little insulation that the air literally moves through the house from the wind blowing outside.  It is ridiculous.

As expected, the office closed this morning as did pretty much every business in North Texas.  The roads are covered in ice with a tiny layer of snow, the wind is crazy and the temperature is way below twenty.  Too cold for Texans to be out and about.

Working from home is nice but it would be nicer if it was warm and if working was a little bit easier to do.  With the garage under major construction the place is a complete mess and the power and the Internet access are unreliable.  Last night, before going to bed, we had noticed some issues with the Internet access – we were getting tons of dropped packets.  I did some repositioning of wires and stuff and things seem to work for the most part.  We were hopeful that that would get us through the day.

The electricians and Souder arrived late in the morning.  They reported that the roads were awful and that it had taken them forever to get out to where we were.  About an hour and a half which is crazy.

By early afternoon we had the heat on again.  Boy does that feel nice.  They worked for about two hours and then took off to go save someone else who had no power and was freezing.  Busy day for electricians – out saving all the people who haven’t tested their furnaces yet.

All day the Internet access got worse and worse with dropped packets getting more and more frequent.  Eventually it was completely unusable.  Just what I need when the weather is bad and I am working from home – likely for several days.

So most of the afternoon was spent working to get the Internet to work.  That ended up being a complete disaster.  To make a long story short we had to rewire the FiOS three times and I spent well over three hours on the phone with Verizon as each person transferred me to a different queue where, instead of finding me the resource that I needed, they just put me in as a new caller so that I would have to wait and wait until someone picked up the phone, told me that this was the wrong queue and started the process over.  At one point, the IVR just decided that I couldn’t be helped and said “Sorry, please hang up” without any reason or explanation.  Thanks Verizon.  Abysmal customer service today and the IVR is completely broken too with incorrect options and dead ends.

Finally, after going through a few phone batteries and getting insanely irate at Verizon for doing nothing to follow up on a clear problem, I managed to get someone from FiOS Tech Support (which, by the way, does not have an IVR selection – you have to go to “questions about FiOS billing” to get tech support which should be under the “other” as it is not billing) and once I got someone who actually knew how to do their job, getting the box fixed was no problem.  He was very helpful and apologized for the known broken IVR and the incompetent dolts who had been trying to get me to go away for the last few hours.

Now, finally, the FiOS box is hooked up to give me real “fibre” rather than converting the fibre to a cable connection outside and just being a cable service.  Attention Verizon: all of the cable providers (Cox, Cablevision, Time Warner, Comcast, etc.) have fibre in the back end and cable to your home, if you do the same thing you are just a cable carrier!  Offer it as an option, don’t default to not giving us fibre to ethernet – what century is this?

So we finally have solid Internet access and the ability to put a real firewall on the line as well.  What a painful afternoon.  But at least it resulted in good progress overall.  But a very long and stressful day dealing with all of that.  Glad that it is over.

We got up early this morning and all drove down to Home Depot to meet up with Souder to pick out switches, sensors, lighting, fixtures, etc.  Another bill of over a grand in building supplies.  Ugh.  But we have some awesome updates for the house now too.  We decided to back off on getting the most awesome wall outlets and stuff that we could – it just isn’t worth the amount of money that it would cost to do it the way that we want to but we are able to do nice and safe pretty inexpensively so we decided to go with that.  But we did go pretty nice on the switches and motion sensors and stuff which will be nice as we have been living in a house where every switch is broken or worn out for over a month now and it has been driving us crazy.  And we are replacing most of the pointless dimmers with normal switches now.  Most of the rooms that had them would never reasonably be dimmed anyway.

I ran off to work as early as I could.  What a day it is set to be.  Up early and running late to get to work anyway.  I’m feeling exhausted.

Work was busy this morning.  Then I tried to go home for lunch.  I made it home just in time for Dominica to tell me that the guys were off at Home Depot buying stuff.  Well of course I needed to be there to pay for it.  So I turned around and ran down there as quickly as I could.

It ended up taking forever just to get some wire cut and check out since Bank of America decided that something crazy must be going on with all of these charges happening in Texas so they suspended my card.  So that took a while to deal with.

By the time that we were done at Home Depot, I had to get down to work straight away.  Dominica had made lunch too but I didn’t make it back to the house at all.  I didn’t even get to see Liesl, even for a second, and she had been calling for me too.  🙁

On the way back to the office I hit the gas station and grabbed food there.  Not much of a lunch but it will do.  It has to, I suppose.

Work was busy this evening and went pretty late.  On my way home after work I had to stop off at Lowe’s to pick up a power strip as the power in the garage is all interrupted and we need power strips to be able to be online this weekend as everything is just sitting on the floor.

I got home and everyone had already left.  Dominica took me out to the garage to show me the disaster… the ceiling had collapsed!  About one half of the conversion side of the garage’s ceiling had come down.  What a mess it was in there.

So we have basic Internet access tonight but that is about it.  Not much power and the house is pretty cold.  They said that they got the furnace working before they left, though.

So the house kept getting colder and colder.  This past weekend it had been nearly eighty degrees here in Carrollton but tomorrow we are supposed to see temperatures as low as fourteen degrees!  Talk about a rapid change.  This is nuts.

I did some checking and there is definitely no heat on in the house even though the fans have been running.  I went outside with a flashlight and determined that the power running from the house to the heatpump did not exist.  There were some wires but nothing attached.  This is going to be a rough night.

So we turned off the furnace and snuggled in for the night.  Lots of blankets for us.  So we are heading into the coldest day in as long as anyone can remember in Texas without any heat.  This is going to be rough.  The faucets are dripping, fingers are crossed.

Today is the “no electric” day as the electricians come in to rip and replace pretty much the entire house.  Souder and the electricians arrived very early.  Lots to be done.  No slacking off here!

There was a bit of work done, leading up to about noon, that was done with the power still on.  So we were able to do some basic stuff around the house in the morning.  Mostly, though, that involved a trip to Home Depot and then getting ready so that we could go out for the day.

We left the house just as they were shutting down the power for the day so that they could begin the real work which involved installing the new breaker box (one with a main, how cool is that) in the new wiring closet at the back of the new office space.  This is not cheap work but boy did it need to be done.  This house was not safe at all.

I talked to the electrician and he thinks that the bulk of the issues in the house are the result of some idiot or group of idiots doing horrible things to the house after the house was built.  Some of the issues are likely the result of the original builder but the level of disaster here is not, necessarily, indicative of a matching disaster likely to be discovered next door when we start looking at that electrical.

Dominica I went up to Plano to meet up with the play group that we were meeting today.  We met at the McDonald’s on Jupiter which was actually a location that I was familiar with.  Bizarre considering that it was Plano and I’m almost never there.  The McDonald’s was really nice but the play area had the heater broken and while it was nice outside it was blasting heat in there so it was easily in the high eighties!  Pretty warm for young kids to be running around.  Liesl was quickly all covered in sweat.

We had a nice time and Liesl liked playing with the few kids that were there.  Only a couple of people showed up for the meeting because, supposedly, so many people were sick.  So around two thirty we left there to drive down to Mansfield.  Liesl was pretty tired after all of the running around, playing with the kids and climbing through the play area so she just fell asleep in the car on the forty minute drive down to Mansfield.

We had a good time, as always, visiting with the family in Mansfield.  We do wish that we could get a house closer in this direction but with where I work it just does not work at very well for that.  It would be a really long commute in rough traffic for me and it would mean that I would never get to come home at lunch like I often get to do now.

While we were at the birthday party we were getting semi-regular updates from Souder about the status of the work going on at the house.  We learned that more and more of the house had to be torn apart to make way for the necessary electrical upgrades and that around every turn there was another disaster discovered.

When we left the birthday party it was dark out and still there was no power on at the house.  It was almost seven thirty when we got home and the power remained off for probably another hour or two.  These guys are really working some long days.  Everyone was wearing head mounted lights and trying to get around that way.  It was starting to get chilly in the house too.  The temperature really dropped throughout the day.

There were not able to get the power fully back on for us tonight – no heat, for example.  But they were able to get a few lights, the refrigerator and the hot water heater hooked up to get us through tomorrow morning.  They think that the rest will be done tomorrow, though.  So fingers crossed.

Tomorrow morning we are planning on an early morning run to Home Depot with Souder to stock up on electrical outlets, switches, motion detectors and the like so that the electricians can do all of that while they are in there as well.  Since they already have to rip everything apart they might as well put it all back together with brand new, working stuff.  Everything electrical in our home is a complete disaster right now and had to be addressed sooner than later so, while this was not quite when we had planned to do this stuff, it probably makes the most sense and it will feel great to have these items addressed.

They had to rip out all of the cabling running from the breaker box into the house today which is a ton of cable.  What is great is that all of the cable was switched out from aluminum to copper.  Better efficiency and safety now.  They had to remove the appliances even, like the fridge and the ovens, to be able to wire them back up.

We have a lot more breakers now than we had previously and our electrical is being split up a lot more logically than before.  While doing the wiring they discovered things like that the entire kitchen, atrium lighting and the tertiary bedroom were all on the same circuit!  That is not good at all.  All of my office equipment, in the farthest room of the house, was connected to the same circuit as the fridge!?!  That’s just crazy.  Who does that.  And that atrium electric is awful with at least one of the lights constantly shorting out.

I can’t wait to get in and start using my new office.  In many ways this is very exciting.  The people who sold us this house really would not recognize the place at all.  We have done more work in the past week in this house that I would venture that they had done in the last ten to fifteen years at least.  Maybe more.  We can’t find evidence of anything, really, in the house that was really fixed within that time frame.

I got up early this morning and went into my office before everyone else woke up and got started on some writing that I wanted to do.  It was actually a very productive morning for me.  Great use of my time.  It is beautiful here this weekend with temperatures in the seventies.  It is awesome being in Texas.

It was pretty early yet, before Dominica and Liesl were awake, when I heard a knock on the door.  Our contractor had arrived and it was time to get started on the garage conversion.

Almost immediately we went down to Home Depot to get the supplies that we needed to get a start on the day.  We mostly got the big items like the lumber as today’s project is mostly to get the framing done so that the electricians can take over shortly.  It was over a grand for all of the stuff that we needed just for today so that we could get started.  Ugh.  This is not going to be cheap.

We also had to get a new breaker box as ours is not legal, safe or appropriate.  The one that was installed in our house was an “add on” box, not a main breaker box.  So there was no main switch to safely cut off all of the house’s power at the same time.  That triggered a lot of other things that are going to need to be done to get the house up to code and safe as well as being more efficient and better to live in.

Right as we were getting started on the garage our next door neighbough, the one whose house we did not buy, stopped over to say hello.  I have seen him a couple of times outside but have never really spoken to him.  He was very cool and we are encouraged that the two guys who live next door seem a lot like the kind of people that we would want to hang out with.  And, to be even cooler, it turns out that today was their long-standing Dungeons and Dragons party that goes all day long!  That is awesome.  And they have owned the house next door for a long time so that is good for area stability since two houses on our very small street were for sale at the same time.  That can be very bad for a street like ours.  So some long-term, lynch pin owners in an area are very important.

The electricians took off pretty early, not much for them to do today while our contractor worked on building the main part of the garage structure.  Today’s goal is to get the back part of the garage conversion done so that the electricians can come back and have something to work with when they start doing the electric.

Souder came over pretty early to help out with the construction and to do what network wiring that he could get done around all of the other work that is going on.  Watson came over a while later to help out as well.

It was amazing to watch how quickly the center wall came down and how quickly the new walls were framed.  Wall framing is always an amazing thing even though I have watch it many times.  You really go from nothing to a good amount of stuff pretty quickly.

By the end of the day there was a tremendous amount of progress.  You can really see the house coming together.  There is a ton left to do but it is encouraging and we can start to envision what it is going to be like.  Much of the floor is in place too which is really good since the room actually “floats” over the old garage floor which is something that I had been having a hard time envisioning how it was going to work as I had never seen that done previously.

It is exciting to see the place coming together.  We have been really looking forward to this.  We are not looking forward to the bill, of course, but we are very much looking forward to having the house in a condition that we can really use.  It is obvious that we could be as little as several days away from being able to put books onto the shelves in the new office which means that we will be emptying out the living room, den, other side of the garage and other miscellaneous places of all of the “stuff” that has accumulated there awaiting an official home in the “office.”

Some additional work, but not too much, was done up in the attic today too.  That is going to be slowly addressed as we go.  It is a total disaster up there and needs to be fixed before other parts of the house are fixed to make it easier to work as we go.

It was a long day and a bit depressing to see the money just flying out of the window.  But it is great to see the house getting put into shape.  We felt much better about the scale of the work going on when, while just doing a little work on a door frame, the center wall in the garage collapsed as it was not attached to anything!  Wow are we glad that we are replacing that!

The work went until pretty late this evening.  There is just tons and tons left to do.  Tomorrow is going to be the electrical day.  In addition to tons of electrical work, Dominica and I have a couple of things going on tomorrow.  The first is a “mommy and me” play group that we are checking out to see if Dominica and Liesl want to join.  Then Dominica’s second cousin’s birthday party in the afternoon down in Mansfield.  So we will have a very busy day.

Thanks goodness for Souder who has been at the house doing a ton of work and orchestrating the work while we are away or whatever.  We’d be screwed if he wasn’t there.  He’s overseeing the entire thing.  Even when we are there he knows so much more about what is going on than I do and we really just need several people to be able to handle the trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot and everything else.  It is amazing how much we have going on all at once right now!