Category Archives: Scott’s Hobby House

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Measuring Up

Today was {Destination: Finished} for a few projects I’ve been working on.

Primarily, the Height Chart:

Last weekend, while Scott was cleaning out the garage (I’ll give you a peek at that progress at the end), I was trying to push along with these awesome ideas that had been laying around in there. While Ben was down for a nap, we did some work. I also threw together some ridiculously easy ribs! Here is the recipe, found on my Allrecipes Dinner Spinner App:

Sweet and Savory Ribs:

(that’s how they looked when they just started cooking, they filled the house with a mouthwatering smell, too)

Ingredients:

1 large onion, sliced and separated into rings (skipped that)

2 1/2lbs boneless (these were bone-in, didn’t seem to matter) country style pork ribs

1 (18oz) bottle honey BBQ sauce (didn’t have honey so I squeezed some in later)

1/3 cup maple syrup

1/4 cup spicy brown mustard

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp pepper

If you cut up the onion, lay it on the bottom. Combine the rest in a small bowl and then pour it over the ribs in the crock pot. Piece of cake! Let cook on low for, they say 8-9 hours. We went 6 and couldn’t stand waiting any longer and it was delicious. I let the rest cook another hour (not sure it was really necessary).

 

I was dressed in my finest:

My most exciting project is my ruler growth chart. I found the idea on Pinterest, but took my own direction with it. If you go to Pinterest and search “ruler growth chart” you will see some of these images, or some like it:

image from: 517Creations.blogspot.com

You get the idea, I just went with more of a loose ruler “look” and stained my wood dark. You can still see the grain, it’s pretty nice. I started with a piece of wood I picked up from Home Depot, about this size and shape.

Then last weekend, the husband stained it for me:

Then, later on, I printed out some enlarged Times New Roman numbers off the computer, and thanks to a tip (that I also found on Pinterest) I traced over the numbers with a ball point pen, impressing their outlines into the wood:

Ben was thrilled, and thought I had set up a gymnastics course for him:

Then today I finally pulled my paints and brushes down from the attic and started working on it.

 

Materials:

White acrylic paint

Small paintbrush

Cup for tiny bit of water

Disposable tupperware that I use for spreading paint around

Paper towel to soak up excess water on brush

The painting was going beautifully. Getting Ben to sit and color with me was hit and miss. Sometimes he was really into it but mostly he just wanted to get up and down and have me draw letters for him. Which I did, in little spurts. It got done, and was kind of nice and relaxing. Music on, Ben playing around me, painting away in a kind of meditative zone. Pret-ty nice.

 

Before long, things were shaping up. I had to go over each area twice or so, to get it thick enough. I really loved painting on wood, think I might try it again soon.

And the finished product!

And here it is after we entered some heights and traced Ben’s sweet little hand. Adorable. We even added my height and Scott’s height, for when the kids get older and start catching up to us!

So meanwhile, back at the ranch, we had these other fun projects going on.

1) Scott was cleaning out the garage. Here are the before and afters:

 Before (during escrow, outside looking in):

Now:

Before (turned just slightly to the right, where the previous owner had built a room inside):

Didn’t get an after shot at that particular angle, but here is a dramatic “during”. You can see the door to the house hidden back there in the corner, just to orient yourself:

Before (standing by the water heater):

Now (same direction):

Still have some junk to expel, but definitely getting there.

2) Last but not least, the first nursery project for baby Alina was a $20 changing table we bought off of Craigslist, that came to us white, is now a very “sunny yellow” thanks to some Rustoleum glossy spray paint (about 3 cans, holy cow):

No sanding or fancy stuff, just sprayed it. We have zero other decorating going on in there so far, so you will have to imagine fun colored bins, a floral changing pad cover and a yellow patterned rug to accompany this after photo (this is for you, Rachel!):

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Scott’s HDMI Hobby House

Okay, so the overall goal of this whole thing is to get rid of any type of TV payment subscription. Lots of people have been asking us how we plan on doing this (Scott, really, I don’t plan on doing anything). So I thought I would document his work, which is experimentation, trial and error at times. Oh, and he gets to use fun tools and the biggest drill attachment you’ve ever seen.

Part one consists of figuring out how to get our PS3 (which is downstairs) to work with our TV upstairs, so that we can run Netflix up there, and also Blu-Ray movies. We (Scott) plan on doing that by splitting the HDMI output of the Playstation using an HDMI splitter and run one cable to our TV downstairs and a fifty footer all the way upstairs. Remember how we weren’t going to put any more work in this house? Ya. Well, that doesn’t count if the work is fun, I guess.

Part two is going to be putting a TV tuner card into our server, which lives upstairs in the very tippy top of the baby’s closet. It doubles as a white noise machine. Okay, so that was Scott’s first plan, but now they have a separate box available that you plug the antenna into and it connects to the server over the network. But the concept is the same. The server is going to receive all the programming and push it out to the entertainment centers.

Ya, so did I mention that we have a server and a home network that connects all (five) of our computers? (which includes the server). This is what happens when you graduate from the computer science department, and the wife is more than happy to go along for the ride. We also have a family emergency 24-hour IT customer service phone center in our living room…. haha nah just kidding, although it does seem that way, and since I reap the benefits of quick and easy installs and bug fixes I am all too happy to pester Scott into helping out. He spent half an hour on the phone with my sister the other night when she caught a virus while studying at school.

The software we are going to use on the server is really meant to communicate with computers at each TV. Instead of the satellite box that we have, we would have an actual computer. But we don’t want to do that, because we are trying to save money. So we will record the shows into a format that can be played by the Samsung TV and the Playstation. There’s a program called Myth TV which is a free Linux program that will do that for us.

We also have an eighty inch directional antenna on top of our house. SO ugly. I had rules about where he could put it so that it would bother me the least. But we got it up there, and it picks up the big stations, mainly from Santa Barbara, and connects to our server, feeding those in.

So yesterday, Scott used a mighty, mighty drilling tool and takes like hours and hours to run the HDMI cable about twenty five percent (hahaha) from the PS3 to our room. It has to run from the attic down into Ben’s room, then down from Ben’s room to the PS3. Then in another step, he will run it from the attic down into our room. So far, he dropped it down into Ben’s room and that took all day. He also cut a bigger hole where a speaker wire was already feeding through to the downstairs center, and fit it with a special panel so that he could use it for the future HDMI cable.

Before he even started he figured out that nothing in the walls lined up like he thought it would. He ran into about a foot and a half of solid wood that he hadn’t anticipated.  Solution? More holes in the walls.

Then, While trying to run the cable from the attic into our bedroom, he runs into another issue. A very… skinny wall?

Ya. Those are matching holes on each side of the wall from where Scott was laying down up in the attic. So… this is not an easy straightforward process. So far we have the PS3, downstairs, connected up to our bedroom TV. I am about to go up there and watch some Netflix right now! I’ll get back to you with the rest in another post (ahem, when he actually finishes). There are bits of attic sprinkled around (thank goodness Ben is not yet a crawler) and dust and stuff all over him and in his hair. But despite all the griping and complaining, this is what he thinks of as fun. Crazy person.

Good times.

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