Hey, it's Friday! Are we done yet?

The cabinet guy came last Friday and this Tuesday to finish up the install of the kitchen cabinet. We were able to slide the end cabinet over to the left, flush with the wall, and then put a filler strip in between the oven and the cabinet so that you can get to the handle. He also installed the filler strip on the end. He fixed the shelves in the buffet area temporarily by putting little ovankol strips around the ends of the shelves to hide the gaps. Although it looks nice if you consider the shelves on their own, it doesn't really fit with the look of the house, so we might have to go to a plan B. But it certainly looks much nicer than it did before! We have two little problems left (very small missing part of toe kick, which can only be seen (or not seen) if you are on the floor, and a drawer slide that doesn't work well). All in all, I'm very pleased that the kitchen is pretty much done!

The electricians came today and put a power outlet behind the TV so the cord won't show, and installed three-prong outlets in the upstairs guest room -- the one that never gets remodeled. (Last remodel we replaced the track lights with recessed lighting, but that was about it.) We also swapped out a test Lutron touch switch with a Lutron Maestro dimmer switch (that I already had) just to be consistent.

There are only a couple of things left for electrical: remove broken ballast from kitchen light so I can send it off for repair, install remaining undercabinet light, and install missing recessed fixtures in non-remodeled hallway (an oversight).

Furnishings...

We are slowly refurnishing the house. Prior to and during the remodel, we sold a lot of the furniture we didn't want to keep. So the house has been pretty empty, but slowly I'm filling in the missing pieces.

Back in October, I ordered bar stools from DWR which arrived over a period of several months. In November, I ordered a new Poliform dining room table from Europe-by-Net in a wood that matches the kitchen. It arrived in the beginning of April, in perfect shape. (It's also serving as my new desk!) Sadly, Europe by Net is not selling much to the US any more, most likely due to the weakness of the dollar (they did their sales in dollars, rather than in Euros or Pounds, and probably got burned badly on the currency fluctuations).

I was also able to pick up a couple of nice area rugs from a Roche-Bobois floor sample sale (so they were somewhat reasonably priced). You can see the one that Coda's perched on to the left. She certainly likes it!

I had to go to Italy in late March for a friend's wedding, and during that trip, I picked out the fabric for our sofa, having settled on the Flexform Groundpiece. Prior to the trip I had designed the layout for the sofa, so having picked out the fabric, I was able to get pricing from several stores in the US, Italy and the UK. intirium.com (in the UK) was the winner by far, although there was a lovely store in Ferrara, Italy that was a close second. My only hesitation is that I had to buy it in Euros, so now I'm the one speculating on currency. Hopefully the Euro won't change much relative to the dollar between now and the time it arrives (when I have to make the last payment). The sofa should arrive some time this summer, at which point we'll do the furniture shuffle (sofabed downstairs comes upstairs to guest room, sofa upstairs goes downstairs, and new sofa goes in living room).

Having the major pieces in hand, I bought a lovely B & B Italia accent chair yesterday from someone on craigslist, which is a nice compliment to either the old sofa or the new one. I still need to purchase dining room chairs (trying to decide between Baleri Italia mari' and Zanotta Lia), and a real entertainment unit for downstairs (to replace the $69 Ikea piece I got a few months ago). As the weather's nice, I need to get a small outdoor patio set and a BBQ (will most likely get the small Fuego, since it has a very clean design). Eventually, I want to get a bedroom set for downstairs, but for that I'll continue to monitor craigslist for a bargain. There are so many great craigslist items for sale... you just have to be patient and wait for the right thing to come along.

At some point, I should put up some artwork too. But I'm still afraid to put holes in the wall!

Finishing touches (again?)

I haven't posted for a while, and you may think that the house is done, but of course those last little finishing details take the longest time to finish.

Our remaining end cabinet + filler strips for the kitchen finally arrived a couple of weeks ago while I was out of town. Unfortunately, the cabinet was slightly damaged (again), although it looks like this time the damage is repairable. One missing trim piece fit perfectly, but the filler strip for the end of the cabinets was too wide. But most importantly, there was no room between the end cabinet (a pull-out pantry) and the adjacent set of cabinets with the ovens in them. Since the drawer/door pulls are all recessed, what to do?

The most complex (but correct) thing to do would be to slide all the cabinets over a bit to the right (heck, we've got about 6 inches of space at the end). Unfortunately, that would require moving the electrical, redoing the small backsplash next to the ovens, and overall, be a big pain. Fortunately, there is about 3/4 of an inch to move the cabinet to the left so that it's flush with the wall, and that gives us enough space. Since the end filler strip was too wide, we think we can use what we had to cut off to fill the gaps between the oven and end unit. A new (different) cabinet guy came last week and will come again on Tuesday to finish off the install.

We still have to figure out what to do about the miscut shelves in the buffet, and the cabinet guy is ruminating over that, so hopefully by Tuesday we'll at least have an answer.

On another front, the electricians are coming on Friday to finish their remaining pieces. So by next Friday, I think, I hope, I pray that we will really be done with the remodel! And then it will be on to other things, like landscaping, and finishing the furnishing (see next post on that).

Woofer on subwoofer

We're completing our home theater system, and I finally got a subwoofer (you'll see from the picture, that we've had the woofer for a while). Ordered it from Amazon on Sunday, received it today with ordinary free shipping! How's that for speedy service?

One more component to complete the setup (a matching center speaker, rather than the random bookshelf speaker I have been using). The electricians are coming on Friday to move the power outlet behind the TV (which is hanging on the wall), so that all the unsightly cords will be hidden. Something we overlooked in setting everything up. Saturday, I should have more pics, as they'll also be putting in the undercabinet lights in the kitchen, and doing a few other electrical odds n' ends that were leftover from the remodel. It should be the last electrician visit. Then, all that's left is to get the replacement kitchen cabinet, and to get the shelves in the buffet area fixed.

BTW, just in case you're wondering, the border terrier did NOT win the terrier group at Westminster yesterday. A Beagle won BiS for the first time ever, tonight! And what a cute beagle it was. But I'll stick with my woofer, and subwoofer, for now.

Is it possible to have a single remote?

Why, yes it is! My brother and his family gave us a Logitech Harmony 550 Universal Remote, to augment our setup. You can read my review on Amazon.com for details, but the upshot is, after setting it up, it allowed us to dispense with the other remotes and use it exclusively. Initial setup was easy, although I had to do some additional customization before it would operate everything in a logical way.

Having used it for a few days, I still prefer the layout of my TiVo remote, and my consider swapping it for the Harmony 670, which appears to be better suited for heavy DVR/TiVo users. But for now it solves a big problem.

Next up is to get a subwoofer and perhaps replace the center speaker with one designed for the purpose.

Home theatre setup

The home theater is mostly set up. But it took a little bit of doing, and a lot of cursing. So I'll tell you what I did to spare you some trouble if you're looking to do the same thing.

First off, I ordered my TV (a Sony 52KDLXBR4 52 inch LCD TV) from LCDTVs.com -- I just couldn't resist the name! It was far cheaper than buying it locally. I checked that it was in stock before I ordered (I called them, having been warned in advance that some sites list that the TVs are in stock and they aren't). They upsold me from free shipping (which uses a slow carrier and lands the TV at the curb) to a shipper that specializes in shipping big TVs and will take it to the door. This cost an extra $129, but the total price was still $800-$1000 less than buying it from a local store. The TV arrived about 10 days after I ordered it (or so). The shippers took the TV downstairs, where I turned it on to make sure everything was working okay. And everything was.

Oh, word of warning. When the store verifies your order, they try to upsell you to buy the extended warranty, wall mounts, and other things you might not have researched. Don't bite -- it's just not worth it.

The next step was to get our home theater guy to come hang it on the wall. He also is a dealer for Denon receivers, and we had been planning to get the receiver he recommended: the Denon 2308CI A/V receiver. Craig (Bever Electronics) and his assistant came the next day and installed the wall mount, mounted the TV on the wall, fished the wires through the wall to the outlet below, and set up and configured the receiver. I should have paid more attention to what they did with the receiver, because the Denon manual is unbelievably bad, and the remote control for the receiver is also very hard to use. (Eventually I figured it out... more on that later.)

The one thing that we didn't do during the remodel, which one of the many of us should have noticed, was to put the power outlet high on the wall so the TV power cord would be hidden by the TV. When the electrician comes for the (hopefully) last time to finish up the undercabinet lighting in the kitchen and a few other remaining things, we'll get him to move the outlet so that the TV cord isn't visible.

I moved my two TiVos downstairs, and my Slingbox (which still isn't set up again... and after a couple of weeks of fussing and cursing, I was able to get things set up to mostly use the TiVo remote to control everything. That being said, it's quite clear that I will need to buy a universal remote control (like a Harmony) to control everything the way I want it to.

Here's what I did. First, I borrowed a newer TiVo remote from a friend of mine. This TiVo remote has a 1-2 switch that allows you to tune each TiVo to a different frequency so that you can control each TiVo separately. (I wish I'd known this months ago, because it plagued me when I had them in the same room with the Slingbox.) I was also able to program the TiVo remote to control the volume on the A/V Receiver, and the power on both the A/V receiver and the TV. I set the TV up to operate like an LCD monitor (since we use the built-in speakers, not the TV speakers, and we use the tuners on the other devices, not the TV), and the only time I need the TV remote is if I want to adjust some display property of the TV.

So now, I use the TiVo remote for everything but changing the source input (TiVo 1, TiVo 2, or VHS (like I'm every going to watch a video tape again!)). I use the Denon remote for changing the source input, since I haven't yet figured out if it's possible to set the TiVo remote to do that. It turns out that I still have to use my old TiVo remote to access some functions on the built-in DVDs though. A universal remote would solve that problem. All in all, it's workable, and I think I could even explain to someone how to work it!

It would have been nice to just be able to buy an LCD monitor rather than a TV. Given that we have an A/V receiver, and built-in speakers, a lot of the functionality on the TV we just don't need or use, so we've paid for functionality we're not using.

The quality of the display is good, but I can't help thinking how much better it would be with real HD input (this is the danger in buying a new HD TV). So, come the beginning of the year, I'll "trade" one of my TiVos in for an HD TiVo. And later in the year, once the HD DVD formats settle down (if they do), I'll probably buy a separate HD DVD with HDMI outputs that will output true 1080p resolution. Finally, I will need a universal remote. But I will wait on all these things until after the holidays, as the setup I have now is quite workable.

It would be nice, however, to have some place to sit downstairs, so since the upstairs sofa appears to be months off (at which point the sofa upstairs will move downstairs), I will need to figure something else out, as sitting on the floor or in a hard-backed chair just isn't cutting it! Beanbag chairs are my current thought... other ideas?

Pods be gone!

Major milestone! We came home and the pods were no longer there. (And yes, we meant to do that.) Slowly but surely, the last vestiges of remodeling are fading away. Next up: clean out the garage and move the remaining furniture back into the house. Maybe we'll try to move the piano back into the living room this week!