Recently Jane Dagmi, a writer for Bob Vila, found me on Twitter and began to follow the restoration process of my Victorian house. She approached me along with 3 other DIY renovation bloggers to write about our workshops and our restoration process. It was an honor and the first interview I’ve ever done like this. I hope you enjoy it.
Since then, I have also syndicated my house blog content onto Bob Vila’s crowd-sourced blog for do-it-yourselfers. Check out Bob Vila Nation for a look at what other DIY’ers like myself are building.
For the past nine days my father and I, with the help of my house mate and other friends, built a victorian library in my double parlor. It is built entirely of red oak and stained a dark walnut color to match the banister we built two summers ago. This has been a long time dream of mine even before we had this house and now it’s finally complete. We still have a little bit of decorating left to do but its ready to be lived in.
During the build process I blogged daily and uploaded as many photos as I could. If you’d like to see what it took check out the victorian library posts on sanfranvic.com.
Every shop needs a good workbench and its about time I built myself one. I sourced most of the parts locally from the $75 solid maple butcher block top to the $40 shelves with drawers I got at a local salvage yard. The only things I bought new were the three Rockler vises which I have yet to install. The picture above is of everything all mocked up.
I have assembled the bottom section out of 4×4′s and 2×4′s secured with long galvanized deck screws. The base frame itself is 45″ long and 23″ deep. The butcher block will overhang 3″ on the front and back, and 12″ and 18″ respectively on the left and right. This will accommodate the vice setup I will be installing but I will post more on that when its complete. For now, you can see more pictures by clicking on the image above.
This week my father flew to San Francisco to help me, and teach me, to build a banister and repair a staircase. We tore down the wall that used to be there, replaced all the treads, and put in a matching banister and railing that we copied from the upstairs banister. For the past five days of the build I have been blogging over on SanFranVic.com where you can follow the story and see all the photos.
Since space is always at a premium, especially in my kitchen, its important to use every inch as best as possible. Instead of having two separate trash bins it made more sense to combine them into one piece of furniture and gain table top space. So I searched the internet to find something that would fit but unfortunately nothing came up. So it was off to the shop to solve the problem.
With the help of my roommate, we built this trash and recycling center out of maple plywood using simple dowel joinery. We finished it in a cabernet color and added some simple hardware like magnetic latches and handles from our local hardware store. All in all the project only took a few hours total and solved a big problem.
My long time friend Caroline and her fiance Regan asked my housemate Brian and I to do the lighting for their wedding because they had seen our renovation work on sanfranvic.com. We were both honored and excited to help out. Not only did it save them thousands of dollars from hiring a lighting expert it allowed us to give them something they will always remember.
The light array was pretty simple and only took a few hours to setup. We hung up five strands of 32 foot strings of ping pong ball lights from the reception house to a rope 10 feet up that we ran parallel to the house. That rope was held up by two pieces of 10′ galvanized steel conduit that was anchored to the ground with a few pieces of rope and some stakes. The hard part was just getting the lights up and taught so they were high above everyones head. I’m happy to say that even after the storm that came through they still stayed up and everything went off without a hitch.
I’d like to thank Caroline and Regan for having me and I was honored to be a part of your wedding. I was happy to help and even happier to give you a present that you’ll always remember and cant be returned. It was a great time and something I wont soon forget.
Its always been my dream to have an automated house and the first step is hardwired Ethernet. Whether you are going to be running video over Ethernet, VoIP, or just the good old Internet you really just cant beat copper. Although wireless has come a long way since 802.11b it will just never keep up. Besides the fact that copper performs flawlessly and extremely fast, there are no reliability issues that you inevitably run into while using on WiFi. If anyone out there reading has found a perfect WiFi Access Point that can run at gigabit speeds for hours at a time with 5 – 10 devices on it please let me know. It would have saved me a lot of trouble!
In true geek blogging obsession/narcissism, I have decided to blog the restoration of my 1890 San Francisco Victorian home at www.sanfranvic.com. Its going to be a long journey and I’ve decided to document it for my friends, family, and any future owner of the house.
It should be interesting to learn what goes into an old house like this one, where it came from, and where its going. Although I have a lot of experience engineering and building many many things, this is my first home restoration. So follow along with me, learn from my mistakes, and try not to yourself like I am going to. Enjoy!
One of the most simple and useful things I have made in my shop so far is this crosscutting jig. It is perfect for when your chop saw just doesn’t reach far enough to cut a big piece of wood. Also, I have much nicer blades for my table saw then I do for my chop saw. Either way, it is a quintessential jig to have in your shop.
I made this one with some scrap wood I had lying around the shop in a matter of an hour or so. The base is made from birch veneered plywood and the rails are made from oak. I bought the T-tracks to guide the sled from Rockler, my new favorite store. Other than that, there’s not much to it. I decided to use dowels to hold it all together but screws or any other type of joinery would work just as well.
The most important part is getting it square obviously. What I did was made the base perfectly square, measured the distance between the tracks on my saw, then attached the tracks to the sled. Then I clamped the jig the saw, turned on the blade and raised it up through the wood. Now with my T-square I am able to line up the pieces that hold the wood perpendicular to the blade. Thats all there is to it. This design is very simple and straightforward but if you browse around the web you will find all sort of different designs, additions, and safety additions.
For years I have been trying to create a Media Center to attach my TV. I’ve tried Windows Media Center years ago, Myth TV on Linux, and everything in between. Nothing was simple, cheap, and easy to setup. I have friends who have tried those off the shelf media boxes like the ones from Netgear and the likes, but those have their pitfalls too. I wanted something open source, truly hackable, and preferably something Unix/Linux based. Thats why I turned to the Apple TV.
For my use case, I did not care about disk storage. I am using my Apple TV’s as terminals or endpoints to play media from storage somewhere else on the network. This allowed me to buy the cheap version of the Apple TV with a 40 GB drive for about $220. Not only that, there is a Toslink (optical) out that I will be attaching to a DAC and set of vintage tubes for crisp beautiful sound. For that kinda money, its pretty hard to beat the Apple TV.
Once in my possession, I immediately hacked it to expand its functionality. Without it, the Apple TV is actually pretty restricted and an overall weak product; however, Boxee helps make it all better. Boxee allows you to watch all those formats that iTunes does not support, like DivX, etc. Not only that, it allows you watch Hulu as well as other online video services.
Hacking your Apple TV and Installing Boxee
There’s actually nothing to do really and I would barely consider it hacking. A few folks out there have made it quite easy. In a nutshell, all you need to do is create a ‘patchstick’ on your PC using a thumb drive you have laying around. You insert it into your Apple TV’s USB drive, restart it, and voila! It installs itself and you’re all set. You can get the USB Patch Stick creator from the Google code repository.
Recently Jane Dagmi, a writer for Bob Vila, found me on Twitter and began to follow the restoration process of my Victorian house. She approached me along with 3 other DIY renovation bloggers to write about our workshops and our restoration process. It was an honor and the first interview I’ve ever done like this. I hope you enjoy it.
