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Still fixing house problems as they turn up. Last week I fixed a long-simmering annoyance: the new bamboo flooring in the living room had started to warp into shallow waves. The floor boards are glued together but "float" on the underlying pad, so it acts as one large sheet of wood free to move within the constraints of the edging and baseboards. At first the waves were just in one spot, but by May it was three areas. This was actually reassuring since it confirmed my guess that not enough expansion space had been allowed in one direction, rather than the alternate (and much scarier) theory that the heating system was leaking water up through the concrete slab. Apparently the strangely damp spring allowed the boards to take up more moisture than they had the previous year, and so they widened more than they ever had before.
After a month of trying to get the installer out to look at it, I gave up and did it myself. The installer was imagining disastrous amounts of work, while I was imagining a two-hour job of trimming the edge and putting in wider baseboard, but even though I said I'd be happy to pay him for the fix, he wanted to bring in the store and the supplier for a meeting, as if the flooring had failed and some partition of liability would be necessary. But I could see there had been no failure, just an odd choice to run the floorboards along the short side and probably an error in not allowing even enough expansion space for the usual installation with boards parallel to the long side of the room. No one really to blame, and easily fixable.
I bought an expensive little Makita circular saw (one of the few that would allow a thin cut close to a wall) and tackled it. A tough few hours of work followed, then I replaced the old mahogany baseboard, and added a small additional width of new fir baseboard (about 3/8") stained to almost match. The result looks good. The waves largely corrected themselves in an hour, and the last remnants have disappeared under the weight of strategically-placed furniture.
This week I replaced the sprinkler system controller. The old mechanical one is a wonder: it uses a clock wheel with a toothed edge segment to turn a wheel that switches on each segment of the system in turn, and another small wheel is advanced one day every time the clock wheel goes around to control whether watering will occur that day. It was starting to be unreliable, though, sometimes watering on a day when it wasn't supposed to and sometimes allowing the last segment to run for hours. So after several years of fiddling with corrections (like tiny shims made of 1x1mm pieces of cello tape to make up for wear on an actuator switch) I replaced it with a solid-state device. Fortunately these systems are standardized at 25VAC and all I had to do was swap and splice a few wires, and it worked fine first try.
Other things are going on, of course. We're getting ready for a visit from my mother in a week, and then Convention at the end of the month. Much remains to be done in storing Paul's stuff and cleaning up disorganized spaces. I don't know when I will be able to get back to "work" (on those long-term, adding-to-the-noosphere projects) or when I'll have more time to scribble here.
After a month of trying to get the installer out to look at it, I gave up and did it myself. The installer was imagining disastrous amounts of work, while I was imagining a two-hour job of trimming the edge and putting in wider baseboard, but even though I said I'd be happy to pay him for the fix, he wanted to bring in the store and the supplier for a meeting, as if the flooring had failed and some partition of liability would be necessary. But I could see there had been no failure, just an odd choice to run the floorboards along the short side and probably an error in not allowing even enough expansion space for the usual installation with boards parallel to the long side of the room. No one really to blame, and easily fixable.
I bought an expensive little Makita circular saw (one of the few that would allow a thin cut close to a wall) and tackled it. A tough few hours of work followed, then I replaced the old mahogany baseboard, and added a small additional width of new fir baseboard (about 3/8") stained to almost match. The result looks good. The waves largely corrected themselves in an hour, and the last remnants have disappeared under the weight of strategically-placed furniture.
This week I replaced the sprinkler system controller. The old mechanical one is a wonder: it uses a clock wheel with a toothed edge segment to turn a wheel that switches on each segment of the system in turn, and another small wheel is advanced one day every time the clock wheel goes around to control whether watering will occur that day. It was starting to be unreliable, though, sometimes watering on a day when it wasn't supposed to and sometimes allowing the last segment to run for hours. So after several years of fiddling with corrections (like tiny shims made of 1x1mm pieces of cello tape to make up for wear on an actuator switch) I replaced it with a solid-state device. Fortunately these systems are standardized at 25VAC and all I had to do was swap and splice a few wires, and it worked fine first try.
Other things are going on, of course. We're getting ready for a visit from my mother in a week, and then Convention at the end of the month. Much remains to be done in storing Paul's stuff and cleaning up disorganized spaces. I don't know when I will be able to get back to "work" (on those long-term, adding-to-the-noosphere projects) or when I'll have more time to scribble here.
