Jun, 2016
(Looked in Sent mail, searched for name)
Yeah, I figured it was a while ago. Got the quote and I can get the whole thing done from breaker to breaker for $2,300. Including the upgrade to a 200 amp breaker in the house.
Well, you have had a thing or two come up in your personal arena. Itāll be great when you get it done, though.
Buyer/seller contract signed by both parties.
Now we wait for the seller to deposit the money into our account.
And in the meantime weāve been putting stuff into boxes and getting ready for the relocation.
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One of the changes thatās come about from COVID-19 shutting things down is the rule of āLocation, location, locationā is out the door. And all those houses with open floor plans? Now people want individual rooms so they can have their online meetings in private.
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Iāve seen at least two companies marketing solutions for, essentially, āOccupiedā lights for home office and such due tot he current crisis. I actually like this company, Joan, who have a neat product for regular offices. They did a pretty fast pivot to release their āhomeā version which isnāt cheap ($250) but should be pretty capable.
They basically do eInk displays. The idea is theyāre easy to install (wall bracket, wifi & battery so no cabling needed) and their back-end is supposedly not terrible. (Iām not confident about the last partā¦) Since theyāre eInk you charge them overnight every couple months and theyāre good to go. If you donāt see them updating they probably look like static room signage.
The Home model is a bit expensive and I donāt have a home office with a door: My wife and I have to negotiate if she is home and wants to work on jewelry in the basement, for exampleā¦ And running laundry can be a pain. But it works. I wouldnāt mind something like the Joan if I had a true home office.
I know a former coworker who is spending the weekending converting a shed into a āhome officeā for his college-age daughter. Putting in insulation and such so she can work in all weather in a distraction-free space.
Itās amazing to me how home requirements drift over time.
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Why does a status board need a back-end hosted outside my house in the first place? Does the product become useless when the company goes under and their hosted back-end disappears?
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Iām honestly not sure what these need. I think it may support direct updates from a WiFi device, but I canāt say either way. If you pop for the $250 let me know.
I could build something similar-ish from a Raspberry Pi and eInk display, but it might not be as integrated.
Iāll try to track down a YT vid of a guy who made a smart mirror that syncs with his computer, or maybe itās just a one-way mirror over a monitor. I canāt remember.
Pi4 touchscreen:
Much the same:
Either of these could be redone to only output the calendar data or something else useful. Of course, it wouldnāt be as cheap, likely. It all depends on what you want.
Itās still location, location, location, itās just that where your office is become less relevant. Now you can have your kid in that school you always wanted them in, or be in the middle of X environment, or have Y amount of land. And soon youāll be able to afford an entire floor in an apartment building.
Itās Blade Runner, but instead of moving to the colonies everyone is moving to the boonies. Like Heinlein said, all you need is proximity to a college town to get most of the good parts of civilization.
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We joke about moving to AZ and just banking on work not needing me back in the office before I go overseas in the spring. Thereās a pretty good chance, actually.
I bought a cost to build report on the house that I want. Looks like Iām still going to have a mortgage after all. It will be worth it to build my dream home, though.
Buyer paid 60% on our property. She will arrange for the final 40% to be paid soon.
Oops, things reallyās going fast this side.
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The hits just keep coming this year. First it was the dryer seizing up (luckily was was a relatively easy fix when we had a guy come out and next time, Iāll know what parts to buy & install myself). Then the water heater quit. Then the fridge.
Then last week, the washing machine overflowed. The pressure switch that detects that the tub is full didnāt trip so it kept filling. Itās happened before, itās a dead-simple fix that takes maybe 15 minutes. As long as you catch it before it goes too far. Which didnāt happen. But thatās OK, weāve got a pan underneath it to catch the water. Exceptā¦that overflowed too. By the time we discovered what was going on, the water overflowed the tub, then the catch pan, and had worked its way into the HVAC duct that comes up through the floor.
Luckily, the water found its way out through the duct seams in the basement and didnāt get to the main furnace unit. So we just had a half-dozen places to put buckets, coolers, and whatever else we could find to catch the 6+ gallons of water as it drained out over the course of probably 12 hours.
Iām not convinced that everything drained out. But weāve been running the fan for probably 20 hours a day, and the A/C when itās been warm enough to warrant, so hopefully things are dried out inside. Up next: getting a professional duct cleaning and sanitization. The quote I got today was for just short of a kilobuck, so I need to get a second opinion before going ahead with it.
You need your ducts cleaned? Really? I have a few numbers you can try.
Hindsight being 20/20 and allā¦
They make a shutoff valve tied to a water sensor just for that.
Dunno if it would be worth the dough at this stage, but maybeā¦
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The reviews on that thing are pretty rough. For now, weāre just going to be a lot more attentive when running the washer, and I have a recurring monthly reminder to clean out the plumbing that trips the water level sensor.
So, regarding our property, we had two buyers. First buyer had to get a loan at the bank, but was willing to give us 100%. Second buyer was a cash buyer, but tried to quibble on the price.
Nevertheless, we went with the first, because money.
Second buyer was in the area today to view a property in the market, wife says sheās pissed at us for not selling the property to us.
Well, if she offered 100% of our asking price and did not quibble then she wouldāve got itā¦
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I can understand why she offered less. A cash offer is usually more valuable than one contingent on finance, because you are screwed if finance falls through.
However, getting pissy because someone else didnāt see it that way is just stupid.
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If youāre in a hurry, I could see that being the mentality. But if it falls through, theyāre screwed, not me - in Ookās case, it seems like he got a couple offers pretty quickly, so it likely would not take too long to get another if he had to reactivate the listing.
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