office – Rõika 15

Garage, party preparation and more

While cleaning up the attic of the garage we came across the upper shelves of the old kitchen. It made sense to hang them in the garage kitchen so we have more useful space and more unity.

In between I made a few holders for the french cleat wall and I arranged a bench for the home gym, which starts to look more complete.

November is also the month Mo has her birthday. As long as I know here she never celebrated it much but this year she planned a real party in combination with an exhibition of some of her art. The art rails really showed their purpose and even the bathroom was brightened up with a fitting work.
This also was a good excuse to refit the kitchen sink and finally move my standing desk and office chair from Mo’s studio to my office. This involved building up scaffolding so we could move it in there through the window.
For the party I spend a day in the kitchen making beautiful and tasty snacks for the party, which gave me nice memories to the time I worked in the big kitchen of Amsterdam Rai.

We also visited Mo’s mother, who had an issue with a toilet pot that was leaking. It turned out to be an easy fix by replacing the bold that connects the water reservoir and the pot.

Second layer and garage cleanup

The 3D-printer was standing on the floor in my office. That had to change, online I saw a lot of people use Ikea’s Lack table to put it on and there are plenty of little hacks you can print for it as well. So of to Ikea.

While there I found the Hornvallmo blackout curtains, which would likely be a good solution for the bedroom, as the support rails guide it nicely next to the glass so no movement through a draft and to be opened from the top and/or the bottom. At home I measured and we decided we should take them on a next trip to Ikea.

The second layer of paint on the house took way less effort. It was a joy to paint and the result was amazing. It seems 2 layers will be enough.

Toward the end of the month Marc had ordered an olympic barbell and 177,5 kg of weights. I had seen a squatting and bench press rack on the Wise marked place and after consulting with Mo, we decided this would be nice birthday present for the boys, as it is always hard to find something for them. But where to place the rack…

A good reason to clean up the garage and create a little gym area in the back. For now we put a leftover piece of linoleum, but I guess at some point some rubber mats would be better.

Wall and floor work at the office

The good thing about such a project week, is that it motivates again to pick up the bigger projects. So I continued on the attic which will be my office.

Finishing the inside of the Velux window is another one of those big changes.
There was still one piece of floor board that needed to be placed, but since I wanted to organize the heating pipes a bit better, as there is a difference between pipes on an attic and in an office, I had postponed that.

It was great to see the improvement of the organization. All nicely next to each other, it looked nice and neat. Although I did think I should make a box around it, both for insulation and so I could easier put a cabinet on top.

Next up was the outside wall. Building a frame, putting plaster board against it and finishing off around the window. Very rewarding. Yet after that I did not do anything worth mentioning until the end of March.

Office floor and helping friends

February is always a short month with 2 weekends already occupied. So basically I just finished the floor in the future office. Besides I helped Glenn and Anton with their kitchen which now is finished. A great metamorphosis with lots more useful space.

Floor in the office and HA glow

Meanwhile my future office needed to get a floor. Marc and Rika would be coming over and if I wanted to work from home it would be more convenient if I had my own space to sit. With a few square meters of floor it was already turning into a real room. Before I could put in the rest of the floor I had to replace part of a beam, which I had prepared already a few months ago.
It was a fun project and with the help of the high lift jack, I moved the beam back into the right position before I glued the new part in. Another very rewarding project.

The next weekend a part came in that I needed for my Home Assistant Glow project to be able to read the LED-pulses. Putting the right software on an ESP board went pretty straight forward and quick enough I had my first measurements coming in. The next day I adjusted the pot-meter and then precise measurements flowed into Home Assistant. Very nice to see different heavy users like the kettle, hub and oven show their own specific graphs.

Electrical jobs and start of an office

To be able to deliver power to the grid, our electricity meter needed to be changed and the power company wanted to place an additional switch on the pole to be able to disconnect the house from the grid. To my surprise they requested to do this on Saturday. Another moment of looking at professionals doing their work.
The guy that replaced the meter said something about the old wires going to the meter, so I asked if that shouldn’t be replaced. He agreed but told me it was my responsibility. Which seemed weird to me as back in the Netherlands everything before the meter is the responsibility of the power company, so I double checked this and it turned out the wire from where the main wire reaches the house to the meter would be my responsibility. I discussed this with Henk and he said this should be 4 x 10 mm^2, which turned out to be some very expensive wire. Luckily I remembered about some large wires I had found a couple of years ago when I was cleaning up the garage and I was in luck. So I prepared this wire between the meter closet and the connection point, ready to be connected.
My new meter is a Landis & Gyr E360, which in other countries has a P1 port for local polling, but unfortunately not in Estonia. I inquired with Elektrilevi but this was not offered, so I started preparing for a backup plan and ordered some parts for the Home Assistant Glow from AliExpress.

On the attic above the bathroom was a nice place for the inverter, so I started to prepare the wall there with plaster plate. This improved the look and feel of the old attic so much that the idea came up to fully renovate the attic and make it my office. So I started covering the inside of the roof with plaster plate. I took out part of the floor to get all of it upstairs.

Last year we bought a few bags of potatoes for the winter, but the garage gets below zero, so the potatoes freeze and get inedible. So for the upcoming season I build an isolated box to prevent this from some left over polystyrene plates.

For a change the heater has some issues again. The main augur did not work anymore. I am getting to familiar with this heater as I had found the cause of the issue within a few minutes. I took out the engine and opened it up. It turned out the gears in the reduction gearbox had totally worn out. Luckily I have good contact with Pelltech and I was able to replace the augur engine quickly.

In the side garden has been a dead tree for some time already and I thought it would be good to take it out before winter. The trailer was on its way to the Netherlands and the wood storage was getting pretty empty. Marc helped out. We took it down in two parts and then cut it in 30 cm pieces, split it and pilled it up. We tried it in the sauna, but even though the tree had been dead for years and didn’t even have a crown anymore, it was still pretty wet, so I guess we’ll first start using the apple tree wood.