Home Handyman

Just finished putting up wainscot in my dining room, replacing the wallpaper that was in the space between the bottom molding and the chair rail. Very nice looking, but I discovered a couple of very frustrating things about the room...

1. The construction isn't all completely level, leading to 1/4" measurement differences between, say, one end of a panel and the other when it's cut in a straight line

2. When I replaced the crappy, paint-stained outlets with new ones, I discovered that most of the outlets in the room were wired backwards. Now I've gotta go through the rest of the house to try to figure out what else is wired wrong.

that's okay, just plug everything in upside down.

My understanding of those I-joists, or I-beams, is that the vertical structure is a laminated material, so even though it looks like plywood or particle board on the outside, there are many layers all glued and compressed together to increase stress and strain resistance.

The horizontal pieces are probably to help spread the load as well as provide a platform for fasteners.

Disclaimer: I'm a computer engineer, not a mechancial engineer.
Laminated Binder

I can name one thing wired wrong...

AC saga came to an end. I got some quotes on equipment only and it was pretty high, as expected. I elected to hire a guy to put in a Tempstar system. It came online Friday and has been working great. The installed price was within 1200 of what I could get equipment for and with Obama buying 1500 of it and the Texas no sales tax weekend on energystar equipment it just wasn't worth it. Total installed price was $5,300 and when you take off 1500 and don't add any sales tax 5300
You get 3,800 for an installed 15 SEER heat pump. Not bad.

That's not bad at all. At some point you can't afford *not* to do it. :)

When I can save up enough cash, I really want to get the upstairs system in my house broken up into separate zones.

Some background: I own a two-story house with a big two-story great room in the middle. The house has two separate HVAC systems: one for downstairs and one for upstairs. However, the upstairs system has only one return register that sits in the ceiling of a hallway right next to the great room. What happens is that all the warm air in the house gets displaced upstairs, which then causes the upstairs system to start cooling. Almost all the cooling goes into the bedrooms, though, and if the doors are closed, those rooms get really cold really fast. Since the thermostat is right next to the return register, though, it keeps reading the warm air coming up from downstairs.

Moving the thermostat into one of the bedrooms would help fix the getting-too-cool problem, but I'd be concerned that doing that would prevent the upstairs system from cooling enough to help the downstairs unit. Zoning the upstairs would fix the bedrooms but also allow the hallway to get cooled down properly, too.
Zone Binder

go redneck. Go buy some flexible tubing and run it from your bedroom and have the other end sit over (covering) the thermostat.
$15 at home depot and some duct tape.

"Brazil" is one of my favorite movies, and trust me, I've thought about taking some ideas from there for decor. The big problem is that I'd be the only one living here. :P

One idea I've looked at as an interim solution is a wireless thermostat.
The control panel and sensor can be anywhere in the house, and sends a wireless signal to the base where it connects to the HVAC system via the normal wiring.
That would let me "move' the thermostat into the master bedroom without having to tear up walls rerouting the HVAC control wires. Last I looked, though, there were only a few companies making wireless thermostats, and they seemed more interested in selling entire systems instead of just a single thermostat.

Another idea I've had is to put in transfer registers over each bedroom door.
This would hopefully allow a better circulation pattern, but then I have more vents that may make things look ugly.

Ahh, the challenges of being a homeowner!
HVAC Binder

Dude, it's your house, open up the walls and run some cable. It's always a good idea.

Honeywell and I believe Lux as well makes thermostats with secondary and tertiary thermometers which could help a lot.

Heh. Somehow I don't think "prop up, nail together and continue until no longer wobbly" would meet most building codes :)

Well, that's sort of the point -- they are obviously a couple of filthy hippies
:)

The problem with this sort of construction is that it doesn't scale. One family can build that kind of house using materials gathered from a walk through the woods, and they even said that all of the high-tech stuff like windows and wiring were gathered "from a rubbish pile somewhere." One family can do that. Ten thousand families can't. That is the VERY REASON why mass production exists.

I think it's great that they did it. I think it's stupid that they're promoting it as a lifestyle they think everyone should pursue, even going as far as to indicate some mild scorn towards those of us who don't.