Buying a house!

Jenny and I are in escrow on a new 1988 vintage house! As mentioned in my super fun Home AC Service post, we're in the inspection period. Neither of us can wait to close on it and get moved in! Here are some pics:

Here she is. The grass isn't looking quite as nice as it was the day these pictures were taken, but still pretty good. Can't wait to take the sign down.

Yeah, that's a 3 car garage and a RV gate!

Not a huge fan of the flooring, the wood is a little light and the carpet is a little dark, but it'll work. The paint on the other hand, has to go.

Should be fun painting the walls with the vaulted ceilings. We're debating scraping the popcorn from the ceilings while we're at it.

My TV room! Perfect shape and nice size. Can't wait to fill it up.

Appliances still in place, and look, nice ceiling fans! Corian counter tops, nice looking layout, and my favorite, maple cabinets. Hooray, not ugly!

We were hoping the house we bought would have gas, so it'll take some getting used to the electric stove, at least it looks good.

Ahh, the wonderful crap collection counter, where everything without a place goes.

Hidden buttons on the dishwasher. Now Blake won't start it when it's empty, stop it when it's full and change all the settings every day (or at least until he figures out how to open it)

Looking from the master bedroom, across the entryway and into the TV room. That closet on the right is under the stairs and unfinished inside, super cool.

That's the same cool closet with a view into the master bath.

This is where I will be brushing my teeth. Maybe I'll even get my own sink so I can have one free from toothpaste :-D.

Looking down the stairs, not a bad view, hopefully the bars for the banister will keep the kids on the stairs when they tumble down!

Another shot of the kitchen looking into the TV room. Not sure what to do with the niche, the girls think our hamster Spotty should reside there.

Hrm, a little tuscany in my house? I've never been a big fan of those types of sinks, but the faucet got me hooked, watching water fall over the spillway on the faucet and imagining wier calculations in my head.

The upstairs bathroom. Sure to be the subject of time sharing issues when the girls get older.

The back porch and view of grassy area. Wow, the grass is still alive, I'm sure to fix that problem with my greenish thumb!

The piece de resistance, the saltwater diving pool, diving board and all. I've been hoping for *a* pool, and a few houses we bid on actually had diving pools, but saltwater? Am I dreaming?

Funny rocky area. That's the 3rd bay of the garage sticking out (or, in it's present state, studio apartment). Not sure what to do with this area, more grass, garden, ash tree. We're going to have to do something to shade that wall from the afternoon sun.

That's the play area in the back. Nice slide and swing set. I think it is about a year and a half old but looks like the sprinklers are taking their toll.

Overall the house is excellent. The upgrades are very nice (hello ceiling fans) and for the most part in line with what I would have liked to do myself. I think the most disconcerting thing about the house is that the previous homeowners were unable to keep it. They did a lot of very nice things to the house, and must have been good people because unlike many of the foreclosures we have seen they kept the interior of the house in excellent condition. A few homes we have looked at were completely trashed and/or stripped by the previous owners. Hopefully they will be able to find an equally nice house when they are ready to purchase again, I know the pain of moving from a nice house into less than ideal conditions. I'm happy to finally be moving back into a nice house, it's been ages! :-D

I can't get no satisfaction Part 3: Home AC Service

So Jenny and I made an offer (and it was accepted) on a house recently. At the time of the offer, there were no thermostats in the house so we were unable to check the AC units functionality. This wasn't a big deal I thought, I can wire those up without much hassle, so off to the Home Depot to pick up a couple programmable thermostats so I could check out the AC units during the inspection period and not have to wait for the bank to get it done. (As a side note, we've made many offers and this is the first one accepted, we're trying to get it done as smoothly and quickly as possible so didn't want to go back to the bank to install them).

I had no luck on the install. The wires weren't labeled and I couldn't figure them out when I looked in the units on the roof. We were having an AC tech come out and evaluate the units, and had no idea how much we were about to get raped. I attached my letter to the company, I think it explains it all well enough:

Hi Susan,

Yesterday Rafael came out to a house I am in the process of purchasing to evaluate the 2 AC units and install thermostats for both of them. The service went find and I think Rafael did a good job of determining the state of the units and letting me know what needed repair on them.

While at the house he also installed thermostats for both units, a pretty minor job by most accounts. When my wife called, she was unable to get an estimate on the installation of these as it can vary depending on the thermostat the tech has on hand, or that was the reason she was given. Despite this, we decided to go ahead and have Mears AC install them anyway, as Thermostats typically range from $30 to $50 and take 15 minutes or so to install. Were we ever wrong in our assumptions on cost, or more precisely, how Mears would bills us for the costs. Rafael installed two Honeywell Pro 5000 thermostats at a cost of $188.46 each. When doing research online I found that this is typically a $50 thermostat, the most expensive I could find it for was $80.

As a customer, I don't like to have to shop around and when I find a company that provides good service at a fair price I stick with them. I also have no problem paying more to get better service, and don't have a problem with that. I do however, know when I am being taken advantage of and will not return to a company that participates in those types of practices.

With new parts for the existing AC units needed within the next few months I was disappointed with the extremely high markup on the thermostats, as now I will have to get another estimate on the repairs to determine if the cost provided was reasonable. My wife and I had also budgeted to replace both units within the first year of living at the house, and what could have been a certain sale for Mears is now almost entirely out of the question.

And that's about that. I shall wait for their response, should they have one. If I don't hear anything I'll find out who owns the place and make sure they hear my venting :-|.

I can't get no satisfaction (Update: maybe some satisfaction) Part 2: Steering Parts

Update: I took my car back to Big O and had a talk with the manager who was very helpful and got my boots all fixed up for me. He apologized for the inconvenience and gave me a free oil change for my troubles. Car is fixed, hooray! Perhaps I am getting some satisfaction :-).

Now on to my wife's car, lots of fun times there. The CV Halfshaft boots have been torn for a while, and the tires wearing unevenly in addition to some leaks from somewhere under the hood. I knew it would need some steering stuff replaced before an alignment could be done so I had her take it to Big O Tires for an assessment. They told us the passenger side inner tie rod needed replacement, when I got it home and had a look it certainly did need replacement, as it was pretty loose and popped back and forth when pulled on. I figured I would replace that along with the cv halfshafts and whatever was leaking all at once, so pulled everything apart to get it done.

As it was late and I needed a trip to the store to continue, I figured I would have a look at the EGR system as it was causing the engine to throw codes. So Jenny got in the car and started it up while I tested the vacuum solenoids, egr valve, etc under the hood. As I'm playing with this I hear the power steering pump start to whine...Blake had cranked the steering wheel all the way to one side and kept pulling! Well, lucky me, with the outer tie rod ends disconnected from the steering knuckles, the rack in the the rack and pinion steering overextended and the whole thing started pumping power steering fluid everywhere.

With the cost of seals and boots for the halfshaft being about what it would cost to get a reman unit online, I figured Jenny could drive the truck for a week while we waited for the part. We got the pretty new rack and pinion in about a week and I put it back in with a few hours work, I put on the outer tie rod ends and was pretty happy with my work, everything looked nice.

Everything seemed to go well. Jenny got the alignment done, a transmission flush (it was pretty dirty) and a set of new front tires. I was happy to not have to worry about the car anymore and she was happy knowing she isn't likely to get a flat from the worn-down-to-the-steel-belts front tire.

Then I got home. Being the loving vehicle owner that I am, I wanted to go have a look at the tie rods and see how far off I was in my alignment guess and notice this:


A Twisted boot! So I had put on a reman rack and pinion with brand new boots and they twisted them! I was not happy. So I jack up the car, take of the tire and proceed to straiten the boot. I put a zip tie on it for good measure when I was done, though it didn't really need it:



On to the next side, I could see it was also twisted when I glanced at it but didn't realize the full extent of the problem:


A TORN boot! Now I'm angry! I was willing to accept their poor service, straiten the boots and take my car somewhere else for any service next time, but this is too much. They tore my brand new beautiful boots! Now I have to take it back and hope they play nice on fixing their screwup, oh how I wish I could have done the alignment myself! This is why I do all my own work!

I'll post an update later with the results of my attempt to get it fixed.

I can't get no satisfaction Part 1: AC Parts

So I've had a nasty string of bad luck with service or mix ups with advertisements lately that has reminded me why I do most of my own maintenance and repairs.

I'm working on redoing the AC system on my truck as the accumulator I got from Autozone had a leak (I didn't notice until out of warranty). Being that it was an older system I figured I would just go ahead and replace everything: accumulator, evaporator, compressor, condenser and orifice tube. Most of those are pretty easy to come by in the form they should be, except the condenser. I have the parallel flow condenser, and wanted to replace it with one, but all that the local auto stores stock are tube and fin or piccolo type condensers, both of which are older designs that don't dissipate heat as effectively as parallel flow. After much searching, I found a parallel flow condenser from Rock Auto that was made by Spectra Premium (part 74579 for any interested). I was excited when it arrived, and opened it up to have a look at it. I was very dissapointed to find a picollo style condenser in the Spectra Premium box. The part number on the supposedly Spectra Premium was 3152, the number for the Visteon picollo condenser. Through no fault of RockAuto.com, Spectra is repackaging Visteon's older style condenser's as their own. So I packaged it back up and back to RockAuto it went. The refund went fine, have to find the condenser somewhere else.

Next item, a Mastercool vacuum pump 90059 from AcKits.com, for the same truck project. This was advertised as a 50 micron vacuum pump with 10oz oil capacity. When it arrived I could see that it was a 100 micron pump with 6oz oil capacity. When I called AcKits.com they corrected their website and offered to refund my money on the vacuum pump, but I was happy with their response so decided to keep it.

So far, not too bad, just some mix ups that weren't too tough to remedy.

PIC 16F628A based POV toy

I can't remember where I got turned on to the idea in the first place, I likely was linked to Ladyada's bike POV from Hackaday or something. I figured it would be a nice introduction to working with the microcontrollers, maybe lead into more interesting and hopefully more difficult projects (it hasn't yet). Have a better idea of something fun to make with a microcontroller? Let me know :-).
Using the educational version of the Microchip C compiler (C18). While it would have been easy to do such a small project in Assembly, I don't have much interest in machine level code and prefer the readability of C.
I have never been much of a hardware guy. I can do Ohm's law, parallel and series circuits and at one point could do capacitance charge and discharge calculations, but that has left me. So I try to stick with the basics. Run the power to the PIC, use it to turn on and off the LEDs. Just need a small battery pack, a resistor and a handful of LEDs.
So here it is set up in my breadboard, seems to be working OK.

And in this picture I have it set up in its final form, blinking away. That little jumpered header is the on off switch for it. Crude but functional.

And here it is attempting to work. I made the mistake of using cheap LEDs that I had laying around to make this. I think they have a 10 degree viewing angle or something crappy like that. Wide viewing angle LEDs would have made it look better, though my timing still wasn't perfect with it.

You can make out most of my name. I have it attached to a bike wheel and am spinning at different rates. I was considering making a longer strip of LEDs and attaching it to my car wheel or something, but that would have required a Hall effect sensor to test timing and I just didn't feel that ambitious at the time.

The code is pretty simple:

#include // for TRISB and PORTB declarations
#include // for 'Delay10KTCYx'


// Set configuration bits for chip
// - set HS oscillator
// - disable watchdog timer
// - disable low voltage programming
#pragma config OSC = HS
#pragma config WDT = OFF
#pragma config LVP = OFF

#define TEXT_SIZE 40
const rom unsigned char text[TEXT_SIZE] =
{ 255, 137, 129, 0, 255,
128, 128, 0, 129, 255,
129, 0, 241, 137, 135,
0, 252, 18, 252, 0,
255, 137, 118, 0, 255,
137, 129, 0, 1, 255,
1, 0, 255, 16, 255,
0, 0, 0, 0, 0 };

int val, binaryOut;
void main (void)
{
// length of bits in order to make string
// put numerical version of hex value into constant "text"
// will need to put this into EEPROM and allow to be updatable

TRISB = 0; // configure PORTB for output
for (val = 0; val < binaryout =" text" portb =" binaryOut;" portb =" 0;">

}