The Masters House

Everyone is going green these days. When I first moved into our new house the first thing I did was to replace all of the incandescent light bulbs in our house with fluorescent light bulbs. In my other house I was able to cut my electric bill in the summer by $100 (see my post Reducing Electricity Bill with LED Lights).

Anyway, our new house has a whole lot more windows especially in the front of the house. These windows get direct sunlight in the afternoon which is usually the hottest part of the day. Both of air conditioning units would pretty much be constantly on just to maintain the temperature in the house. My youngest son and daughter’s windows also faced the front of the house and their rooms would get pretty hot in the afternoon as well.

To date I have installed the tint on all of the front facing windows except the window in my office. Even as I was putting the tint up I could feel the temperate change even though the windows were not in the direct sunlight at the time. Due to the tint being metal based it actually reflects heat in general and not just heat that comes from direct sunlight.

The implications of this are far reaching since your windows are the cause of most of your heat and cooling that escape from your house. I am speculating that the tint will also to help keep heat in the house during the winter as well which will have additional energy savings.

My estimate is that my $150 investment in tinting my front windows could pay for itself within the next 3-4 months in reducing my electricity bill. My bill for the last month was $309 so we will see what happens as the temperature goes up over the next few months. If my bill doesn’t go up I will be happy but I am fully expecting it to go down. According to Gila (the brand of tint I bought) my estimates may be a little high but we will see. You can check out their savings page here – Gila Window Tint.

I’ll keep you posted with my savings.

Technorati Tags: Window Tint, Going Green, Home Improvement, Gila Window Tint, Home Window Tint

One the biggest items that sold us on our new house was the fact that it had a walk-in storage area in the attic above the garage. The space measures 19′ x  7′ and the roof slants from about 7′ to about 4′. The space appealed to us because it could hold the majority of the non-clothing items that occupied our master closet in old other house.

During the week my wife and father-in-law installed drywall over the 2 walls that had exposed insulation (The walls came unfinished). I have to say that they did a much better job then I would have done and am thankful that I did not have to do it. As great as the drywall looked we still needed some shelves to effectively take advantage of the space.

The idea was to have one shelf about a foot from the top of the roof for smaller items, another shelf a little further down from there, and are large shelf that would be a little bit wider that would act like a counter. After some measuring I decided to do the shelves 8′ long and to make the two higher shelves 1′ wide and the bottom shelf 2′ wide. The reason for this was that I could buy a single piece of plywood that was 4′ x 8′ and have it cut into 3 different pieces that would use the entire piece of plywood and not have any scrap left over.

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Well it has been quite a long time since I have posted here. In Blogoshere that’s a bad thing but I am back never the less.

My drop off in posting was directly related to how busy I became both at work and at home with both house at the same time. At work I got the equivalent of a promotion (I say equivalent because I got the responsibly but not necessarily the title or the money, but both should be coming) so that kept me busy during the day which when I had free time I would blog. With the two houses it was a combination of getting loans done, getting the new house ready to move into, and getting the older house ready for someone else to move into.

So here I am, sitting on my back porch of my new house with the majority of the move-in projects done. This is actually the first time that I have sat out on our second story porch and got to enjoy it. It is nice to be able to sit here with my laptop and type away and watch people walk back and forth to the little neighborhood park we have that is a block away.

The kids are in their individual rooms enjoying their own personal space. My mother and father-in-law were downstairs outside for a while but then retired indoors downstairs to watch TV in the downstairs family room. They eventually retired to their room that is also down stairs.

The house is really nice and has a great setup. Everyone has their own space and can get away to do whatever they need to do uninterrupted. The upstairs is where my wife and I reside with the kids. They all have their space and we have ours. We have our own family room upstairs and in the laundry/utility room we have added a little fridge and microwave so it doubles as a mini kitchen.

I feel so much more at peace in this house then I ever did in the other house. Don’t get me wrong, the other house is great but it just didn’t fit for us the way this one does. Here everything just falls into place and is comfortable.

Anyway, enough of the heartfelt commentary for right now. I will get down into the nitty gritty of everything that has been done at both houses in the days and weeks to come. There is a lot so expect to see plenty of posts.

With the addition of the new house that we are building I had to reorganize things around here a little bit. The main change is that there are now the Butler House and Cami House categories. Butler and Cami are the names of the streets that each of our houses are located on.

I have moved all of the previous posts that related to the Butler house under the Butler House category. I have also created an Initial Construction Category under the Cami House category. This way things will be organized and you will know which house I am taking about in my posts.

I am also thinking that I need to make separate "About" pages for each house too. I will do that later though.

Technorati tags: DIY, Home Improvement, Building a House, Housing Market, Austin TX, Round Rock TX

A friend of mine renovated his house this past year and was doing it in a retro 1960’s style. As a part of the renovation he wanted to replace his front door that had seen better days. His search around the country for a company that manufactured these types of doors turned up zero results. From there he had to have one custom built.

While having the door made the thought popped into his mind - “I bet there are others just like me that are looking for similar doors.” - as a result of that epiphany Crestview Doors was born.

Crestview Doors manufactures and distributes  1950s to 1960s vintage – mid century - front entrance doors. These are the types of doors that are used on ranch, rambler, and bungalow homes that were built post-war. These modern doors have a vintage look that is a perfect addition to any restoration project.

The main types of doors that they offer are:

• Modern Ranch/Rambler, Mid-century  – Modern 1950’s and 1960’s
• Fabulous Fifties – Mid to late 1950’s
• Post-war Vernacular – Late 1940’s/Early 1950’s

They have over 30 doors to choose from with some great styles so you are bound to find something that will look perfect for your house.

Well the rest of the roses are starting to bloom in front of the house. I am happy that they survived the cold weather that we had this past weekend.

Hopefully they will be established enough be the time the 100+ degree weather comes along.

Technorati: Roses, Landscaping, DIY, Home Improvement

These types of contractors are the ones that give all the rest a bad name. I think if more people would stand up to bad contractors and bad companies the world would be a much better place.

This is the story of a guy who hired his friend – a contractor – to do some landscaping for him. To make the story short the contractor screwed his friend and now it is going to court. The bets part about it though is that the guy who got screwed posted the entire story on the internet @ jondrewniak.com (the guy’s name is Jon Drewniak).

I would watch out for this guy if you are in the Assonet/Auburn, MA area.

Technorati: Bad Contractors, Jon Drewniak, Home Improvement

Texas is definitely different the California as we have a real winter out here in Texas where the temperature actually changes – dramatically.

Because of that doing things outside is not much of an option. Also, with the holidays in a few weeks there is the shopping, wrapping, and general mayhem that it is included in the end of the year rush.

Things that we will be considering after the first of the year will be:

• Installing knobs on our kitchen cabinets
• Building the deck railing
• Installing sprinklers
• Garage organization / finishing the work benches
• Decorating my oldest son’s bedroom
• Finishing the trim for the new room we built

I did not think that there were that many things we wanted to do but that list looks pretty big.

I am trying to pace myself between this blog and the other 5 blogs I author so there will be updates here but not blow-by-blow updates.

Anyway, there is so good stuff in our archives. Give em’ a whirl for some good entertainment.

This past weekend Elsy and I went to Houston to visit some family remembers and while down there stopped by Ikea. While down there we picked up some toddler tables and chairs for the kids. We also pick up some flush mount lights to accent the new wall that I am building.

The area that I am filling in with a wall is double the thickness of a standard wall so I am making the room-side of it a standard wall and the outside a half wall to create a shelf. These lights are going to be mounted in the arch way to shine down on the shelf.

The coolest thing about these lights is that they were only $15 while i had seen similar ones at Home Depot for $30.

I think they will make a nice addition to the shelf.

Technorati: Ikea, DIY, Home Improvement

Now that things have settled down around the house I finally have some time to put back into the site.

What I have done this evening is to upload the pictures of the few projects that we have completed already.

These include:

• Water sealing the fence
• Mounting the Plasma TV on the wall
• Installing a digital thermostat

Each project has it’s own “tag” over in the photos section. The above links go to those tags. All the tags for all the pictures can be viewed here.

I will be fixing the categories so that each of these projects has its own post and thus a sub-category under the project category.

tags: Water Seal, Fence, Plasma TV, Wall Mount, Thermostat