Mike and Jeff's New House

Our HVAC guy came by last week to test the `tightness' of the house.After shutting all the windows and doors, he installed this plastic piece over the door and started up the fan to pump air out of the house. We've got to get him some ceiling measurements so he can calculate the volume of air in the house. Based on the measurements that his device measured, we have very little air leakage and should be able to heat the house with minimal energy... It's almost time to turn on the radiant heat, the concrete floor on the first floor is starting to feel chilly.

The Eucalypus veneer panels are now installed on the cabinet in the master bedroom that defines the edge of the balcony.....The stainless steel skin has also been applied to the base that it sits on.....Now, to get the top of this cabinet finished....

FINALLY! After more drama than I care to recall, we finally have the correct shower valve cartridges and extension kits.....I know more about shower valve hardware than I ever thought possible...Turning on the shower with pliers lost its glamour after two months...... Our plumber also came back and hooked up the water line to the refrigerator so the ice maker finally works.... He also hooked up the faucets in the laundry area and in the garage...It's a regular water garden.....

Before the open house we were able to get most of the art back on the walls and the lighting adjusted.....It's starting to feel like home...

The last weekend of September we had an open house to celebrate the completion of our house. Our friends Mike Lewis and Jeff Mathieu came out from Chicago to help us celebrate and to install our Russound distributed audio system. THANKS AGAIN GUYS!!!!!! We now have 6 zones of audio control (2 per floor). Each of these controllers run a pair of speakers and control the inputs. They can access regular AM/FM , Sirius Satellite Radio, CD's, or MP3 files. The system is great, we bought speakers from Home Tech in Cupertino and have been very pleased so far.

In mid-September our friends Mary Bushette and Mike Balak came out from Minnesota for their annual visit. Mike is a computer network administrator and he did virtually 100% of the work to hook up our 110 punchdown panels. (THANKS AGAIN MIKE!!!!!) We are now able to distribute high speed internet signals and video signals throughout the house. The house also has a wireless network and future expansion capacity in that we have two coax cable drops in every room. The coax is not yet terminated as we have no need for it with SureWest (they distribute video on CAT-5). The pic shows our Surewest fiber optic gateway at the bottom of the box and then the mass of punchdown blocks and the wireless MIMO router up on the wall above. Bay Alarm FINALLY got our alarm system to work...we had truly poor customer service with them and would not use them again.