Media closet & a real fence!

Its been a while, we've been busy. Fall has hit me hard with the new school year and Mike's been picking up overtime which means our projects are going slowly. Very slowly.

Our last major accomplishment was getting the TV on the wall. There was still a cable issue and we had two wires running across the room for a long time. In preparation for the finished product, Mike sheet rocked the media closet, fitted it with a three-gang and two-gang outlet box. The boys finally got it hooked up right, without cables and we could walk across our floor in the dark without fear! Of cables at least, toys and blocks are still a hazard. For a little while we still had the power cord down to the outlet below it until Mike rewired the box behind it.

He had to spend a long time with Steve trying to get his infrared system to work. Mike wanted all of our equipment (cable box, DVD player, receiver, etc) in the closet under the stairs near the bar area. In order for them to receive signal from the remote, they had to add an infrared receiver under the TV that was wired through the wall (luckily extra CAT6 had been laid in when the rest of the wires were run) to the closet and sent out of an infrared transmitter in the closet that sends the signal to the devices. Once that was hooked up, Mike could sit on the couch and control the channel of the cable box, the volume of the TV, the volume of the receiver controlling the speakers, the DVD player, etc. If you come over, he'll show you - he can also control it on his phone. There's an app for that.

After everything was wired correctly, Mike built shelves for all the components. He still wants to have it taped up when our painter comes but it works for now. He didn't want me to include a picture of it because its not "done," but its such progress! Our cable upstairs has gone back to looking like it needs rabbit ears though so somewhere along the way we goofed. Mike was able to fix the occasional digital hiccups downstairs by removing a power cable splitter and replacing it with an un-powered one. Go figure.

We also got the green house window replaced.  We had gotten an estimate on replacing the pane that had a broken seal from one company  and wanted one for replacing the window itself with a flat one from another but the company didn't want to replace it because of the vinyl siding. When we replace the vinyl siding and windows in another ten years (and go into debt probably) we'll have that window changed out. Now we can actually see into the backyard which is helpful with the baby.

And today we got our fence finished! We had the single wrought iron gate on the south replaced with a straight redwood one (right). On the north side, we replaced the double wrought iron fence with a double redwood one and built a fence along the slope up to our neighbors fence (left). We had asked for an arch along the top so we have to email him back and check on that. But for now, Beau can go into the backyard, unsupervised! He can't see into the front yard to bark at cats in the neighborhood and we're hoping he can't jump  a six foot fence on an incline. Time will tell on that one I guess.