Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I always forget how magnificent our irises are when in full bloom. The photos don’t really do them justice. Right now there is a wall of irises rising up between our driveway and our front sidewalk. The bulbs, which come from my grandmother Jarrett via my father, are really in action this spring and have [...]

Why is it that home networking stuff takes so long to resolve? Warning: highly technical and elliptical post ahead.
It took me a few days after my last networking adventure to get the last few items cleared off the checklist, namely getting my network attached storage (NAS) and TiVO into the network. To do it, I [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, there were a few unfinished items left after the FiOS installation yesterday. I got two of the items taken care of this morning, but I was a little disturbed at what I had to do to make things work.
After the installation was complete on Sunday, I connected to the administrative web [...]

Winter sure came in with a roar. I didn’t go to the office on Friday–we had pushed a new release of our software late Thursday night, and I knew that the storms this weekend were going to snarl up traffic Friday afternoon. So I used the snowblower on the driveway Saturday morning–we had about ten [...]

We have FiOS now. The installers from Verizon left at about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, with handsful of cookies from my wife and thanks from me. They started work about 10 am. In the four and a half hours (including a lunch break) in between, they:

Installed a new wall box (shown) to take the fiber from [...]

It’s an exciting day here at the Jarrett house. The new drop that I mentioned on Friday is a fiber drop. We’re in the middle of a Massachusetts snowstorm, with another three to six inches on top of the ten we got yesterday, and Verizon, God bless ‘em, is in my driveway getting ready to [...]

For those that have not been following my structured wiring project (and hard to blame you: it’s been going on since late 2004), here are the highlights to date:

Moved into a 1941 house with no inside telephone wiring and put a temporary fix in place.
Installed a Leviton structured wiring box in our basement and mounted [...]

I got a little carried away back in 2004. I assumed that when the clogged drain that backed up into our driveway got fixed, it stayed fixed.
Hah.
I found signs that it backed up again this morning, and proof this afternoon as a pool rose out of it when the washing machine drained. I called the [...]

Pick up the scraper, paint bucket, caulk gun, ladder. Walk up the driveway. Caulk is quick: push out, drag down, wipe. Let it dry, move on to the window sills. Pick up scraper and start to knock the paint, loosened by rain from a leaking gutter, from the sill.
And I’m back at the farm. I’m [...]

I’m not used to having time to myself on Columbus Day, but for whatever reason, my company has the day off, and Lisa’s doesn’t. So a fairly leisurely morning, a luxury bagel, a little blogging, spend half my eMusic subscription for the month, and then get outside and caulk and paint some places where the [...]

Here’s the after to Tuesday’s before, with my row of Bestå shelves from Ikea fully assembled. The doors went on Monday night, and the books went in the last few nights. I’m still waiting on one glass door and a few DVD organizers for the small shelf to the right, which will help with the [...]

A quick update on our basement project: it looks like we’ll make our deadline. The picture to the right shows a stage in the completion of the project, with the Bestå bookcases mostly assembled and the Flor carpet in.
I was able to finish the carpet with about an hours’ worth of work on Sunday. I [...]

We’re bound and determined to finish the basement project before the middle of next week. Why? Well, we’ll have both my parents and my sister visiting, and we only have one currently usable guest room… so it’s crunch time.
Fortunately, Lisa and Esta decluttered a lot of stuff and painted a lot of the basement last [...]

For various reasons, we’ve taken a good long break from home improvement, so the houseblog has been pretty dormant. That changed last week when Lisa and I started to look seriously at what it would take to reclaim our basement as a guest bedroom.
Right now it’s quite a project. Ever since the flood in 2006, [...]

While I was in Pennsylvania, I helped my uncle move some junk out of the storage unit where we put some of my grandfather’s things. A few items held memories for me (I never could get comfortable on that fold-up metal cot, and was glad to see it go), but others were remnants: the boxes [...]