However, we do rent movies from time to time, especially for our young child, and we were growing frustrated with the increased fees and hassle from Blockbuster. When it came time to replace the aging TV in the den at the cabin, that set the wheels in motion. Blu-ray player prices had come down quite considerably, and almost all of the players were compatible with a wired and/or a wireless internet connection.  Since an internet connection is one thing we don’t skimp on, moving towards that means of media distribution made the most sense for us. So we bought an Insignia (Best Buy brand) player for the cabin for $130 and a LG BD550 player for home for $140 – not so much with the idea of being able to play Blu-ray discs, but to download movies from Netflix.

The Netflix setup was rather easy – from a computer I set up an unlimited account for $9/month and registered both receivers. A decent selection of movies is available by browsing from the receiver, but many more can be found from a computer and added to the “instant queue”. The downside is that they tend not to have new releases, but for childrens’ movies that’s quite alright, and many of the two year old movies are new to us.  We’ve been rather happy with Netflix so far.

The Blu-ray/network players themselves have also worked out quite well.  We bought wired models to keep the price down (and for a faster, more reliable connection), as similarly equipped wireless units cost about $100 more.  It was possible, though a bit of a challenge, to get a wired connection to the players, as shown in the photos below.

Cabin

First the TV mounting bracket, recessed electrical outlet, and an opening for the cables! The opening for the cables is just a low voltage outlet box, with a Decora rectangular shaped wall plate.

TV is now mounted on the wall. The cables have been fished down the wall and out an opening at the bottom.  The ethernet (network) cable will be run in the crawl space below, then up into the wall and out the opening with the other cables.

Lots of cables, might as well plug them all in now, so I don’t have to take down the TV later!

Finished! The Blu-ray player is under the printer/scanner on the left.

Home

The tricky part was the wired ethernet connection at home. The ethernet connection is at the rightmost outlet between the coax cables, but the wire had to pass through three studs – one next to each wallplate – to get there.

Luckily there is a closet on the back side of the wall with the receptacle, so that’s how I made it through that stud.  (Repairing the drywall is a project for the Mrs.!)

I removed the air intake grill for the heater/AC so I could crawl under the stairs and fish the wire through to the garage.

After coming out from under the stairs, the cable is in the blue channel in the background going up to the garage ceiling. I still need to staple the ethernet cable (in a loop in the foreground) to the garage ceiling, but that will be easy.

I moved the router from its original location upstairs, down to its new location in the garage by the DSL modem. Putting a $15 switch in the original location of the router made life easy by not requiring messing around with existing wiring. Once I get the ethernet cable over here, I’ll plug it straight into the router.

Well, it’s nice having the router next to the modem for organizational purposes, but now Im getting a weaker wifi signal inside the house – plenty strong enough for the computers, but not strong enough for the iPhone.  Moving the router or connecting up an external antenna will do, but that’s a project for another day!

Installation was similar to the original install, using an electrical junction box and plexiglass for the enclosure, except this time I used a 4″x4″x4″ box instead of a 6″x6″x4″ box.  I had to take apart the webcam casing in order to get the antenna to fit in the smaller box.  Since the webcam overheated last time, this time I didn’t bother with any insulation to keep it warm.

Original photo with full length antenna.

Here’s what it looks like on the garage:

Here’s the view from the webcam. It’s blurry, but at least I can see whether or not there’s snow on the street and driveway.  (I still have to see how the view looks at night with the garage lights on.)  The walkway to the front steps of the deck is in the lower right corner of the image.  I may rotate the webcam in the enclosure or take it apart to move the lens (the camera movement functions were fried during the overheating) in order to see more of the walkway.

Note the difference between the previous image and better quality image from an undamaged webcam in the backyard.

By the way, a strange thing happened today that I can’t explain. Every half hour during daylight, the backyard webcam connects to my ISP via FTP and overwrites an existing image (which sits in its own folder/directory) with a new one.  So rather than give live access to the camera, my cabin rental site has a link to the latest image.  When I looked at the website this afternoon, the image was all black.  Yet if I connected via FTP and downloaded the image to my hard drive, it looked OK. To fix the problem, I had to delete the directory, create a new one with a different name, tell the webcam to write to the new directory, and update the webpage to look for the image in the new directory. Problem solved. My only guess is that the directory somehow got corrupted?

In retrospect, I should have unplugged the camera for the summer or at least removed the insulation. Lesson learned, but now I needed a new webcam. I picked up a D-Link DCS-920 wireless webcam online for under $70 shipped (after rebates. First the webcam had to be turned upside down to fit in the enclosure. Luckily the D-Link webcam configuration allows the image to be flipped, avoiding the need to flip the image with software post-capture.

Then the insulation went back in.

And finally the plexiglass cover went back on.

Setup of the D-Link webcam on the wireless network was much easier than the Panasonic – although that’s not saying much if you’ve ever tried to setup a Panasonic!  However, the D-Link built-in webcam software is not as flexible as the Panasonic’s. For example, the Panasonic supports mulitple FTP profiles, while the D-Link only supports one.  Still, that was good enough for me, because all I really need to do is upload a still image to my cabin rental website every half hour. 

Here is an image from the new webcam:

All in all, the D-Link DCS-920 has been a great buy and has worked out perfectly so far!  But I’ll be sure to remember to unplug it or remove the insulation this summer!

The first problem with this setup was that the white vinyl ducting was sagging in the crawl space and got packed with lint, affecting dryer performance as well as being a potential hazard.  I replaced the vinyl ducting with flexible aluminum ducting as a short term fix.  However, a longer term fix was necessary, as rigid metal ducting is required when it is inside walls.

The other problem with the original venting configuration was the potential for snow melt and rain water to enter through the vent, which was only an inch about the ground at a low point.  Therefore, I decided to relocate it – the two options I considered are below.

Although it would be the shortest route, I did not want to put a hole in the roof for venting.  Option 2 would have been the shortest route for the two options above, but the two 90 degree bends seemed unworkable without tearing open a wall.  So I decided to go with Option 1.  Here’s a photo of the original and proposed vent locations.

That photo is the view facing north.  The dryer is right in front when opening the door.  So the re-routed vent has to go up the wall into the attic, then turn east a short distance, then turn south, and then out where it says “proposed vent location”.  That’s makes it a challenge to make the vent routing short enough to get adequate exhaust flow.   Therefore, the first step was install a product called the Dryerbox, in the photo below.  That eliminated the awkward bends in the flex ducting that you can get when the dryer is pushed against the wall.

The next issue to deal with was the two 90 degree bends in the attic.  Per the codes, for each elbow you have to deduct 5 feet from the total allowable of 25 feet.  It would be 7 feet up the wall, then one elbow, then a short straight section, then another elbow, and then 10 feet to the outer wall.  Even though I hadn’t yet accounted for the short straight section, the total already adds up to 27 feet!

Enter a product called the Dryer-Ell.  It’s a long radius elbow.  Below is a comparison of conventional elbow with the Dryer-Ell.  By using two Dryer-Ells, I was able to save the equivalent of 9 feet of duct length!

Here’s a couple of photos of the final installation.  The first one is looking west, towards where the vent pipe comes up out of the wall, near the black plumbing vent pipe.  The second one is after the vent turns south and goes out the exterior wall.

Not too long ago, the dryer had gotten extremely noisy and had a lot of vibration problems.  My problem with a lot of “modern” technology is that when it breaks, it’s cheaper to replace it than to repair it.  But this dryer was a pleasant exception.  This article describes the repair process.   I was able to go to the closest Sears store with a repair center and picked up the 29″ dryer repair kit right off the shelf for about $25.  It has the typical parts that fail – the rollers, belt, and idler pulley.

Here are my old rollers, they definitely needed replacing – notice the middle of the left roller is out of round!  The belt was also starting to wear, good thing I replaced that too.

So after just a couple of hours of work and only $25 out of pocket, the dryer runs like new.

Rather than buy a new webcam, I started looking at outdoor enclosures for my current camera.  My camera is rated for operation down to 40F and exposure down to 32F – which I believe is fairly typical for these types of cameras.  So most off the shelf outdoor enclosures have a heater and a blower, which wouldn’t make it cheap.  I found this site with a $27.34 DIY webcam enclosure.  I figured that if his setup could work in zero degree temperatures in Colorado, something similar would be just fine for typical low temperatures around 20F in the Southern California mountains.

I started off with a $9.99 Carlon plastic 6″x6″x4″ electrical box, which I screwed to the back of my garage.  I drilled a hole in the upper right corner to pass the power cord through.

The webcam slid in there just fine, and I put the transformer inside in order to provide some heat.

Finally, I found some leftover pieces of fiberglass pipe insulation and put them around the sides to keep the camera warm.  I made sure I had an open path to the hole in the upper right to vent back to the garage.  Then I discarded the plastic cover to the box and screwed on a trimmed a $3.95 piece of plexiglass to the front.

For the moment I’ve decided not to seal the plexiglass to the electrical box, as the setup is somewhat protected from the elements as shown in the photos below.  (Edit: First photo below replaced with one after we got over two feet of snow, camera was OK!)

We’ve had 20F daytime temperatures all week, and the camera has been working fine.  The only problem is that the lens sometimes doesn’t like to move.  I believe that is due to power cord in back falling down, pushing the camera forward against the plexiglass.  I should be able to secure the camera to fix that problem. (Edit: The power cord was indeed the problem – I fixed it by putting it to the side of the camera, as shown in the photo above.)

The problem was that attic above the addition was inaccessible, since the old roof was retained and the new roof built over it.  So I cut a section of the old roof away (including cutting through three layers of shingles!) to get into the formerly inaccessible portion of the attic.  The addition is the part with the pink insulation.

Once cutting an opening, I could lie on the plywood in the foreground and squeeze my way through the opening.  Here’s the wire after removal.

In case anyone is wondering why I’ve gone through so much trouble to replace a section of wire, the real reason was that I was investigating routing for dryer venting – but more on that in another post.

The deck is made of pressure treated wood.  Although it’s weathered for about a couple of years, there are still quite a few posts that are a bit greenish.  So we decided to go with a dark stain from Superdeck, in “Canyon Brown”.

The cabin is currently all red, including the trim.  We wanted to have different colors for the exterior and the trim, one light and one dark.  With the deck being dark, we decided to go lighter on the exterior, our two choices were “Boston Fern” and “Mississippi Mud” from Behr.

Finally, we had to pick a color for the trim.  The “Bison Brown” from Behr seemed to be the best match for the gutters and the window frames.

Here’s a photo of what they actually look like on a piece of the siding:

Although the photo doesn’t do the colors justice, we decided to go with the “Boston Fern”. We’ll see how it turns out!

By the way, we got a tip on what to do with unwanted paint (such as the samples for the colors we didn’t like) – donate it to a high school, whose drama/theater group could use it.

I knew that no amount of do-it-yourself retrofitting would guarantee the cabin surviving a major earthquake.  For one thing, I’m going to lose the chimney for sure in a big quake – the only way to avoid that would be to tear it down and rebuild it.  But I figured that reinforcing the cripple walls would give the best “bang for the buck” by shoring up the weakest link, which could make a difference in saving the cabin from a smaller quake.  There’s a couple of online do-it-yourself guides from the City of Oakland and the City of Los Angeles, and even a standard plan.  So I finally made it to the big box store and got some plywood and rented a nail gun and compressor to do the job.  Photos are below.

Portion of unreinforced cripple wall:

Cripple walls reinforced with plywood (with screened vents):

More cripple walls reinforced with plywood:

Closeup of framing anchor to secure the house to the newly strengthened cripple walls:

Same framing anchor, further away (good thing I have an air compressor and a palm nailer to fit in the tight space to nail the anchors in!):