The undecorating begins!

Yesterday was the first full day for me in the house. It's only taken almost 4 months since putting an offer on it to finally getting in and seeing it during daylight!

Becky spent most of the week cleaning and tidying as much as she could, and during the evenings I helped out. I will post more photos and details soon, but for now here are 2 quick photos of the master bedroom that is Job Number 1.

We dislike the floral decoration, so aim to gut the room and start from scratch. During the evenings this week we removed most of the built in wardrobes. As you can see, it already makes a difference!
All of yesterday was spent removing the last bits of wardrobe and stripping wallpaper. We also got some paint and tools from B&Q so we can start painting today! Last night we were both absolutely exhausted, but pleased with the progress so far.

We aim to get as much bedroom decoration done over the next few days, as well as move small items over to the house. Virgin media is installed tomorrow (Monday). Fridge/freezer and washing machine arrive on Tuesday. Moving larger furniture Wednesday onwards.

Lots still needs doing, but this will have to wait for a bit:

• Electrics need rewiring and a new distribution box fitted
• Gas boiler, whilst almost new and working fine, was fitted badly and needs re fitting correctly
• upgrade 3 radiators, replace 1 in the bathroom with a towel rail, and add a new one on the upstairs landing
• some cracks need filling correctly and sealing up
• lots more decorating!

A new kitchen and bathroom would be lovely, but are much further down the line.

At least we get an extra hour in bed, thanks to the end of British Summer Time! Autumn is here and winter is on its way, and we now have plenty to keep us busy over the next few years!

Before

After

Fresh clean house. Fresh start?

I just read this post on the register and it sounds almost identical to me and my technology hoarding habits

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?' • Reg Hardware

But, new house, new way of living. I shall keep all my junk in the garage a.k.a. the man cave (I have no cellars and loft storage is off limits). When there is no more space, I will just have to sort it out and throw some things away!

Now...why did I throw away that broken vintage mac se/30 when I moved house last time?! It would have made a perfect doorstop!

T minus 33 hours and counting!

So, a few months of legal paperwork, solicitors and estate agents, and the end is in sight!

We exchanged contracts last week, and completion is set for tomorrow evening (Monday 22nd October). Then its over to us!

I'm really looking forward to making some visible progress; getting access to the house and being able to measure, plan and clean up before we get fully moved in (my weeks holiday off work doesn't start until Saturday 27th October)

There is going to be plenty to do over the next 2 weeks, but we managed to move last year into our current flat in less than a week.

The geeky technology house related hacks will have to be put on hold while traditional decorating and moving in is done, but I'm planning ahead and thinking of little tweakes that will make future hacks easier and save on time, effort and mess when implementing them later:

- installing cat5 while any potential mains electrical rewiring is done
- fitting extra capacity mains sockets where needed (although this could be hard to predict)
- getting the nice virgin media engineer to put and hide the coax cable where I want it to go (or at least leaving me some spare cable so I can re-route it later)

I'm almost considering some sort of house wide CAN bus installation (as used in modern cars to link all the electronic subsystems) but this would need more research and planning, which is probably best spent on the house move and initial decoration.

Anyway, as I have Blogger on my smartphone, I should be able to post more frequent updates (and photos) quite easily (if I remember to)

Better heating control?

I have a completion and moving date of 22nd October 2012!

Realistically I won't get any of the cool things done straight away, and will probably spend most of my time decorating and getting the essentials done to make the house liveable  This doesn't mean I can't still plot and scheme!

I read another post on hackaday that mentioned using an old android phone as a thermostat to control your heating.

This would be a perfect use for my old HTC Desire mobile phone.

http://androidthermostat.com

Capacitive Phone Charging

Just a quick post to save some useful links.

I'm near the end of my 2 year mobile phone contract, and so far the logical upgrade is from my existing HTC Desire to a HTC One X. I noticed that it has some pogo pins on the back, allowing for it to be docked and charged.

The official HTC media dock is £50! So I did a bit of Google-Fu and found this thread where someone made their own docking case.

I also found a youtube video of someone who used the Palm Touchstone capacitive charger with a custom case that hooks into the pogo pins. There are no instructions for this persons mod, but I'm sure I can make something similar.

A few more home hack ideas

Getting very close to completion of the house purchase now!

On a long drive back from a family holiday in St Ives last month I had the following ideas/thoughts. I forgot to post it at the time, but here it is:

• A house-wide CCTV system. Probably cheaper to use individual ip webcams than a composite video and separate DVR recording system. This would cover the: front door, garden, garage and alleyway behind the garden (where there is access to the back garden and car parking)
• PIR motion sensors in the alleyway, front garden, front door and inside the house in the hallway. This can be hooked into the CCTV and/or security system, as well as detecting people when they come in (potentially hooked into the automatic lighting system).
• Temperature sensors in all rooms and under stairs cupboard. This can be linked to the thermostat/central heating to allow for more efficient heating of the house.
• All equipment to run the hacked house to be hidden out the way in the under stairs cupboard (hence the temperature sensor in the cupboard). UPS compatible wiring, if I wish to add mains power cut protection later.
• Cooling system (probably temperature controlled) to vent from the under stairs cupboard into the adjacent boiler cupboard or out of the side of the house
• Run cat5 and power out to the garage (makes other ideas easier to implement)
• All the living room entertainment systems to be in shelving unit to the left of the fireplace (where the TV is going to be wall mounted). Wiring will be hidden as much as possible. Potential to have virgin media coax hidden through ceiling or floor to the cable tv box on the shelves.
• A 5 channel surround speaker system in corners of the living room and auto calibrated to balance the sound for optimum listening on the sofa, opposite the tv/fireplace.
• TV wall mounted above fireplace.
• 2 additional speakers in the kitchen running off main amp in the living room.
• A Raspberry pi running raspbmc or a silent mini-itx media centre running xbmc in living room (to replace the existing PS3 which doesn't support all media codecs).
• Google nexus 7 tablet as remote control for xbmc. Can control music playback in kitchen/living room. Can also access web based house interface with cctv, temperature monitors, lighting control, etc
• A computer controlled (from server or media pc) IR sender to act as dummy remote control. Used to control amp, tv, and other Ir media equipment in living room to provide seamless media experience

Possible ideas, but not sure about these. Probably best as separate stand alone projects

• Brewing control/monitoring in garage to control my planned micro homebrewery. Could use aebcam and Arduino connected to temperature sensors and boilers to automate the brewing process. It would appear that most of the hard coding work on this project has been started at http://brewpi.com (although this would mean buying another RaspberryPi)
• A modified roomba style Hoover with camera and remote control. Can clean carpets downstairs and monitor house/cat. Another one upstairs? Linked by WiFi to server for out of house control