Ames and I have been talking about painting our house for a while but never decided on a color scheme. This weekend we looked through some of the color books from Home Depot and Lowes but wanted to see what they would actually look like on the house. After Photshopping them in on a picture of our home we decided to create our own. We came up with four that we like. One is a little “out there” for us, but I won’t tell you which one because we want your honest opinions.

You can click on the links below to see a 1024x768 version.

Current Color - Blech…

Scheme 1

Scheme 2

Scheme 3

Scheme 4

Help us out! Just let us know in the comments which color scheme you like the best and why. Thanks!

My first headline idea for this post was “Grids are good and how to lay tile on them” as that’s where my mind has been for the past week. Ames’ parents came up on the Thursday evening before labor day to help us lay tile in our house. Her dad actually runs a tile company in Florida and has been laying tile for most of his life, so we were really fortunate to have his professional help. Still though, it was hands-down the most labor-intensive project we’ve attempted in the remodeling process. Honestly, this made the kitchen demo and cabinet assembly look like child’s play. We planned to work from Friday through Monday, and after four 12-hour days, we were still wrapping up the grout work on Wednesday morning. We’re all back to our regularly-scheduled lives now, but still a little sore from spending so much time kneeling and bending over:

Amidst all that work though, I learned a lot and gained quite a bit of inspiration from the process. The most interesting part to me was the planning phase. While most people you see on those DIY shows tell you to just choose a starting point and work out, using spacers to maintain the grout joints, my father-in-law explained how real tile layers don’t use spacers. Instead, they rely on a meticulously planned grid that is laid out with chalk lines and adjusted to prevent (as much as possible) having to use small filler pieces where the tile meets the walls. While we could have just picked a place and started laying tile, the grid method allowed us to make cuts in one location while someone else was actually laying the tile. For more pictures from the process, check out our photo gallery.

With all these home improvement projects going on and the prep work leading up to the tile project, it’s hard to keep up with all the other things that are going on. Somehow though, in the last 3 weeks I posted an article to WPDFD, spoke to some prospective web designers at the Atlanta Art Institute, was interviewed for Smashing Magazine’s 50 Designers x 6 Questions and my book sold out again. Ames is busy as well, pulling together her research proposal for the next 3 years of the PhD program. Labor days, indeed.

Ames and I have done a lot of DIY home improvement projects over the last couple years, but we’re just now about knee deep in one of our biggest projects yet, a full Ikea kitchen remodel. We’ve had our entire kitchen mapped out using Ikea’s kitchen planner tool software for several months. We bought most of our stainless appliances back in November at Lowe’s amidst the unbeatable Black Friday deals. We’ve had the slate-like tile for the flooring stored under our porch deck for well over a year. We didn’t actually get started on all this though until June 2^nd when we drove the 3½ hours to the Atlanta Ikea in a rented cargo van to bring home all the cabinetry.

Since then, our non-work life has been a whirlwind of cam locks, hinges, and drawer pulls. As of last night though, we’re finished with the majority of the assembly, have removed all the old cabinet doors and it’s time to start packing everything in boxes. Once that’s all done, it’s popcorn scraping, sawzall cutting, sledgehammer demolition time. As you may have guessed, this is the part of the project that I’ve been anticipating the most and I’d like to get started this weekend if possible. My wife (and super project coordinator) pointed out though that as soon as it’s all gone, we’ll be without a real kitchen until all work is finished; so we may end up delaying the sledgehammer slinging until the following weekend. Either way, it’s going to be beautiful when it’s all done.

In other news, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design still seems to be selling well even after its place at the top of the Sitepoint books page has been taken by The Art and Science of CSS. Although I’ve really been looking forward to this book I still haven’t bought my copy, but I’ll have to wait as it seems the first print run has already sold out! Congrats to Cameron, Jina, David, Steve, and Jonathan!

And last by not least, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Webmaster Jam Session on September 21 & 22 at the Adam’s Mark in Dallas, Texas. From what I heard about last year’s event, I am both excited and humbled to be a part of this year’s Jam Session. I also can’t believe the list of confirmed speakers that I’ll get to meet up with. Some of these folks have been an inspiration to me for a long time, and I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting a handful of them in person so far. Should be a whole ton of fun.

During the course of the long Thanksgiving weekend, Ames and I managed to meet my employers for the first time in person, attend 3 Thanksgiving parties, do some Christmas shopping, assemble our Christmas tree (for the first time in our new house) and rearrange the home office. While Amy worked on the perfect configuration for our 2 desks, bookcase, futon, filing cabinet, and office accessories, I decided to work out the kinks in our home network.

Before:

Previously, I had the cable modem (top left) conntected to the uplink port on the Vonage router. I then used 3 of the 4 wired ports to connect the iMac, the PC, and the Printer/All-in-one. The 4th port was connected to the wall jack that I installed which runs under the house to the living room where it connects to our wireless router. The wireless router is connected to “The Box” (our little server/media center which is connected to the TV) and provides wireless access to Amy’s laptop.

I set this up before we picked up Amy’s laptop and the wireless router. It worked great at the time because The Box was in the same workgroup as the rest of the computers even though it was out in the living room. After we added the wireless router, getting into the box from the computers in the office became a major pain. I tried disabling DHCP on the router and setting The Box in the DMZ, but I still couldn’t get file and print sharing to work from the computers in the office.

After:

By moving the wireless router into the office and connecting everything to the network through it (rather than the vonage router) file and print sharing is now so much smoother. We’ve had a wireless PCI adapter in the PC for a while, and since it’s now on the opposite side of the office, we decided to utilize that rather than running a long cat5 around the room.

New Furniture Layout:

Amy used Better Homes and Gardens’ Arrange-a-Room tool to create the new furniture layout. No, we don’t have pink office chairs, a blue futon, or white “server-room” tile in the office, but the little online tool saved us a lot of time.

So yea, even with the pretty Omni Graffle charts, and Amy’s furniture layout this is still quite possibly the most boring thing I’ve ever posted here. I don’t expect anybody to read this far into it or even find it useful. It’s really for posterity that I’m writing about our home network. You see, in a few months this network configuration will probably all change. In a few years I won’t even remember how I had things setup, and at some point I won’t even remember which computers we had when. I hope at that point that we will at least have flying cars or teleportation. Perhaps we’ll even have salmon flavored soda, USB beverage chillers or disappearing colored bubbles.

Living in apartments for the last 5 years has really limited Amy and I’s exposure to the whole Halloween/Trick-Or-Treating thing, and although I’m not as big a fan of Halloween as Jason Santa Maria, I am excited about giving out candy this year at our new house. We live in a very well-established neighborhood with lots of families, so I’m guessing we’ll have droves of Pirates, Princesses, and… iPods? to treat. We’ve got a long, wooded sidewalk that winds up to our front door that would be great for luminaries, and last night we carved a couple pumpkins to go by the front door:

You can click on the picture for Amy’s post (and more pictures), or just hover over it to see what they look like in the light. Amy found a pattern for her Shrek Pumpkin online at CarvingPumpkins.com. I decided I wanted to do a Gators pumpkin, but couldn’t find a pattern anywhere, so I made my own using a wallpaper I found online. I had to work with it a bit in Photoshop to get a black and white pattern to go by, so if there’s any Gator fans out there wondering how to make one of these:

1. Download this image.
2. Print it out as big as you can.
3. Clean out your pumpkin and tape the pattern on where you want it.
4. Poke holes around all the black areas.
5. Remove the paper pattern.
6. Cut along the dotted lines with a pumpkin carving saw.

I probably make it sound too easy. It took us both about 3 hours to get our pumpkins carved, but neither of us have done intricate pumpkin carving before…so I’m sure it might take some people less…but it’s really not that hard.

While some people create killer web apps in their spare time, Ames and I prefer to make holes in the ground. There are a couple factors here that make hole digging in South Carolina difficult:

1. Trees, or more accurately stumps. We have been trying to get a maintainable handle on the forrest that is our yard. As a result, we’ve got quite a few stumps around. They range in diameter from about 2 to over 18 inches. Today’s stump was a small one, but then there’s factor 2.
2. Hard Soil. Back in Florida, the ground was nice and moist. You could actually use a shovel to dig into the ground. Not so here. In addition to shovels, you need a tool called a Mattock that has a pick or axe on one side, and a grub hoe on the other.

Getting this one tiny tree stump out of the ground probably took us a couple hours. We started out thinking we could just dig it up, then moved to hacking at roots with the mattock, then more digging, then I got out the chainsaw…which started smoking, so we went back to digging and hacking again. Here, Ames is clearing out some of the dirt around the roots by hand so I might split them in twain.

Success!!! - Little did we know, we were far from “done” with this project.

Once we got the stump out we had to bring in some soil from another part of the yard to even out the slope from the house. The goal of all this digging and dirt moving: plant Hydrangeas. We finished leveling out the soil, made our holes, put down some potting soil and got the new plants watered in. They’re looking a little scraggly now, but with some TLC they’ll make it through the winter and create an amazing display in the Spring.

This actually happened last weekend but I promised Josh I’d post a picture, so here it is.

Last Saturday while Amy’s dad and I were out in the yard chopping up one of our dead trees, I slipped on a nice round log and landed on the side of my face on another log. In my head it went something like Ryan’s stunt from Singing in the Rain, but it was far less graceful, I didn’t really do a flip, and I don’t think Ryan could land on the side of his face if he tried.

Having wrestled for 3 years in high school, my ears were already a little deformed, and I fully expected when it happened that I had broken cartilage. Fortunately though, a week later, my ear seems to have mostly healed up. Ames and I spent most of this weekend doing more of the same type of work. Between this week and last, I think we’ve cut down about 14 trees. Some were large, some were small, some were dead…and some were tall. Sorry, couldn’t help it. It’s not like we have a shortage either. Amy tried to figure out how many we had total and lost count at 40. I think our goal is to get that number down to about half. We really don’t hate trees, we just like the idea of being able to grow grass in our yard…and of course, I like using a chainsaw. Perhaps I should stop this post now before I start getting hate mail from the folks at treesaregood.com. While I’m at it…maybe I should sign up for health insurance too.

When we bought our house, one of the things we asked the seller to do was cut down the dead tree in front of the house. It was a pretty large dead tree and we saw it as a potential threat if it were to fall toward the house, but the seller ended up refusing to have it removed. Ames’ parents were planning to come up next weekend and they were going to bring us a spare chainsaw so we could take it out. Well, apparently with all the rain we’ve had lately, it decided to come down on it’s own. Fortunately it fell AWAY from the house. We spent the evening trying to get what we could out of the neighbor’s yard. I think we’ve decided to give up for now until we get a chainsaw.

Looking back, I’ve been posting a lot more about house stuff and very little about webdesign or development. So…as a side note, I just wanted to say I’m very excited and inspired by the ALA Redesign. In case you haven’t checked it out yet, the new design is by Jason Santa Maria, css is by Eric Meyer, and the backend is built on rails by Dan Benjamin. How crazy is that? There’s even a few custom promo shirts, including this XHTML fist one on the right by Kevin Cornell. I think I have to buy it.

Last weekend we had our first visitors at our new house. Our friends Josh, Erica, and their son Silas stopped by on their way back to Gainesville to hang out and help us with some home improvement. They actually left early this morning, but I’m still feeling sore, bug-bitten, and tired. Between Saturday and Sunday, Josh and I probably spent close to 20 hours working outside around the house.

The only project that really needed to get done this weekend was installing handrails on the stairs to the side and back deck. That project was assigned to us by our homeowners insurance company and was required to be done 30 days from closing. With Josh’s construction experience and the couple extra hands, we were able to knock that project out on Saturday morning.

The rest of the weekend was spent making our yard look more like a yard…and could only be classified as manual labor. We trimmed trees, dug out railroad ties and walkway planks, demolished wooden fences, and hacked out a sea of bushes. Ames and Erica were getting a lot of work done as well. When they weren’t out helping us in the yard, they were inside taking care of Silas and tearing up some wallpaper. Although Josh and I didn’t watch Silas nearly as much as the girls did, we sometimes took turns carrying him around in the “Baby Backpack”.

There is no way Ames and I could have gotten all the things we got done this weekend if it weren’t for Josh and Erica. We really wanted it to be more like a vacation for them, but they insisted on working and really pushed us to get a lot done. After a weekend like that, you really know who your friends are.

I figured I’d make good use of our last day of internet before it gets turned off…since it’s too late to make friends. For those not in the loop, Amy and I are moving from Gainesville, FL to Columbia, SC bright and early Tuesday morning. I should be back online and back to work by Wednesday…hopefully with pics of our new digs.

Come ‘n listen to my story ‘bout a girl named Ames
A poor engineer, hadn’t time for any games.
And then one day, she got an acceptance letter from USC
And then bought a house and planned an Ikea shopping spree.
Lillberg, that is, solid birch, modern furnishings.

Well, the next thing you know, all our stuff’s in a box.
Gainesville friends said, don’t forget to cancel Cox,
Said, Columbiana Mall is the place you oughta be
So we’re load’n up the truck and movin’ close to Lake Murray.
Harbison, that is, shoppin’ malls, restaurants.

Well, now it’s almost time to say goodbye to Ames and Jas,
We would like to thank you folks for hangin’ with us in this place.
You’re all invited up to our new locality
To have a heapin’ helpin’ of our new duality
USC vs. UF, that is, Steve Spurrier, takin’ on the Gators…

Y’all come up now, hear?