# Renovating a tired Craftsman house



## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

I meant to start this thread a few months ago but as life would have it, I've been th busy doing the work and too scatterbrained to download photos from my phone to document it. But finally I wrangled my phone into submission and so here goes...

We bought this house in the spring. It's a 1925 Craftsman style house in a nice neighborhood in Washington DC. It's one of those houses that is much bigger than it looks. The first and second floor are 2100 sq. feet, and there is a full unfinished basement as well as an attic that would easily make a good sized office were it finished. But we're downsizing so no plans to do that.










The first order of business was to clean up the basement. It was like something out of Silence of the Lambs when we bought the house as the previous owner, an elderly gentleman who had lived there for over 50 years, had clearly never cleaned it once. After much wetvacing, sweeping, mopping, and general clean up I got to this point:










Not too shabby, but since the laundry is down there and there are three rooms off of this main room, it needed to be a little brighter. So I trotted off to HD, rented a spayer and bought a five gallon can of Zinsser 1-2-3 primer and proceeded to spray the ceiling. Pretty uneventful except for almost passing out from the fumes despite a quality respirator and a couple of big fans. With that out of the way I thought I should give the walls a good coat of Drylok. There are no moisture problems to speak of but it always seemed to me if you're going to paint a basement wall you better use something like Drylok because if you don't and you're wrong, it's a mess. But then I read that one should NOT waterproof terra cotta foundation block because it traps moisture in the material and can cause it to deteriorate. So much for that plan. I'll come back to it later and investigate coatings that are breathable, if such an animal exists.

So the next month or two was occupied with putting on a new roof and putting up a fence around the property to keep in our dogs. And lo and behold, we found out that the previous owner had quite a green thumb. Went from this sight in March with no fence:










To this in June:










My brother and law and I were going to tackle the fence but when I did the math on doing it myself vs. hiring a local fence company, it made sense to have someone else do it. My material cost was over 2/3 their bid so I moved on to the big issue. The kitchen:










Do not be deceived by the high quality picture (from the online tour when the house was for sale). The cabinets date from the 70's and have been resurfaced with speckle paint. The bottoms of some of the draws were sagging and literally worn through. The base cabinets had no bottom shelves...the floor was the bottom shelf. The formica counter was so worn, nicked, and stained that even after half a can of Comet it still looked dirty. By the way white formica is just a plain bad idea in a kitchen. You can see ever last crumb. What were they thinking?

Well the kitchen is small, and oddly enough the largest room in the house is the dining room. It's enormous for a house this size:










We spend 80% of our time in the kitchen and family room so...the plan was hatched to take the kitchen, an ajoining breakfast room, and the dining room and turn it into one big L-shaped open space. 

The details of that journey will begin with my next post. But here is a little teaser:


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## oh'mike (Sep 18, 2009)

I am liking this a lot----the fence really set off the back yard space---

I'm looking forward to the next batch of photos.----Mike---


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

The fence was amaaaaaaazing. I was really shocked. Of course when all the plantings sprang up, that helped a lot as well, but the fence really gives a sense of space and privacy instead of something I feared which was a boxed in feel.

For the past 12 years we lived in a house that had a steep slope behind it and no usable back yard. I'm loving that the kitchen/dining/family area will now flow out to a nice patio. Of course in DC you risk being carried off by mosquitoes six months of the year, but that's nothing that a case of Cutter's can't fix.


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## oh'mike (Sep 18, 2009)

I've traveled through Mexico a few times and always admired the walled court yards and the comfortable private space they give.

Your yard and its fence give the same relaxing feeling.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Liking what I'm seeing.

Keep the photos coming.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

It seems like in an old house you need to confront two things when you undertake any project of consequence; old materials that were used that have since proven to be less than ideal, and discovering all sorts of prior work, like so much archaeology, as you start peeling back layers.

The main point of this renovation, other than getting a modern kitchen, is to open up the house and making it less of a ratwarren of smaller rooms. Unfortunately, a load-bearing wall sits right in the middle of the spaces that we wanted to join to create our "L" room. And that load bearing wall is sitting on top of a terra cotta foundation wall. Well, a consultation with a structural engineer revealed that terra cotta block has less than ideal load bearing qualities. The LVL that we were going to need, 14' of it, was going to put a lot of load on the end points and the terra cotta was not going to cut it. And so began the least fun part of the project, building two posts in the basement to serve as supports. The floor needed to be taken up in a four foot square area, down one foot. And at one end the post would need to be on the same plane as the wall. I thought about cutting out a vertical channel in the terra cotta and simply filling it with reinforced concrete, using the wall itself as a form but in the end paid to have two steel posts installed.

You don't know what fun is until you are using a jackhammer and a gas-powered concrete saw indoors in a small enclosed space with limited ventilation. Boy am I glad that is over.

The end results:



















With that part out of the way it was time for demolition. Pretty straightforward although plaster lathe and the 18" of loose cellulose insulation above the ceiling that needed to come down was only slightly more enjoyable than the concrete saw.

An lo and behold, a frightful sight was revealed when the load bearing wall was taken down to the studs:












The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end when I first saw this. It instantly explained why the floor above sloped more than 2" to the point...you guessed it...where the deflection was in the break in the doubled cap plate. Built a temp wall in the opening really fast right after this photo was taken for fear that the horsehair in the plaster was actually what was keeping the house standing. 

Elected to simply delete all of the wiring to this part of the house and run new wiring:










Got that done, ran new plumbing as we were swapping the locations of the sink and stove, insulated and was ready for close in:










Meanwhile, after building two temporary walls and finnegling 4 14'x16" LVLs in through the side window and installing, the opening was supported:










And with this came the first gotcha. I used 6x6 PT posts. The specification was for a 6x6 PSL posts. The inspector received a blank look, followed by the reddening of my face. Two steps forward and one step back.....


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Hrm. Is that BX you removed? Hope you're recycling it.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Thadius856 said:


> Hrm. Is that BX you removed? Hope you're recycling it.


Yup! Indeed I am.


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## oh'mike (Sep 18, 2009)

That wall you removed had been modified some years back---badly.

Is the upstairs floor back to level? You cured two ills with that job.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

oh'mike said:


> That wall you removed had been modified some years back---badly.
> 
> Is the upstairs floor back to level? You cured two ills with that job.


Heavens no. I contemplated jacking it back up but after some consultation concluded that would make matters even worse. I was told it was best to leave it alone and not invite fatigue on nails, not to mention cracking all the walls upstairs. The beam is tight to the lowest joist and the rest are shimmed to their existing height.


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## oh'mike (Sep 18, 2009)

I would have been inclined to jack it up---but I'm not on site---


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

This is actually how far I had gotten when the inspector came. It was the close in inspection so I had to have all the framing done. I had to build a temporary wall on top of the the kneewall to demo out the post and install the PSL. A full day of work lost 










I decided to take this opportunity to run in-wall speaker wire with wall mounted volume controls, all of it feeding into a SONOS system in the basement. More details on that when I get to setting it up but here are some of the wires and controls:










Of course it did not occur to me that I could just run four-wire speaker wire and so run almost half as much cable. So it goes.

This picture also shows a) the rerouted hot water heating pipes to the bedroom above. They needed to go up this wall and then over the top of the LVLs. The picture also shows some of the weird renovation construction. The other side of that plywood is the butler's pantry and has sheetrock on it. I can only think that they needed the dimension of the plywood or simply had it on hand. Who knows. The strips of sheet rock on this side on the studs are to bring the patch to the same thickness as the existing plaster and lathe.

All work an no play makes Jack a dull boy. Took in a Hot Tuna concert at The Birchmere.










Boy can they still play, even 70 years on. 

Then smoked some pork shoulders for pulled pork the following day...what better to do when snaking wire than to run out and check on the smoker now and then.










And I think I need to tackle this today. This is the bus stop in front of our house. There were daffodils in center in the spring but I have not touched it since we moved in and I get nasty looks from the neighbors:


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Small victory:










This was a nice distraction from trying to figure out what to do about what is emerging as a real problem. Getting the new drywall even and parallel to the existing plaster wall in some places is proving extremely difficult. These are areas where the light rakes a cross the wall from a nearby window and if they are not flat it's going to look like a$$. It does not help that the house basically does not have a single right angle or flat wall in it to begin with. I'm thinking I might have to take the rest of the wall down to the studs and put up new sheetrock along the entire thing, on at least two walls. NOT happy about that at all. I had hoped I was close to hanging up the dust mask.


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## evane (Aug 8, 2007)

:thumbsup:

Looking good, love love old Craftsman Bungalow's, they are not too common here in Buffalo unfortunately.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

oh'mike said:


> I would have been inclined to jack it up---but I'm not on site---


Mike the difference is over 2.5" from the lowest joist to the highest...those at the exterior walls. Above that low point is the wall between the master bedroom and the walk-in closet (a deleted bath, from the looks of it). The doors and trim and everything upstairs have been adjusted over the years to adapt to the sagging. I was told that if you want to correct something like this you have to jack it up over a month or so, a bit at a time, to prevent fatiguing and failure of nails, and to be prepared for substantial repair work from setting it right. And the kick was that it would ruin the ceiling in the red room which was redone at some point. I just did not have the time and the appetite for that. I think were it any area other than the kitchen I might have considered it.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Ironlight said:


> Small victory


I'm really surprised that all that vegetation hadn't caused severe unevenness from the root systems bulging the pavers upward, then dieing and rotting each season, leaving voids underneath.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Thadius856 said:


> I'm really surprised that all that vegetation hadn't caused severe unevenness from the root systems bulging the pavers upward, then dieing and rotting each season, leaving voids underneath.


I only planted it all yesterday. Give it time.

Seriously, since the ornamental grass and the ground cover around it are both perennials, that latter is not going to be a problem. And as for the former...the root system is not going to spread beyond the perimeter of the foillage so I'm not too worried. Maybe in 5-7 years I'll need to dig up the grass and divide but that will be a good problem to have because it means it survived


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Nah, I meant I expected bulging from the overgrown mess that you tore out.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

The sheet rock is up. And so the endless tape, block and sanding proceeds apace. Probably my least favorite thing in the entire process.










So I have engaged in a few side projects to keep myself from losing my mind. Started by replacing the huge egg light fixture in the front hallway with something more fitting:










And the living room light:










Soon after we moved in during the spring, the neighbors across the street invited us to a welcoming party. Their house had previously be owned by two architects and it was full of Stickley reproduction lamps and furniture. I did a casual search on the internet, thinking that what I had seen there would go well in our house. I almost blew coffee all over my laptop screen. $2,500 for a table lamp. Ended up going for affordable over authentic.

Have also turned my attention back to the bannister that I had started to strip. It's walnut and I'm debating staining it a bit darker to make it more even:










OK, back to the skimming...


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

When I removed the wall between the kitchen and the breakfast room I discovered that the floors were not the same level. The breakfast room floor was about an inch higher largely due to joists of uneven height. How they got this way is a bit of a mystery, although I believe the lower part was at one point a summer porch. It sits over crawlspace.


The easiest solution was to pull up an 8’ section of the middle of the new larger floor and sister the joists in this section to make the transition gradual. It worked better than I expected:













The plywood is the area that I redid. The floor “above” it is the original hardwood. The subfloor at the bottom of the picture is the rest of the room where I also took up the old floor as it was running perpendicular to the rest of the flooring. And of course I discovered yet another odd thing…the subfloor in the area approaching the joist that is the seam with the plywood had been chiseled down, it looks like with an adze:












This was clearly a crude and misguided attempt to level out a bump in the floor. The result was a subfloor barely 1/4" thick in places and so weak in that area that you were at risk of putting your foot through it. While the right thing to do would have been to pull up ALL the sub floor and put new plywood down I was not game for that in terms of time and cost so elected to perpetuate the house's noble tradition of Maguyvered fixes. I pulled up just a couple of the subfloor boards and slipped 13" x 48" strips of 3/4" ply underneath and then screwed them up hard against the existing thin sub floor. Gave it strength without my needing to pull all of it up AND it got rid of the extra plywood I had. 


The floor guy came a couple of days ago and put down the new oak. He is from El Salvador and he works for a flooring company but does independent jobs on the side. I have never seen anyone work so fast in my entire life. He repaired two areas that needed new oak toothed in to the existing floor and then put down new floor in a 15x15 area. Altogether it took him about 3 hours. He was just a demon.


I had been anxious to get the flooring down so I could get the cabinets in. While I did put plywood in areas where I knew they would be covered by cabinets, it was too tight a workspace for both he and I to work together and I had other stuff to do. And I was not looking forward to assembling the Ikea cabinets. We had ikea cabinets in our old house and I was always very impressed and pleased with them but I had not built them myself. I knew this was going to be rather mind-numbing work and I was not disappointed. And I’ve only built the carcasses. Now I need to install all the fixtures.




















One of those other things I had to get done was one of my basement windows that had broken. One side of the house is a long brick walkway and there are no real window wells for the half buried basement windows. The bring comes right up to the side of the house and they just made a “well” three bricks deep right up against the window. 














The bottom of the frame of this window was actually in the dirt and when I pulled it out it was rotten. The board up top was just to try and block some of the cold wind that was coming in while I was working, lol. You can were I dug out the bottom of the frame. Took my sawzall and cut the side pieces to the height of the new window, put in a new “sole” plate, then mortared underneath and put in the new window. 














Took me far less time than I expected. Some things just go faster than you expect. I’m going to have to replace the other four basement windows on this side of the house but I’ll do one a year probably and in the mean time contemplate creating real window wells for each one.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Jebus. You're a machine.

3 hours for a 15x15 room doesn't seem that out of the ordinary if the subfloor was ready, the baseboards were off, etc. Laminate installation goes surprisingly fast with the proper nailer.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

It was not laminate. It was 3/4" hardwood oak. That included repairing the areas where walls had been taken out on the first floor where there was only subfloor. He had to chisel and rototool out sections of boards so he could tooth in new wood and have it properly staggered. He had to do that in three spots. AND he did the 15x15 area, which also had a lintel to a hallway. Needless to say when I'm around a craftsman who works that efficiently AND does spectacular work it is very inspiring.

Hopefully I will get all the cabinet bases installed today. The counter top folks are coming on Monday to measure, but I have a bunch of things I need to figure out. The "U" shape of where the counters go is not square, and the fridge and a tall cabinet are going to be installed on the part of the floor that slopes. If I do get these done today I'll probably work on the ceiling speakers and some light fixtures. The electrian comes next week also to do the heavy up so it would be good to have those hooked up by then.

We have been using a table in the basement as a temporary kitchen with microwave and toaster oven. Been about two months now. I'm sick of it. Time to push through and get this done. I had hoped to have it functional by when the girls came home from college for the Thanksgiving break but I was a little ambitious. Didn't help that I painted both of their bedrooms along the way.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

I just got done putting together our IKEA kitchen cabinets. I am never, EVER going to buy anything again from IKEA that requires any assembly. I'm DONE.

I'm quite pleased with the result and I'm generally impressed with the quality, particularly the hardware, but it was a mind-numbing task. It was complicated by the fact that I had made an error in the cabinet layout design. I had not offset one of the corner cabinets that has drawers by 2" so that the drawers could be pulled out without hitting the pulls on the perpendicular cabinets on the adjacent run. Total rookie move. I had to uninstall six cabinets, including the sink cabinet, the over the fridge cabinet, and an 88" tall pull out cabinet and move them all over 1.75" and remount them. 

The granite folks come tomorrow to measure for the countertop. I'm hoping that in about two weeks I'll be ready to paint and then have the floor refinished.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Yeesh. I can imagine.

Was it like most Ikea products... held together by a set of one million dowels and lots of wood glue?


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Dowels and metal anchors and posts. I did not use any glue as once these things are under 1000 lb. of granite there is going to be zero torsional force on the cabinet frames. They will not be going anywhere or coming apart, trust me 

The real pain was that the kitchen products are totally modular, so everything comes in a separate box. A cabinet might be comprised of 10 or more items, and many of those items can be used across several different cabinets. The killer was that the finally assembly instructions for a given cabinet are included in the one product that distinguishes it and that is often the last piece that is incorporated during assembly so you are sort of flying blind until you get there if you did not gather every piece, unpack them all, and read the 10 instruction sheets before hand.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Lol. I can imagine. If you don't mine me asking, how much did the set run you?


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

I don't have the exact figures because the design changed and I had to get a few extra cabinets and I have a pile of other cabinets that need to go back, but when the smoke clears I believe the total bill from IKEA will be @$4,500. I bought everything during their 20% off sale including three appliances which allowed me to get the full discount. However, I only wanted their fridge (a 36" stainless side-by-side with in door ice, water, and digital controls) because it was well reviewed and it was marked down from $1,400 to $999 and then I got the 20% off on that as well. I bought two of their cheapest microwaves at $150 a piece to get to three appliances and immediately ditched them on Craig's list for $100 each. So $1,100 of that total is appliances so I guess that means the cabinets set me back $3,400. I looked at what they had at HD and Lowes and was not impressed, and the quote from Cabinet Discounters for "custom" was around 40% more than IKEA. That said, they definitely make a killing on their cabinets. I had to refer to my purchase list as I was assembling them as it was the only document that listed the parts for a given cabinet. I found my self frequently mumbling "That cost THAT much? What a rip off. Generally it's the front panels that they get you on, which are all solid wood, and some of the fancier hardware like the corner cabinet rotate and pull out mechanisms.










The panel on the sawhorses goes on the left side of the over-the-fridge cabinet and I'm going to cut it and install it when the counter guy is done. I need one more piece from IKEA, another panel to go on the right side of the tall cabinet to the right and I'll be done.

The next thing to tackle is the vent installation which is going to be tricky. It's actually going in front of the central window as you can see and since it's a wall mount (Island vents are 3" deeper and I would hit my forehead on it while cooking) and has no back I need to create a back out of plywood if only for the benefit of my neighbor and my general sense of fit and finish.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

At least you're making progress. Noticeable progress.

I spent my three day weekend and all of my off-shift time today chasing tool deals on Craigslist. I pickup and set up a ton of vintage tools, driving all over the place. But I do now have a very fuctional table saw, compounding miter saw, radial arm saw, router table and two routers, 25 bits, a Paslode gun, worm drive circular saw and a heavy duty reciprocating saw. I just need a good dado set (working that on the sister forum) and I'm set.

However, I only got 4 hours to work on my trim work and three hours to build the base for my bookcase. Certainly lacking in measurable results to show for over 50 hours or actual labor.

Guess it was probably worth it to tool up that much for $400.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Today is trim day and brine the turkey day. I'm going to smoke it tomorrow which will give me an excuse to also work on the trim.

I saved all the old trim and had planned on having it chemically stripped and primed but that ended up being outside the budget so I took inventory the other day of what was in good enough shape to reinstall. Looks like I'm good with most of the baseboard which is an unusual one two piece, the base and the shoe, instead of three piece. The base has a ogee profile routed right onto it. 











As much as I love my router I'd rather not have to try and reproduce that 85 year old profile so all of that is getting original wood and the new openings will have new trim all around except.

Thinking about this reminds me of an old friend I had when I lived in Philadelphia. He was a sculptor who taught at one of the local art colleges and he lived in the enormous 19th century row house off Spring Garden. He had over the years restored the interior, stripping and refinishing every last piece of elaborate trim and crown moulding. He had even machined his own scraping tools to fit the profile of the pieces he was working on. He was a total minimalist and in fact in his kitchen cabinet had only four mugs, four glasses, and four simple place settings. Most rooms did not have any furniture at all. The house was it's own sculpture. It was extraordinary experience walking through that house. It was one of the most serene places I have ever been.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

*The end is in sight!*

We now have a functioning kitchen. Still on the punch list are the glass tile backsplash, painting, and some electrical work:



















The first meal was a real pleasure. Three months of preparing meals in an unfinished 85 year old basement was really starting to put a dent in my appreciation of food.

The big open question is what to do behind the stove. I did not want to get rid of the window because more light is always good, but after a bit of cooking we clearly need something behind the back of the stove. I'm contemplating a stainless steel panel running straight up to the vent. A bit of a kludge, but it's better than nothing 

Need to finish off the powder room now. I did my first tiling job ever on the floor and boy do I have a newfound respect for tilers:










Never have so many things gone so wrong so quickly in such a small space. I had assumed that a small tile job would be easy, but did not appreciate the fact that it's much harder to work in a small space. In short order there was thinset all over the place and only one tile down...had to take a deep breath and force myself to relax and plan ever step. Even so it was like whack a mole...put a tile down, work on leveling, then realize I had pushed down on another tile and it had slid out of position, thinset oozing up between seams, etc. In the end it turned out OK except for the two tiles at bottom right that were not cut precisely to meet the marble threshold. I broke them out and chipped up the thinset (talk about a chore) and redid them.

The room was particularly challenging because it is significantly out of square. Had to angle the tile grid a bit to create the optical illusion of squareness and it worked out well, although in hindsight I think laying the tile diagonally would have been a good idea.

Now for the toilet, sink, paint and light...


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Oops. Double-post.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Diagonal laying is even more of a headace because you greatly increase the number of cuts that need to be made. Also, it's much harder to lay out and cut everything before you start slapping down thinset. Multiple courses make things even worse.

Just laid a floor with a ) shape to it a few months ago with a diagonal center field, a border course, two sizes and colors of tile. See here: http://www.diychatroom.com/f49/1958...first-home-first-major-project-114193/index7/ (page 7)


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Well this is one of those situations where more "pain in the ass and a few extra bucks" would have been if fine if it ended in a better result. Clearly diagonal tiles would have helped to mask the room's out of squareness. That said I'm pretty pleased how it turned out, having split the "out of kilter" angle between the right wall (outside window wall) and the threshold. It ended up looking quaintly skewed, but the whole effect was mitigated from what I might have encountered had I chosen a wall to line up with.

Also these were 13" tiles. The wet saw chews through them pretty quick and had I upped the number of tiles needed by say 50% to accomodate cutting for diagonals it would not have broken the bank and would have been worth had result had been noticeably better. As it stands I think it turned out well and I'm happy it's not diagonal, in fact.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Fair enough.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

Deciding that I needed music to deal with the relative tedium of all the painting I have yet to do, I set about setting up the audio system and along the way juggling around some of the network stuff that I have.

Before we moved, I had over a period of time built out a SONOS system in our old house. In short, this is a wireless audio system allows you to play music from a whole fistful of sources through any speakers you like. It will search for all the music libraries on any running computers in your house, play Pandora music off the net, connect to your Sirius/XM account if you have one, and play any of thousands of internet radio stations. Best of all, you can set up zones throughout your house, connect zones so they play the same music, select music sources, playlists, etc, all from your smart phone. I put my system together on the cheap, buying the pieces I needed over time through eBay.

In the new house I installed in-ceiling speakers in the kitchen, the family room, the parlor, and the powder room. They are hooked into wall volume controllers and then all the wires run down into the basement where I installed a wall rack from IKEA for about $40:










The wires run into a speaker selection box which is acting as nothing more than a distribution hub, and from there into a beefy Sonnance whole-house amp that I also got off eBay. It's main advantage is that it has an auto-on feature when it detects a signal, and shuts itself off after a period of no signal.

The rack also includes most of my network stuff--my FIOS modem/router, and my Netgear NAS network storage box which houses two 2 TB drives that store music, movies, photos, and computer backups. All this is right under where the home theater system will be above in the family room, making it easy to hook them together to watch movies off the Netgear through the Boxee Box I have. There will be another wireless access point on the second floor, connected to the main router though a pair of powerline adapters, to provide a fast connection to the bedrooms. The SONOS system is also connected to stand-alone speakers in the bedrooms.

I'm glad how all this worked out. Old houses can be particularly difficult creatures to insert new technology into. I swear our previous house must have had tin foil in the walls given how hard it was to set up a good wireless network in there. This has all turned out well and I really love having a place to put networked equipment that puts it out of sight and makes it easy to maintain.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

I find that I typically have the best luck with whole-house WiFi if I mount the router/AP close to or on the ceiling and rotate the antennae close to horizontal.

Most nice routers/APs have external directional antennae. Easiest way to imagine the direction of signal spread is to imagine putting a donut on the antenna.

Though if you wired that sound system, I'd imagine you already knew that... moving on.

Edit: Clearly jealous of your FiOS availability, for the record.


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

In my old house I tried everything under the sun to get better wifi coverage, including trying external directional antennae, a few of which I built myself out of tennis ball cans, and a few other tricks. For whatever reason, I just could not get full coverage of the dwelling, even with N-standard units, from one access point and ended up having to set up a two access points at each end of the house. I linked them through powerline networking which ended up being a revelation given how fast and rock solid it was. Oddly enough, the house we moved to is older and more robust, yet the Actiontec router (an extremely impressive piece of equipment which you can see a the top left in the photo above) that Verizon supplies reaches the whole house, from the basement and with one antenna, with ease. I may put my D-Link 655 up in my bedroom closet which would then give the whole back yard coverage which would be pretty cool in the summer. During the renovation I pulled some Cat6 up there and also to the attic so linking them will be easy.

FIOS is bloody amazing. We have 25/25 in large part because I work from home a fair amount and we are heavy consumers of streaming movies and music. In addition, Verizon is best service provider I have ever had, bar none, and I've had them all going back to the late eighties. The service never goes down and if you ever call them with an issue you are soon talking to someone who clearly knows what they are talking about.


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## Thadius856 (Jun 2, 2011)

Blah. I have Comcast. No idea what the rating is, but I consistently pull a tested 12/3-4. Think I pay $45 on a promo bundle that runs out... like, today.

Definitely no FIOS available here. Maybe uVerse, but the speed is terrible from what I recall.

Gotta call today to see if I can get another promo rate. I'm really considering dropping all TV and streaming everything through the XBox, the Wii, two Smart TVs and a Smart home theater. Maybe throw a Boxee or a Roku in the mix if they won't give me a price break.

[/threadjack]


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## Ironlight (Apr 13, 2011)

The secret code for getting them to give you a break is "I can't afford it." That triggers the CSR to cut you a deal. They will give you deal and then if you say "I can't afford that either." they will usually cut it down some more. If you just say "I don't want to pay that." or "So and so will give it to me cheaper." then they are far less likely to give you a good deal as they know you're just shopping around.

I'm close to dropping TV as well. We dropped our landline when we moved (and I actually just finished ripping out all the old wiring and junction boxes in the basement yesterday) and I've always expected that we would drop TV in the near future. We already watch streamed Netflix more than anything else, and then watch files off the NAS through the Boxee Box. I love the Boxee Box by the way. I had built an HTPC that ran XMBC and then Boxee but the Boxee Box does it all in a much smaller form factor using much less power.

Dropping TV service will also mean I can punt the Tivo which will be another $15/month in savings.


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