Sennheiser CX300 s Review

I know this isn't a DIY thing, but I've been so happy with these earbuds for my Apple Nano that I just need to share. I got some Sennheiser CX300 silver ear bud headphones for Christmas. I had asked for replacement ear buds for the ones that came with the Nano. The original ones didn't do a good job of blocking out the sounds in the gym that I workout at.

Here's the quick synopsis:

Pros: Good bass response, noise canceling and more comfortable than the original Nano earphones

Cons: I wish the length of the earphones where even. The left cord is shorter than the right.

For the past year I had been using the standard Nano earphones that came with the player. Because of the level of ambient noise at the gym, I've had to turn up the volume to sometimes three quarters of the way up to hear my music. So this year I asked for some replacement earphones for Christmas. What I got was the Sennheiser CX300. It came with three different size covers. I ended up using the medium ones. When I first tried them on I immediately noticed all the background noise in the house was gone. I was also pleasently suprised at the better bass response I was getting from them.

The real test was when I worked out yesterday. I was able to cut the volume by 45 - 50% over what the previous levels were. At least now I don't have to worry as much about damaging my hearing. The only thing I found kind of annoying was the fact the cord for the left earphone was shorter than the right. Call me old school, but I like both cords to be the same length.

Together For The Holidays

I just wanted to say, it was a lot of work getting the house ready for the holidays, but for me it was worth the time I spent with my family. Gotta go early this time.

Thank you to everyone that got me gifts, and especially the gift cards to Home Depot and Lowes. I'm like a kid in a candy store there. :)

Table Saw Deal

I was shopping with my brother-in-law at the Lowes this last weekend. When we entered the store we started straight up the main aisle when you enter, and came across some clearance items placed in the middle of the aisle. There were things like power washers, a toolbox for a truck bed, gardening stuff, and some power tools. Not thinking anything of this, I started to walk by everything at least until I hit the power tools. It’s a given that I’ll stop for some tools. My heart started to race immediately when I saw the prices they were marking things down to, from 25 – 60% off.

A lot of the things I saw were open box returns and some damaged box items. There was a Dewalt contractor table saw there for $200 that was normally $400, a Porter Cable router with plunge base (had one already), some deeply discounted tool set (no interest) and a Delta ts350. Upon closer inspection of my two options, it became quickly apparent that the Delta was going to fit my needs better than the Dewalt. The main reason was the Dewalt had a composite plastic top, which I’m sure was sturdy and would remain true, that was designed to make it easier to set-up and take down at a job site. What I was looking for was a table saw for use in a workshop or garage. That led me to the Delta even though it was only discounted from $400 to $300. It had a cast iron surface, 4” receptacle for dust collection and a metal stand. You could guess by the amount of detail I just gave about the Delta that I purchased that one.

New Carpet and Ceiling Painting

This weekend was spent preparing for the carpet we purchased at Home Depot to be installed today. Unfortunately this included finishing up the painting of the ceilings, left over from removing the ceiling popcorn, before they got here.

Painting
For the paint, I had originally purchased the Behr ultra white flat paint. Good thing I happened to go to Lowes before painting. While I was there I came across the Olympia paint end cap. I was able to pick up a 5-gallon container of flat white interior paint for around $35. This sure beat the close to $20 per gallon I was paying for the Behr version. Truthfully, the Olympia paint probably doesn’t have the same ability to cover previously painted walls with one coat, but I was painting a freshly textured ceiling. I came to this conclusion because I got sloppy in application in a couple of places, and painted a bit of the walls too. Not that it really matters too much because I’ll repaint all the walls to try to brighten the place up a bit.

Carpet installation
The carpet installation crew that was contracted by Home Depot was pretty professional. They arrived within the first hour of the time frame they gave me, and finished the installation of a little over 1000 sq ft of carpet plus stairs in 5 hours. All in all I’m pretty pleased with the outcome of purchasing my carpet with Home Depot even with the large chunk of time I spent initially with the sales person.

Cleaning and Quick Exterior Furniture Refinish

Today was a clean-up day in preparation of moving a bunch of stuff from storage, none of it light, to the garage. The house came with an older Toughshed, but in the move and popcorn ceiling, removal things where just put in randomly.

It wasn't all for nothing. Cleaning allowed me to take an mental inventory of what I had and what came with the house. The previous owner had done a remodel to the master bath, and had purchased extra tile. I also took a close look at the finishes I had accumulated either through past projects or close-out specials. A little side note, there was a time I was doing a lot of research and experimenting with various finishes for woodworking. The result of this was lets just say .. leftovers.

I happen to find part of a spray can of gloss spar-var, and move an older outside table in bad need of a new finish on the table top. These are the steps I did to do a quick refinish on the table top:

• I set about washing down the piece and cleaning it abit with a brass wire brush
• Letting it dry while continuing to clean in a different area. I didn't feel like cleaning it again so I made sure the piece was away from where I was working.
  
• Once it was dry, I did a quick knock down of the fibers that were raised by the water and wire brush with some 180 grit sandpaper. I used 180 grit because the surface was relatively smooth from the previous finish.
• Next, I tacked the piece to remove any dust from sanding with a slightly damp shop blue paper towel.
• When applying the spray finish I held the can about 4-6" away from the surface, and tried to spray in a consistent sweeping motion. I did this repeatedly from different angles to make sure complete coverage.
• Once sprayed, I let it dry overnight in the shed to make sure no debris was blown on it by the wind.
• There's enough finish in the can for another coat. Tomorrow I'll do a light sanding with either 180 or 220 grit sandpaper, tack it and spray one more coat.
  

Mortared Stone Around Mailbox

Now that the basic setup is done for the mailbox, its time I started to think about how to mortar stone around the mailbox. I found this one site that does a good job of giving a quick overview for using and not using mortar. I think I want to do a stacked stone look. Not sure if I'll use the prefab stuff I've seen at the Depot or go with o' natural. Probably the latter.

Sore Hands

I was able to put in the heavy gauge galvanized steel post for the new mailbox on Sunday. Sure wish I had a post hole digger. I dug the 2.5 foot deep hole with a shovel. At least I got a workout. Things pretty much went as planned. One of these days I'll learn to use work gloves. You don't realize what a little nub on the end of a shovel will do to your palm within an hour of repetitious use. I have a blister the size of a quarter on my right hand and the pinkie side of my left is really tender. Yup, I'm complaining like a wuss. Its OK. I kinda like the little bit of pain. Its like when I workout really hard and my muscles are sore. I love that feeling.

That was my Sunday. Saturday I helped a family member move into an upstairs condo. Enough said. On a related note, why is it you go to U-Haul, see a truck rental price of around $30, rent it and end up paying $90? For the amount they charge a mile you'd think the trucks were in kick ass shape, not something pushing 200k miles from the early 80s. Another thing is the insurance. The way they sell you on the $15 insurance. While we were driving we saw a new Ford GT something, the one that looks exotic. I told the guy driving we should test the max of the $15 insurance and plow into that vehicle. By the way, that's the second one I've seen within a couple of days. They must be more "affordable" or there's a club in town or something.

Putting In a Secure Mailbox

With the raise in identity theft we want to make sure someone can't just take our mail easily. This weekend I'll be installing a new mailbox. I plan on doing this project in two stages. First will be setting the mailbox and post in concrete. Next stage will involve building a stone surround around the box. If I didn't need the mailbox right away and have limited time, I would pour a concrete footer and build the surround.

I've read a couple articles online about setting posts in concrete and they seem to have these things in common:

• It seems a bag of concrete mix can be used for a 10" by 2' hole with a 4" post
• Since the mailbox uses a metal post I need to use a rust inhibitor like POR (paint over rust) or rustolium
• The hole needs to be three times the diameter of the post and about 2' deep
• Put gravel at the bottom of the hole and 6" around the base
• Place the post in the hole, level it and anchor it in place with stakes and wire or by nailing a couple of 2 x 4s to it
• Mix the concrete. I'll be using a concrete mix so I don't have to worry about any other proportion than mix to water.
• Pour in concrete level to the ground and poke air bubbles out with some scrap wood
• Check level of the post and adjust if necessary
• If I didn't plan on building up a surround I'd add some more concrete around the base to form a mound so the water runs off the sides

The only thing I'll be doing a little different is making a square section of concrete so I can use it for a footer later.

Researching Home Insulation

It is now getting cold here in Vegas. By cold I mean high of 50 and low of 31. Sure sure, I've lived on the east coast and know that's not bad, but I've been living in Vegas for about 13 years now. I'm used to the 100 + weather because my Jeep doesn't have A/C. Conversely, my cold tolerance has gone down dramatically. I go for a jacket when it gets around 70 F.

Back on the farm, I noticed my new home was a lot colder than the condo we were living in before. The home was built in 1979 so there is no telling what the R ratings are on the insulation in the exterior walls and attic. I guess its back to research and figure out a plan of attack to see what I can do.

Some of the sites I'm checking out are:

• Energy Star
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory - Building
• U.S. DOE Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• Owens Corning
• Insulating an unfinished attic

2nd Floor Texture Is Done

Its been a little bit of time since I've written. This is because of the holiday, frantically trying to finish packing for our move across town, moving and getting the rest of the ceiling texture taken down. It took about about 20 hours to scrape and spray texture for about 1k square feet of ceiling. I still need to paint it. It'll probably take the same amount of time to paint it. Here's the breakdown of things done and things learned for those who don't care about the exposition of my pain.

• It took about 12 hours to prep everything. Even spending that amount of time sealing up the rooms and hallway, there was some cleaning with a shop and regular vacuum.
  
• Scraping the texture wasn't too bad. I made the mistake of not getting the ceiling wet enough. Yeah I know, I said to make sure you get the ceiling was wet enough. I stopped trying to use the bag attachment after the test room. You'd be surprised at what 5 - 10 extra pounds will do to you after 10 minutes.
  
• Using a corded drill with the paint stirrer sped up the joint compound mixing. Be mindful of your paint mixer if its plastic. Mine came right off the metal rod once.
• The mixture and settings for the compound and hopper were pancake batter thick compound, medium spray nozzle and right around 25psi coming out of the air compressor.
  
• I found it best to mix up about two hoppers worth of joint compound at a time. For me this was about a third of the box because I was going for a thick pancake batter consistency.
• When spraying I was too timid when applying texture the first time around I think. I made sure to spray in overlapping strokes this time. It kept me from having to go back and touch up spots.
• Light, light and more light.
• Last thing. Invest in a good respirator instead of those paper masks. I did and I wasn't coughing up particulates that evening.
  

Here is my tale of woe. I decided, like a freak I would get this knocked out in no more than two days. Wednesday and if necessary Friday. I mean really I had done some prep work ahead of time by taping off the sections of wall where the ceiling I was going to scrape met the walls. I had it in my mind I could do it in a day. Right....

Started Wednesday about 9am, consolidated everything upstairs in the bathroom that would not need any work done in it. BTW I'm going to redo that bathroom probably next year. I though cool, all I have to do now is tape up the light fixtures and ceiling lamp then get started on the plastic. Well, I didn't realize there were so many recessed light fixtures in the master. While taping the lights I saw that the vanity area in the master bath needed to be totally prepped too. That added another half hour onto prep. Got done around 12 with all the lights, ceiling fans and moving all the furniture out of the areas.

My wife came with some food about this time. Ate. Got back to work putting up the plastic. It was about 2pm by the time the plastic was up. Got my trusty sprayer and started to soak sections at a time of the master first. Scraping was slow going. I could scrape for about 10 minutes and have to stop to rest for a minute or two. As I finished a room I would spackle the ceiling for a better base to spray on. Because they used the popcorn to hide the imperfections in the ceiling it took me till 6pm to finish that.

Let the spraying begin. I was already tired from scraping and the other stuff done previously. I know, cry some more wussy. My plan at that point was to get the master, vanity area attached to the master and hallway done. Damn that master was huge! To get those sections done I was spraying texture till 9:30pm. I could do no more. So I spent half an hour doing clean-up. Went back to our condo, because at that time we weren't living at the house yet. Funny thing though, I was wearing my new respirator when scraping and spraying. When I got home and looked in the mirror, my entire head was ghost white except for the area where the respirator was.

Took Thanksgiving off.

Started up around 12pm on Friday. I still had two other rooms to do and decided to respray the test room to make sure it was good. That was business as usual until my 8 year old cordless drill gave out on me. Luckily there is an Ace hardware store down the street. Went there instead of the Depot or Lowes because it was Black Friday. Didn't want to spend the money on a cordless so I picked up a Makita 3/8" cored drill. I was amazed at how underpowered my cordless was compare to the Makita. By the way, unlike me you might want to remember that you can take the plastic head off a plastic paint mixer with a good drill. With a little coaxing with a hammer it went back on. This was of course after I had to dig it out of the joint compound. After that I was able spray the rest.

Friday turned out to be fairly straight forward. So in retrospect of writing this I guess it wasn't that bad. Still need to prime and paint everything. Then the downstairs has two rooms that need popcorn removal. Oh, the real kicker will be the 25' ceiling. That will have to wait though.

Test Room Done

I applied ceiling texture in the test room this last weekend. I hung plastic, sprayed the ceiling with water and scraped the old popcorn off. I work in a shop that does GIS so I had access to 42" and 60" wide maps that would have gone to the trash. Those went on my shed and were used to practice spraying the texture with the hopper. After practicing, texture was applied. I did the clean up. I took some time off around the Thanksgiving holiday to do projects and move into the house. So, I'm going to attempt to get the second floor done on Friday. That's about 1k sq. ft. minus the test room. Should be fun.

Here is what I learned from my test room.

• I made the mistake of putting up the 1 mil plastic first then trying to put masking tape on. Next time I'll mask off where the walls meet any popcorn texture using 1 1/2" masking tape, not the painter's tape (blue one). If I use the painter's tape I'm afraid the adhesive will not be strong enough to last getting soaked with the water. That'll allow me to staple up the plastic and not worry about over spray on the walls.
• When setting up the plastic I put it on the floors first, but I think I'll staple up the walls first on Friday.
• Use plenty of water. I was using one of those pressurized water sprayers, the kind you can use for things like pesticide and such. This worked fine while I was working in small areas. I'd spray once, wait a couple of minutes and end up spraying right before scraping. I've heard of people bringing in the hose to spray. In hindsight it might have saved me some time. I don't have a hose(s) right now that would reach so I used what I had.
• Make sure you have some other light source besides the one in the room. I didn't. Because of stupid daylight savings and the days being shorter I started to run out of natural light from the window. I'm going to pick up one of those halogen work lights.
• I was using a paint mixer that went on my drill. I can see where it would be a problem if I tried to mix a whole box of joint compound at once. When I do the rest of the upstairs I'll try to limit it to half a box at a time.
• For spray material I just used the topping joint compound, the one in the green box.
  
• I wanted a light to medium texture so the instructions with my hopper recommended the medium nozzle with the joint compound mixed so it was like thick paint.
• I only had a paper mask, but when I started scraping the popcorn texture the particulates in the air started to increase a lot even with it being wet. I will definitely invest in better breathing apparatus.

That's all I can remember for now.

Bought Ceiling Texture Supplies and Carpet

After work last night my wife and I went to Home Depot to set up carpet measuring for the second floor. While we were there I thought that we might as well pick up what I needed for the ceiling texture since my attempt at using the paint / texture mixture failed. I really don't understand why I don't go to a different store sometimes. Sorry, I realize that was hopping around a bit, but for some reason it took a good 40 - 45 minutes to set it up for someone to come out to my house to measure the areas for the new carpet.

We ended finding a good deal there for the carpet. We're going to pay a little over $23 per square yard for some pretty plush carpet. This was our second carpet trip to the Depot. The first one we talked to a pretty knowledgeable sales person named Christina. She was the one who showed us the smaller display with carpet samples we could check out and take home. We ended up with a color called Root Beer. I know the name is kinda weak. One of the main determining factors for the color choice was the color of our dog's fur.

After waiting to get the carpet measurement set up, we picked up the stuff for the texture ceiling. This is the stuff I grabbed;

• 12 ft x 400 ft of 1 mil plastic - $42
• hopper and sprayer with 3 nozzles - $64
• box of joint compound - $7

So if you count the ceiling texture / paint I used before the total comes to $131 so far.

The junk about my home improvement ends here. The rest is me ranting about retail and software development. First off, I used to work a retail job and did so for a pretty good chunk of time, like 7 years. Now I work for something like a utility company doing computer related stuff. The person who setup our order had done so only once before. Half the problem seemed to be the fact he was new, which can be expected this close to the holiday. The other half of the problem seemed to be the unnecessarily long and repetitive process he had to go through.

Part of my job is watching how people work, and trying to improve the ease at which they do their job. So when this person started to help us, I couldn't help but observe the amount of extra work he needed to do interfacing with what looked like an AS/400 terminal on their windows machine. They upgraded the hardware, but didn't spend the time to increase productivity and sales by creating a more streamlined process. In fact there was another person sitting near us that was waiting for 15 minutes for the same thing we were having done. Another idea would be to train holiday staff using the same program in a training mode so none of the transactions were real, but the could get the experience working with the older system.

Failed First Attempt At Ceiling Texture

In my house I unfortunately have popcorn ceilings. Out of everything in the house that is what I notice the most. I was able to successfully scrape test areas without a problem using the Homax ceiling texture scraper. This was purchased at my local Home Depot in the painting section. It only took half an hour for about a 10 x 10 section of ceiling with only 20% of the texture not making it into the trash bag attached to the scraper.

So I'm wandering down that same isle I got the scraper in and I see some premixed ceiling paint and texture by Behr. And of course immediately I envision myself not having to buy a hopper and sprayer, spending the time to find the right consistency of mud and not having to practice for half a day to get the right texture I want. Grabbing a 2 gallon plastic container I head to the paint counter, have them shake it up and confirm with the paint person I should use the largest nap roller to apply the texture paint. Oh, I was all to happy to pay the $18

I took a few minutes on my lunch break yesterday to visit the Behr site to check out the recommended application. They mentioned applying the texture paint with a loop roller and then using a smaller nap roller to set the texture height. That night I laid plastic in a hallway closet that I had previously taken down the popcorn ceiling along with some other prep work like taping things up. After opening the container I was glad I had them shake the stuff. There is no way I could have gotten the sand as evenly distributed in the paint. When I started to roll the texture on I immediately noticed that it wasn't going on consistently. I'm not sure if it was the amount I loaded onto the roller or what. It took me about half an hour to apply the texture as evenly as possible to a 4' by 4' section of the closet ceiling. I had to do some major touch-up to some areas. When I went over a previously textured area it would yank clumps off the ceiling. There was no way I was doing more than that section of ceiling with this stuff.

Needless to say I'm buying a hopper and sprayer this weekend. I was thinking later that this stuff might be OK if I wanted to trowel it on. As far a creating either a knockdown or orange peel ceiling texture this wasn't going to work. Granted I didn't have the recommended loop roller, but at the rate the texture was making my thick nap roller one big solid piece of sand I don't think it would matter.