diy

A few months ago, I found this Hacker News post about the AirGradient DIY Air Quality Monitor. I had already been considering buying an AirThings Wave Plus sensor to monitor my home's CO2 levels, but the high price and limited 'ownership' of the data coming from it turned me off.

So I built two AirGradient DIY air quality monitor boards (see above), and integrated them into my Prometheus + Grafana home monitoring setup I've been using to monitor other things in my house:

We have one corner in our basement that has never been touched since the day we moved in.

Now that we have three kids and the need for more playing area in our basement, my wife and I decided to consolidate all her sewing stuff into one part of the basement (apparently fabric is to sewers as scrap wood is to woodworkers).

Last weekend, I finally finished off one of a zillion projects my wife and I are tracking in our home improvements Trello board, and, as with most of my projects nowadays, I recorded a timelapse using my pi-timelapse rig:

I love the look and feel of hardwood flooring. After we positively destroyed the oldest carpet remaining in one of the rooms of our house by using it as a temporary kitchen (two spilled smoothies and a spilled kids art paint set sealed the deal), my wife and I decided the time was ripe for replacing the flooring in not one, but all three of the front rooms of our house—our 'front room' (used currently as a large play area, mostly), the foyer (which was, until now, a kind of dead area with beat-up parquet flooring), and the school room (where all the kids school supplies, art projects, games, and toys are stored).

About ten years ago, I bought a pair of used JBL J520m bookshelf speakers. They have nice, wood cabinets, a great-sounding woofer and tweeter, and a classic look (they don't really look dated, like 90% of 80s and 90s-era speakers).

Doesn't it look stately?

Whenever you buy used speakers, you should check the woofer cone and foam surround, as these are usually the first parts to deteriorate and cause terrible distortion in certain situations. In my case, the speakers had been stored in someone's garage for a few years, so I knew the foam wouldn't last long. When purchased, the foam flexed okay, but this year I noticed both speakers started making funny noises during explosions or low bass notes during movie and music playback.

My wife and I needed an extra dresser to keep up with the growing family (third baby is on the way in a few months!), and since we would rather buy things that last—but not buy new if we can save a bundle of money—we bought a used wood dresser on Craigslist:

First lesson: always inspect every last bit of furniture before loading it up and hauling it away! Most of the rails were in not-great condition, and the guides on the drawers weren't in great shape either:

We decided to make the best of the situation and make as good a repair as possible, resulting in much improved (like new!) rails:

I delivered a session on Tips for successfully working remote/working from home—both for employees and employers—at php[tek] 2016 in St. Louis today. This session was a bit shorter than yesterday's session on a HA Raspberry Pi cluster, but I had a lot of content I've been putting together for many months.

Every year, my wife and I try to tackle one or two large projects to improve our house and make it a more functional space for our growing family. This year, we decided to remove a giant brick chimney/fireplace that took up 30 square ft. of floor space both in the basement and on the main floor. With the regained space, we installed a TV/media center on the wall that had the fireplace, and arranged the room to have more seating so we could do more family activities in the room.

Here's a picture of what the room looked like with an old brick fireplace (it was wood-burning, but had been converted to gas logs prior to our purchase of the home):

Between projects at work, I decided to take a week's vacation and attempt a rather ambitious DIY project at the house. After working through some plans for the main rooms in our house, my wife and I decided we wanted to convert what was originally the formal dining room at our home, complete with a low-hanging chandelier and wall of floor-to-ceiling tinted mirrors, into a functional schoolroom with tons of storage and a teacher desk area.

So we started with this:

And ended up with this:

Sorry for the radio silence over the past couple months—I've been quite busy! In addition to finishing up my responsibilities at my old job (I'm going to start my new job at Acquia in just a week!), I've had a bunch of crazy, fun, and interesting things happen lately: