At Home In The Woods

[JKirkwood]

Check for consignment furniture stores in your area. They usually carry better condition furniture. Also, check for a ReStore (Habitat for Humanity). They may have appliances that have been donated from remodelers. Good source for building supplies as well.

I have enjoyed your project and appreciate your sharing details. It has been a great learning forum with all the "expert" help from the TBNer's.

Best wishes to you and the family for the future.

 

[eepete]

Pete,

Do you have cat doors in walls? Did you install them during the house construction or afterwards? Do you have any cat doors in exterior walls/doors? How well insulated are they? My general impression is that most of the pet doors are not insulated very well; you might as well just have an open hole in your wall.

Obed

We have them on both inside and outside walls. We framed then up so they could be attached just like it was a hole in a door. After drywall, we had to line the inside with nice wood, and then do trim to match the doors. All the door were in during construction and inspection. We consulted with the inspectors so they knew they were coming. The little cat doors cost as much to have trimmed out as the big people doors. Same details, just a change in the amount of material. Due to the small size, the scale the tolerances were a bit tighter than the people doors.

On door goes outside to an open deck, you can see both sides and the trim work before the door was added. We close that door at night: stick in a piece of white foam insulation (you can see it on top of the door in the picture) and put down the flap and lock it. The other door (shown just on the inside of the house) goes out to a screened in deck, it's open all the time. We put a different door here, it has a magnet in the bottom of it so the wind doesn't blow it open as easily.

The doors are not insulated, but they are less than a square foot of surface area. The leakage isn't an issue for us. It's far better than an open hole- if you hold it open you get a lot of breeze through it. The house has spray foam insulation so it's pretty tight. We did the door pressure test with the cat doors, no problems. Sometimes when it's cold the cats just site at the door. All the smells and none of the cold weather, cat paradise.

Finally, we have a catwalk around the main living room area. You can see where we put both an interior cat door from the 2nd floor into this cat walk (the shot with mini and me), and where we put some cat stairs in from the 1st floor to the catwalk (no door, you can see the 1st floor door at the bottom left). It's a fun architectural detail that also breaks up the high ceiling room a bit. The engineer in me likes the functionality of a catwalk in addition to the form of it all. There is also LED up-lighitng in the catwalk.

I also put in a cat-5 cable by the two outside cat doors. Someday I'll build a 180 KHz loop antennae for RF ID and combine that with a motion detector so we know which cats are inside or out. You can see the cover box on for this in the 1st picture (closeup of door from the inside). Fun project for another day...

Pete

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I also put in a cat-5 cable by the two outside cat doors.

Pete

Great ideas, love the cat walk. But we only have 4 cats, so I'd have to use CAT-4 cable. :laughing:

 

[Barton]

Obed & Pete,

Are you guys related? Brothers, perhaps!?

 

[Obed]

Finally, we have a catwalk around the main living room area. You can see where we put both an interior cat door from the 2nd floor into this cat walk (the shot with mini and me), and where we put some cat stairs in from the 1st floor to the catwalk (no door, you can see the 1st floor door at the bottom left). It's a fun architectural detail that also breaks up the high ceiling room a bit. The engineer in me likes the functionality of a catwalk in addition to the form of it all. There is also LED up-lighitng in the catwalk.
...

Pete

Wow Pete. That's an interesting set up you have. Put's a whole new meaning to the expression "cat house"! Thanks for posting the pictures.

For right now we will only have one door, the one between the kitchen/LR and garage. We also made arrangements for a future cat door that runs between the garage and the screened-in back porch. You can see the hole left in the brick for the future cat door. We would need to make some sort of cat door through the porch screen so the cat could get all the way outside.

Obed

 

[Obed]

On Tuesday we are supposed to get our electrical re-inspection. Assuming we pass the inspection, the electrician will want to get paid. So we needed to make sure all the lights, outlets, appliances, and other equipment were on the circuits where we wanted them in order to prevent overloading individual circuits. Before the wiring occurred we had discussed with the electricians at length about what would be on each home run. We just needed to verify them before paying the final electrician's bill.

In consequence, today my wife and I tested and documented which breaker controls each light, outlet, and appliance. The labels on the breaker panel were not detailed enough for us and some of the breakers were labeled incorrectly. If I had it to do over, I would have asked the electricians to not write on the labels for the breaker panel but just use a loose piece of paper. That way we could make the panel labels say what we want them to say and wouldn't have a bunch of lined-out and re-written entries.

We put blue painter's tape at each switch and outlet and marked the corresponding breaker number on the tape. We would like to find some means to discretely and permanently label each face place with the breaker number in a way that is not ugly/tacky. That way, if a breaker trips, you could just look at the # on the face plate and immediately know which breaker to check. Meanwhile, we can just use the hand-written sheet I made up that documents the breaker associated with each device.

 

[dstig1]

If you get a label maker that uses the film labels (Brother makes a lot of them - P-Touch), you can use clear film label stock, so all you would see is the number. They come in different text colors too, but it could be more a matter of what you can find (black on clear, white on clear, etc). You can control text size so you could print a tiny number on there, if you like. They are about as inobtrusive as I have seen. I use them for labeling data connections on wall plates. Office Max/Office Depot/Staples/etc places will have a large selection on hand.

 

[tommu56]

OBED
On any thing I modify or work on I write the beaker number in marker on the back side of the plate.

Take the plate off see what breaker controls it go turn it off test curcuit and proceed with work.

At work we have an excel spread sheet that every one is suppose to keep up to date some do some don't.
I think you will get netter cooperation with your "employees":laughing:

tom

 

[dcyrilc]

I think you will get better cooperation with your "employees":laughing:

tom

I don't know....

...his wife would be CEO, so that leaves his daughter and the cat as the employees.:laughing:

 

[mikefromnh]

We put blue painter's tape at each switch and outlet and marked the corresponding breaker number on the tape. We would like to find some means to discretely and permanently label each face place with the breaker number in a way that is not ugly/tacky. That way, if a breaker trips, you could just look at the # on the face plate and immediately know which breaker to check. Meanwhile, we can just use the hand-written sheet I made up that documents the breaker associated with each device.

Hey if it makes you happy go for it. But in practice its fairly easy to check which breaker has tripped just by looking at the panel. Besides you shouldn't have any tripped breakers.

For some of my houses I have taken a copy of the floor plan and written which breaker serves each room. That way if you want to shut off power to the bedroom you can look and see which breakers it could be.