Disaster!

Day before yesterday, I was watching a movie and relaxing. All was good. My computer was streaming the video to my Xbox 360, the video looked great.

Then it happened.

"The system has lost the connection to your computer."

Huh? Wierd.. There's no traffic on the LAN tonight except mine. I reset the connection and continued the movie. Not ten seconds later it did it again.

I went upstairs and decided to reboot the computer. As it went through it's start up backflips, the screen stopped on the Windows XP splash screen. And stayed there. For ten minutes. Then it said my system files were screwed and I should try to repair them.

What happened?!

Apparently, Windows decided to randomly delete a much needed file from my system folder, and of course, it was unrecoverable. I had to re-partition the hard drive to even copy files back to it, and lo and behold, 8 GB of space had become unusable.

I've ordered a new 250 GB sata2 hard drive, simply because I don't trust this one now that I've got it running again. The worst part of the whole fiasco is the fact that I lost everything on the hard drive. Emails addresses, bookmarks, stored emails... the whole lot.

Well... time to start rebuilding the system.

Steadily moving towards the big finish...

Well, after a few weeks of patience, it seems the problems I have had with the project are starting to go away.

The dishwasher is installed and working wonderfully. Much better, in fact, than the old one. I plan on getting rid of the old dishwasher by dropping it off at the steel reclamation centre here in town.

The toilet in the bathroom has been reseated. When we lifted the commode, the wax ring that seals the bottom to the sewer had slipped. It's tough to get them to sit exactly when there is one person who is trying to set the toilet, and the tank is attached.

Lights are all done, power and wiring completely finished. All I have left is the shower stall, and then the door and the bathroom is usable. I plan on putting up the ceiling when I can.

The office will be getting a coat of paint probably this weekend, and the carpet will be going in at the end of the month. Then we can move into it also. Again, the ceiling will get put in at a later date.

Sold my old motorcycle. I really want to get a brand new Suzuki Boulevard c50, but I need to pay some other bills first. And I probably will be going on a vacation to either the Dominican Republic, or Cuba sometime this year. Rob and I have decided that we need a break from work and the rest of life for a week. What better what than to go and be pampered with food and booze at a luxury hotel in the Mediterranean.

Not much else happening in my life at the moment.

Situation Normal: All Fudged Up

Seems like this project is going to be plagued with every possible problem before I can get it finished. When I last posted, We needed to put the toilet in and finish plumbing the drain on the sink. Well, the sink is done, and the toilet is in, but there's a problem. The toilet has some sort of leak in it. It's a slow leak that seem to be coming from the wax ring in the base.

Rob has tried tightening it, and it still hasn't fixed the problem, so our next fix will be lift the toilet, and redo the wax ring with a new one. "But that's not bad!" You would think so. There's more.

The electrical was all rough run, and I wired the switches, sockets, lights etc. Seems I should have done some more reading before I did this. Apparently, much to my embarrassment, I wired the wall switches in wrong. When I bought them, I just picked up the number I needed from the bulk bin. These were three way switches. Hence, I wired them wrong.

After we fixed this problem, we found that I had wired the GFCI plug in backwards. Sigh. Fixed that, and Voila! Power to the bathroom! Turn on the lights, and they worked! Turn on the fan, and it worked! Turn off the fan and... POP! The GFCI plug trips.

After an hour of checking the wiring and three grown men scratching their heads in puzzlement, We disconnected the fan from the circuit and left it for the night. I did some research the next morning and found this:

"The GFCI in the bathroom and Arc Fault detectors are only required by code for the receptacles. I would recommend against putting any lights on these circuits, especially the AFCI ones, as standard toggle light switches can arc a little when being turned off, causing the system to shut down... "

Ah ha! So all I need to do is wire the fan directly to a power source, and no need to run it off the GFCI. Ok, I can do that. But it's another delay.

The office was also checked for wiring mistakes. About half the plugs were put in the wrong way. While they would have worked, they would not have been the right polarity, possibly frying some electronic device plugged into them. We fixed that, and everything was ok.

So... I learned a valuable lesson, and had to eat a little crow.

The office is still on hold, and the bathroom is slowly being completed. The next part of the project will be to finish installing the shower. But.... as much as I hate to have multiple projects going, I need to start another. My roll away dishwasher finally gave up and died last week. I bought a new built in washer, and need to install it into my kitchen. I have the spot picked out, and everything is sort of ready to go, but again, it's a new project and I still have to finish the other two!

I hate washing dishes by hand even more, so this one will be placed as a priority. The highest point for the whole project is the office only has three things left: Paint, carpet, and a ceiling. As I'm using it to store materials for the other projects, I can't do anything in there until at least the shower is done.


Other than the project dragging still, life is pretty good. Work is busy, and satisfying. I'm still trying to get a steady girlfriend (I have one in mind, but she's awfully busy and hard to get a hold of!). About the only thing I can really say is I hope winter is over soon. I'm about sick of the cold.