The new office... so far

We've been living in the new house for about a week now, and things are coming along. Every day or two we find some new little disaster that needs dealing with. It turns out that the dishwasher is leaking, and the central air conditioning unit either needs fixing or replacing. But the washer and dryer work, our new sink is awesome, and most of our kitchen cabinets are in place.

And my new office is still filled with boxes and junk because I've been too busy to set things up properly, but that's on my to do list for this weekend. I decided that I've outgrown a single desk setup, so we picked up a second desk from Ikea a few weeks ago. Right now it's covered with odds and ends, but eventually I hope to use it to give myself a little extra workspace.

We also picked up an office chair for $30 from a secondhand store. It's far more comfortable than the desk chair I had been using, and it's at least $100 cheaper than anything I would have picked up from an office supply store.

Sharp eyed viewers will also notice that the windowsills have been ripped off. We have a guy fashioning replacements which should be in place in the next week or two. Did I mention this room is still a work in progress?

But all told, there's plenty of room for me, my computers, boxes of files, and some recording equipment. There's even a closet which I'm going to use for storage and as an occasional voice booth when I need to do radio work from home. That's the nice thing about converting a spare bedroom into a home office. They tend to come with closets, which are excellent at damping sounds if you throw a few shirts and a pair of pants or two in there.

The new house

As if my life hadn't been busy enough, Farrah and I decided to buy a house recently. So on top of blogging for managing the fast-growing Liliputing, blogging for Download Squad, and anchoring newscasts a few days a week at WHYY-FM, we've been doing all sorts of housy stuff.

First there was the house hunting, mortgage applying, offer putting-in, negotiatin' and so forth. About a month ago we closed the deal and we've been working to make the house habitable ever since.

We move in a few weeks from now. But the house was a bit more of a fixer upper than we'd expected. We knew we wanted to remodel the incredibly tiny kitchen and make it bigger. But we also had to have a leaky roof fixed, deal with some faulty plumbing in the house, and there's still a fair amount of work to do. For instance, the laundry is on the third floor instead of the basement, which is nice. But the people who rehabbed the house a few years ago forgot to vent the dryer, so if you don't want lint rolling around the third floor of the house (which happens to be the floor my home office will be on), we need to knock a hole in the wall to vent the dryer.

A few weeks ago we signed up for DSL service with Verizon. Since we only need internet service and not cable TV or land line telephone service, DSL was by far the cheapest option. And every major room in the house has multiple phone jacks. Unfortunally, they were all wired wrong.

So when the modem showed up, I plugged it in to each room with the same results: nothing. I went out and purchased a cheap telephone handset to test the lines. Again, nothing. But if you climbed a ladder and plugged the handset into the Verizon box outside the house, you could hear a busy signal. So we could either run a line out a window and into that box as a permanent solution or call Verizon for help.

We chose the latter option, and the story gets long and sordid. But the short version is that I waited at the house from 8:00am until 7:00pm last Tuesday and nobody from Verizon ever showed up. Over the span of two days I spent about two hours on the phone until I found a Verizon supervisor that was actually quite helpful, and today two friendly Verizon techs came to the house and fixed our wiring. It was all very exciting and I'm writing this blog post using our brand new internet connection.

You can find more updates about the progress of our new home at Farrah's blog: Creative Neurosis.