There’s our pretty pretty house. Isn’t it pretty? Now on to the aforementioned scotch-powered wit:
I meant to post much more often than this, but I have some very good excuses. In no particular order of importance or gravity, but numbers are aesthetically pleasing:
1) Work is hard and it takes up my time.
2) My 2 year old son is fun and he takes up my time.
3) Building a house is hard and fun and it takes up my time.
4) I spent a lot of my blogging time on server issues, that took up my time.
5) Daylight Savings Time no longer saves time, and the sun now goes down before I get home.
Server issues? Server issues. So, quick story (Pro tip: skip this paragraph). Believe it or not, I have a test server and a production server for my websites that nobody goes to. Why? Because I’m an engineer, and building ecosystems are as important to me as the final product. But not as important as scotch and cheese. So, here’s the quick story, which I’ve introduced twice so far: PHP 5.4 went went end of life last month, so I needed to update to the newest stable PHP 5.6. But Debian still has 5.4 when you do your normal apt-get’s, but I wanted 5.6. So, in my test environment, I updated my server and my server was stable. (If that didn’t make sense to you, replace all that with “blah blah blah, I updated my computer and it worked.”) Then, after a couple of days of stability, I updated my production server. 5 minutes later, my test server crashes. 10 minutes after that my production server crashes. I can’t even log in. I can’t even reboot them! I freak out because I can no longer even access the data for my websites, let alone the fact that every website I host is offline, and I start every trick I have to get back in. After 3 hours of futile efforts, I open a trouble ticket with my virtual server hosting company (Linode. Awesome awesome people), tell them I did a bad thing by updating my servers, and they respond with “Sorry about that. Our Atlanta hosting servers are being targeted with a DDOS attack right now and we are trying our hardest to get things working again. This will probably take another hour.” Once the stupid hacker attack was over, all was well again. Phew! The blog is back online, and it wasn’t my fault after all. Rejoice.
So, what happened since we signed the papers? Well, we gave the builders money, which they were happy about. We asked them to move walls, which they did. We asked them to move wiring, which they did. We asked them to change doorways, which they did. We also changed a tub, made the shower bigger, put in blocking for hanging my guitars, turned a doorway into an archway, located the in-ceiling speakers for our kitchen, dining room, master bedroom, and master bathroom, brought closet doors together in a bedroom, moved the doorway to Sarah’s closet, located our towel warmers, and told the builders that we wanted to pick the exterior paint colors. Then we got our budgets for the kitchen and we went shopping!
KitchenAid has a new awesome color for 2015: Black Stainless. It’s not black on stainless, it’s not stainless with black trim. The stainless steel itself is black. It is sexxxxxy. Check it out! I decided I had to have it. So I started with that color and picked their new black stainless dual oven… And it’s almost $4000. Take a look at the dishwasher: looks great. $1500. Checked out the weird 5 door black stainless fridge, $4000… holy crap there’s an eleven thousand dollar fridge. My GE appliances will look fantastic in the new kitchen.
We have designed and redesigned the kitchen 4 times now. The cycle usually goes that we decide everything that we want, get it priced, decide we didn’t want certain details in the first place, rearrange the kitchen again, get it priced, decide we didn’t want certain details in the first place, rinse, repeat. I think we are getting close though. We’ll have an island instead of a peninsula, a showpiece fume hood instead of an over-range microwave, separate in-wall microwave and oven instead of a combined oven or a double oven, and lots and lots and lots and lots of drawers. We’ve picked a color. The cabinets will be “cappuccino”, which is darker than our current kitchen’s “coffee”. Nevermind that in the world of coffee, coffee starts out dark and gets lighter as you add milk for a cappuccino. Out are any turned post corners for our island ($1450), out are the glass-door cabinets on either side of the fume hood ($1800), and once we priced adding a raised panel to our doors at an unbelievable fifty six hundred dollars, we decided we like it flat.
Sarah is worried that we don’t have a place for everything. We’re almost tripling our kitchen cabinets and we’ll have a pantry for the first time ever. I’m confident we can squeeze it all in.
– Josh