Now that we actually own our home, there's one or two things that need to be fixed. Nothing really important, just minor things that make the difference between a house and our house.
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Call us decadent, but now that we have a full-sized house, instead of a cramped town house, we've decided that we would like to be able to plug a computer into our in-house network almost anywhere in the house, instead of having all of the computers in a single room. Likewise, we'd like to have cable/video available in the bedrooms, the offices, the family room, and the library. And since we're going to the effort of running ethernet throughout the house, we decided to update the phone lines and run them throughout the house as well. While this is hardly a small project, the material cost is fairly low ... it's just time consuming.
After putting up with Cablevision of Loudoun (now Adelphia) for a year and a half, we finally gave up completely on cable television, so we purchased and installed a small satellite dish and receivers for Dish Network. The channel selection is better, the signal is better, and it costs us $10 less a month for the same level of programming, as compared to Adelphia. Yes, there was an up-front equipment cost, but it was worth it. Now we'll be tying that into the internal video wiring.
We've had a full-time connection to the Internet for several years, but the price for xDSL has finally dropped low enough that now a 192k symmetrical connection costs the same as a 28.8 dialup connection, so we're switching to CAIS Internet. This has given us the incentive to finish wiring the phones and network.
This is an ongoing activity involving the following steps:
![[done]](pics/done.gif){kind=small}
For a number of reasons, we decided that we wanted to have the living room physically separate from the rest of the house. The original living room had a half-wall with decorative rails and a doorway without a door. We decided that we wanted to install double bi-fold doors with frosted glass panels in the doorway, and that we wanted to mount a stained glass window above the existing half-wall.
This is an ongoing activity involving the following steps:
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These aren't in any particular order, so we'll be fixing them as they seem important ...