Building the base for the shower p-trap

bathroom behind the scenes

Insulation bedroom outside wall (inside utility room)

moving more air ducts between joists for more headspace

bringing power to the gym

Day 9: adding the new waste water Y-connector from the bathroom to the main pipe

Day 9: Bathroom Insulation around the plumbing

Day 9: Bathroom power

Day 10: Building boxes for the waste pipe in the bathroom

Day 10: closing the bathroom walls

Day 10: Bedroom: Building a box around the ductwork

Day 10: Drywall ceiling around the corner window

Day 5: new walls for the bathroom

Day5: new walls for the utility room

I’ve clumped the recent days together. A holiday and a family visit took the concentration off the basement for a couple of days.

New purchases: Maax Yarrow shower kit $400 (just polystyrene, not acrylic because of the price difference), Watergenie mascerating toilet, pump and tank ($1000), Diplex bathroom heater ($200).

new walls going up in the future play room - Ah the basement is nice and cool in the summer!

Day 6: adding sound insulation to the bedroom / bandroom walls

Day 6: adding new ductwork to bring some heat into the bedroom

Day 7: Adding drywall on top of sound insulation in the bedroom.

Day 7: Adding some plumbing in the bathroom

Day 7: where the new shower will be.

Today we added water connections for the new bathroom, the framing for the bedroom and some insulation for an outside wall that had been left uninsulated since an oil tank had been removed some time ago.

new frame for the coming bedroom

new water connections

Some new frames are built for the coming bathroom and guest room in our basement. It’s getting exciting! What made it even more exciting is that we had our first power outage last night. From about 7pm to midnight we had no lights and no water (well pump). I guess it’s time for a generator. I’ve been scouring through Home Depot, Rona and online reviews quite a bit of the day. We’ll have an emergency panel added to our electrical panel to connect the generator to. In case of a power-outage we’ll have our microwave and some smaller kitchen appliances, a light on every floor and the water pump and sump pumps working. Hey, maybe even a bit of television and radio (and the cable modem of course). Hmh, what generator to purchase?

new frame for the coming bathroom

How framing is done these days..

wall for new gym / band room

Removed wall along floor in the new storage/utility room

The first day was not very exciting but it was immediately clear that this was going to take some time. One basement wall was removed  and the new wall positions were discussed and drawn on the floor. We also took some action with regards to our well water source. There is too much sulphur in the water and this created a rotten-egg smell everytime one turned on the tap. Not very appealing when brushing your teeth! So we had the local Pump & Well guys come in to install a chemical free iron filter. This little rocket (Duro Duroclean IF) now stands next to the well pump and does its job perfectly. The smell went away immediately.

Day 2:

A crack in the foundation wall was filled up to make sure we wouldn’t have any water problems after the wall gets covered with insulation and drywall. Some of the forced-air ducts were sitting too low in the basement (at six feet tall I had to duck to cross the room). There wasn’t any good reason for the ducts not to run between the joists however, so we had them moved up. For there to be enough room for the new basement bathroom, we also had the hot water heater moved a bit to the right.

DuroClean chem-free Iron filter to remove foul odours from well water

Fixing a crack in the foundation wall: epoxy

Ducts moved between joists to create more headroom in the basement

Move hot water tank and realign connecting pipes

Recently, I attended  techshow in Chicago and sat in on a “collaboration tools” dinner. I quickly realized that my work-from-home setup was interesting to others and have decided to share the tools I’ve found to be the most useful for my situation and how I’m using them.

Skype - all employees have skype accounts and we regularly chat and talk using skype. I also use a localized skype-in number so that clients and colleagues can reach me directly without having to pay long-distance fees. Add to this that skype is now available as an iphone App even allows me to continue these conversations while I’m out to lunch or strolling my daughter.

Action Method – this is quickly turning into our #1 organization tool. Simply enter somebody’s email to delegate a task, prioritize tasks and have discussions and reference files at your fingertips. Action Method also has a great iphone App which allows me to check on projects when I’m on the go. Action Method is a great example of how a beautiful user interface can make the difference. In the past, we used Sugar CRM but I found it to be too cumbersome, particularly for smaller todos. Too many fields to fill out in an old fashioned interface.

Twitter – of course. I can’t overemphasize that twitter has become a fantastic productivity tool for us. Every employee gets a company twitter account with protected updates (visible only to company employees) and is highly encouraged to twitter what they are currently doing and problems / questions they have.  The advantage? When I get up in the mornings I can see what people in 5 separate locations are doing and what happened while I was sleeping (6 hour time difference). This used to take 30 minutes of calling, emailing and waiting during morning meetings. Now it takes 30 seconds to see what everyone is doing and even more – what they want me to know! Did I mention Twitter makes a fantastic productivity tool?

Mantis – a bugtracking tool to track all the problems that users are having on our websites. Easy to use, simple layout and gives me a good overview of critical bugs as well as feature requests.

Cerberus -  Great tool to keep track of communications with customers. When your support team is geographically dispersed it’s important to know who said what when to whom. I’m very impressed with the templating features and the spam protection. We set up a two level support system in a matter of days.

ok, and I sometimes still use email but often take the written text and plug it into one of the abovementioned tools because it gives me the opportunity to manage the responses better.