The Great Northern Estate Update Phase 2

So at the end of the last post we were up to summer 2024 and nearly the end of phase 1. You might think this post would be about ending phase 1 but that would include finishing the downstairs floors. If that happened the floor in the living room would get ruined by the work upstairs so we'll pause phase 1 for now.

Phase 2 begins upstairs. As bought the house had 4 bedrooms upstairs. With the removal of the stairway to nowhere three of those bedrooms are all in a line, which is no fun. That northern bedroom was really small and there was only one bathroom in the house so why not turn that little bedroom into an upstairs bathroom and a walk in closet.

The original plan had it as a half bath but Angie and I pushed for a shower and I'm glad we did. It essentially makes the upstairs a little apartment. Its nice to not have to traipse through the kitchen to take a shower.

Bathroom on the left, walk in closet on the right. Well, it was supposed to be a closet. My parents wanted a little bed in there, so for now we're using it as a bedroom.

With the upstairs bathroom and closet finished the guys moved on to the master bedroom. This didn't require a whole lot, new trim and better paint. Electric and insulation had been done by one of the Cushman brothers at some point in the past.

The floor in the master bedroom has been stripped but not refinished. Unfortunately its had a lot of traffic since the finish was taken off so when we do the rest of the floors this one will need to be sanded too but fortunately it'll just be a quick sand to take off the wear. I'm tentatively planning on refinishing the floor in the little bedroom and the master bedroom last summer but that will depend on replacing the windows in the master bedroom.

Actually the big holdup right now is the fact that we've used the house all summer. The guys really only get access from late November through mid-May. I think they had planned to work into the summer but my parents are much more comfortable in the house than the camp, the indoor bathroom being an important feature.

At some point last winter the roof leaked a little around the chimney into the downstairs bathroom. The guys gooped up the joint which stopped the leak but that meant we needed to shift focus and get a new roof.

This will be a standing seam metal roof but we opted for an inch of foam insulation. There isn't much insulation in the roof of the house. We intend to add more but there is only so much you can do so this will help.

I left before the metal started going on, it should be done by now.

Technically the roof is phase 3 but this is one of those things we didn't feel comfortable putting off. It'd be stupid to spend all that money on the inside to have it ruined by a leaky roof. Fortunately this kind of investment is once in a lifetime, I should never have to mess with the roof again.

The Great Northern Estate Update Phase 1

I realize I've been remiss in updating you on the state of Cushman House

Fall 2020:

Summer 2024:

A pretty good transformation right?

In my head I've broken this project roughly into 3 phases. Right now we've nearly completed phase 1 which is to rebuild the downstairs. Phase 2 takes us upstairs including re-working the stairs themselves which are too narrow and steep.

To that end we've rebuilt the kitchen, bathroom and dining room entirely. Thats new windows, exterior doors, flooring, insulation, electric, plumbing, ceiling, cabinets, lighting, shower, and toilet. The only thing original is the kitchen sink and fridge.

I didn't really want the laminate flooring but the glue on the old flooring would have been very difficult to get off the hardwood underneath. I'm particularly pleased with exposing the chimney, I think it looks great. Our builder was doubtful. There is something about folks around here that makes them want to hide a chimney.

The living room and downstairs bedroom (formerly a parlor) got new insulation, electric, windows and wallboard. The bedroom also got a closet:

These old houses never have any closet space and we were lucky to have somewhere to put this one.

Oh and before I forget the reconfiguration of the bathroom had us saying goodbye to the stairway to nowhere:

Its such a weird stairway that it bears explaining. I'm taking the picture from a very small bedroom on the north end of the house. The stairway Angie is coming up ends at a chimney. So there are 2 little like proto-steps that brought you into the bedrooms. I wouldn't have wanted to negotiate those in the middle of the night. 

The spot where Angie is standing in the picture is now the bathroom vanity down stairs.

Still to come in phase 1 is the ceiling in the living room and bedroom and refinishing the floors in those rooms.

Progress on the great northern estate

 

You might remember the house and barn we bought in northern Maine. After mucking about for a couple years I finally made contact with the builder who worked on our camp and got him to work on the house.

Step one was to put garage doors on the south end of the barn.

The original builder never bothered to put doors into those openings, they were covered with a kind of conveyor belt like matting used for making paper. This spring I spotted a raccoon sneaking in through a gap and knew we needed to do something.

One substantial application of money later and we've got doors. If you look carefully you'll notice that the cap between the garage doors and the hayloft door has increased. The door openings were originally 9'x9'. Nine foot tall garage doors are very expensive, like double the price, so our builder shrank the door opening a foot and put in 8'x9' doors. We don't need the big height here because of the big barn doors on the east and west walls which allow the tractors to pass through.

Looking back at these old pictures I'd forgotten how much stuff was in the house...

The next plan is for the kitchen and bathroom. As a summer house you could get away with bad windows and no insulation in bedrooms but you can't really use a house that has no kitchen or bath.

Of course the first step is demolition.

This is ahead and to the right of the first picture above. I actually did this work, there was a little stub wall where the ladder is, which I removed. The window in the left of the picture has been removed. That's the north wall of the house which is the coldest so a window there is kind of silly. The window in the center of the picture has been replaced with a larger one.

This is facing into the bathroom looking north. The window pictured here has been replaced with one just over half the height. I like having natural light in the bathroom but there is no need for a big window. This door is new, this used to be the "stairway to nowhere" which went up and stopped at a chimney with little steps up to the right and left to get into bedrooms.

Looking into the bathroom facing west, this is where the door used to be. The shower will be just on the other side of this wall. We decided to go with a stand up shower rather than a tub, who takes baths anymore?

I talked to the builder this week, the drywall is all hung and kitchen cabinets are ready to go in. This project has consumed way more money than I expected but this is really the most expensive phase of construction because of needing to buy things like cabinets and the shower and whatnot. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have an update where things are going in, not just getting torn apart.

More old school computing

 You might remember my first computer well my second computer was an Atari 130XE. It was the last of the 8 bit Atari computers. I got it for Christmas 1987 or '88, I don't remember which. This was fairly late in the lifespan of the Atari 8bit, the 130XE was released in '85 and discontinued in '92, quite a long life for an 8 bit machine.

Anyway in 1985 Atari also released it's first 16bit computer, the Atari ST. ST stands for "Sixteen/Thirty two" to reflect that the Motorola 68000 processor in the machine was 32bit internally but 16bit on the outside. The ST machines were a LOT more expensive than the 8bit and my friend Nate had an Atari 800XL so I wanted something where we could share games so I got the 130XE.

For 30+ years the ST has bugged me so this year, for reasons even I don't really understand, I went looking for an ST.

Locally I found a few 520ST models but with only half a megabyte of RAM I wasn't super excited by them. RAM upgrades are possible but challenging. The prices were also more than I wanted to pay. Eventually I opted for a 1040STf from The Brewing Academy. I opted to pay a little more for one that had been tested.

Apparently these came out of some educational environment which is reflected on the box.

The next job was to figure out how to hook it up. One nice thing about the 1040 is that it has it's power supply built in so only a normal power cable was required. 

The Atari ST's use a weird 13 pin DIN connector for the monitor. I found that the connectors were cheap on eBay and, not knowing if anything else about the machine would work out I decided to start by making my own cable.

Warning, these cables are very janky.

I found the pinouts on the internet.

My cables started life as a VGA cable that I then cut in half and soldered a DIN 13 end on to. The Atari ST has 3 graphics modes, 2 color and one monochrome. The 2 color modes synch at 15Khz which is out of range for most modern monitors. The first cable is my color cable, it wasn't too hard to make but I quickly discovered that I don't own anything it can sync to. The second cable is monochrome which was MUCH harder to make, many of the VGA pins have to tie together. A better way to do this would be to attach short leads to the DIN connector and the solder those to the ends on the VGA cable. I did manage to get the monochrome cable working though:

Notice the power light at the bottom left and the floppy drive light in the upper right.

A cool feature of the ST machines is "TOS in ROM" TOS is "The Operating System" (very clever Atari) and it lives in read-only memory (ROM) on the computer, meaning you don't need a disk to boot the machine.

The TOS desktop is similar to the Macintosh desktop of the period but with a lot more real estate. Macs of the period only had a 9" screen.

At this point I knew we had a runner so I ordered an Atari to VGA adapter.

The adapter cost as much as 10 of the DIN connectors I bought before but it also includes audio capability and with the push of a button can support both color and monochrome modes.

The setup every nerd in 1985 wished he could have had...

So, next steps: I need to get a working mouse. I was POSITIVE I had a PS2 mouse at home but I've looked all around and can't find one. I'm pretty sure I've got several at the office, I need to go there next week anyway. I did pick up a PS2 to Atari adapter, the Atari uses a 9 pin port, same as an Atari joystick port for the mouse. I might even spring for a wireless mouse, apparently the Atari serial port will supply enough power to run a wireless adapter but probably not enough for a USB mouse.

Then I need a way to get software to the Atari. Fortunately the ST will read PC floppy disks, unfortunately I don't have any floppy disk drives around anymore. I *might* have one in the office and I think Angie's office computer has one. Her office machine is due for replacement anyway so this might be the push to finally get that done. I don't really want a big tower machine here anymore but I wouldn't need it that long.

Eventually I play to get an Ultrasatan for this, it's an Atari ST to SD card adapter that can emulate floppy disks or hard drives. It'd be the easiest way to get software onto the machine. I'm also thinking it'd be good to get an Ethernet adapter and setup some kind of FTP server to move files. We'll see.

Finally I need to work out a monitor that can display a 15Khz signal. This shouldn't be too hard. I'm reasonably sure I recently e-wasted a bunch of them from the office. I'm hoping there is one left that I can haul home. Otherwise I'll probably buy a signal converter so I can use the little monitor in the picture above. I like the size of the monitor, it'd make a handy little setup. It has a composite port too so I can hook up my 8bit machines to it as well.

Old tractor update

 You might remember my 1952 Farmall Super M

Pictured here with the dirty old Ferd I've had the Super M since 2002, it's been in the family a lot longer than that, probably back into the 1960s.

The engine was rebuilt at some point and usually runs really well but this year it's been hard to start, was only firing on 3 cylinders (of 4) until it warmed up and was down on power. We've had trouble with the electrics in the past and after running some Seafoam gas additive through it I figured that was the place to look. I'd done a basic tune up, cap, rotor, plugs and wires about 10 years ago when we rewired and converted it to 12v. Certainly we were due at least for plugs.

It needs a new thermostat too, the one in it is stuck open and it never comes up to temp. While shopping the thermostat I somehow lost my mind and also bought a Pertronix Ignitor electronic ignition conversion. During a rainy day a couple weeks ago I set out to install it.

This is the brains of the operation, well brains and hall-effect sensor all in one. Spin a magnet past it to trigger spark events and Bob is your mother's brother as they say.

These are all the bits that came out, breaker points and condenser, and the electrical block to ground same. On the left is one of the crimp on ends for the new system and the two nuts that hold the hall-effect sensor in place.

Everything installed, in this picture the magnet pack (the black thing in the center) isn't pushed down all the way, I couldn't get the rotor all the way down with it like this and thus the cap wouldn't fit. I like that I couldn't get it wrong...

Think the plugs needed replacing? I can't imagine why, they were only 10 years old. The old ones were Autolite 386, the new ones are 3116, a slightly hotter plug recommended for 4 cylinder engines.

Here is the system installed. The white thing in the foreground is the resistor for the coil. I hate it, I'll be looking for a coil that works with no resistor. Notice how the wires that come out of the distributor loop back in to the coil quickly. A lot of the installs I've seen online they leave those wires long and flopping, just waiting to get caught on stuff. I mow a lot of brush, those would get ripped of quick.

So how does it work?

Great. The tractor fired up on the first revolution and sat there idling perfectly. It's quieter, there is less vibration, it runs super smooth. I haven't had a chance to really work the machine with this installed yet, it rained the day I installed it and we went home the next day but I'll get back up there soon to give it a real load test.

I really wish I had thought to shoot before and after video, the change is dramatic.

Something new, but not bought

I've had a Nook Color HD+ tablet for just over 2 years now and its been kind of a constant disappointment. It replaced a first generation Kindle Fire and while it seemed like a great tablet on paper it never really lived up to my expectations. The worst was when I first got it the OS was a Barnes and Noble special version of Android that only ran a few apps with no way to load any they hadn't allowed. That only lasted a few months before they opened to the whole Google Play store but the tablet was still much slower than it seemed like it ought to be.

The last couple weeks its degraded to the point that it was basically unusable, apps took forever to open, my email wouldn't mark as read, I couldn't browse the web or watch YouTube, about the only thing it was good for was playing Risk. I couldn't even really read with it, the Kindle app would freak out constantly. As a last ditch effort I downloaded "Advanced Task Killer" since it would work a little better if I paged through all the apps and turned off anything I absolutely didn't need.

Today I spent HOURS figuring out how to root the tablet and install Cyanomod 10.2.1 which brings me to a standard base Android install without any extra crap mucking up the works. There are still a couple things like Google Hangouts that I don't need or want but considering the Nook has become a ROCKET SHIP I don't mind much.

Seriously, not only is it like a new tablet, its like a new tablet made by a company that actually knows how to make good tablets. For the first time ever I can watch YouTube videos in HD without it pausing. I'd always thought it was pausing because I have crappy internet but it turns out it was having trouble playing the frame size, now its no problem at all. Errors I'd had in my Risk game are gone too and I can actually browse to websites without falling asleep waiting.

I did back up the B&N OS before I started but I'm never going to go back to it. I was so happy I even ordered a 32GB SD card to replace the 16GB I had. I'm scheduled for a trip to the Philippines in a couple weeks and now I'll be able to take a whole bunch of videos with space to spare.

Supposedly this will help with the lackluster battery life I'd been experiencing but it'll be a couple days before I can report on that.