I never saw these pics until today, very nice setup and great work on the house. Do you have any updated pics since it's been a couple years or does it all look pretty much the same? By the way, I also love checking ratigators.com whenever I need a cover that I can't find here.
Thanks.
Everything looks pretty much the same, just a few changes here or there. The equipment area downstairs, swapped out the receiver a couple of years ago with a Pioneer Elite SC-27, and the dual HDMI out comes in handy, as I wall mounted a monitor on the wall in there, that way if I want to do things like 360 updates or something, I don't have to click on the projector, I can just flip on that monitor and do what I need to do. I've been itching to upgrade my receiver again for a while, especially since the new Elite's offer triple HDMI out. I planned on going all digital with the Xbox One (my next gen system of choice, I blindly follow Killer Instinct) and would use the 3rd HDMI out to run to the display upstairs (that has all of my other gaming consoles).
I also swapped out my DVD Audio player (yes, I bought into that format, and finally found a deal on one that output via HDMI so I no longer needed 6 separate analog cables just for audio like my original one) and it sits on top of the cassette deck, and on top of it is my Wii U and Neo Geo X (yes, I bought into that as well, with high hopes of miniaturized AES hardware ala Sega Nomad/Sega CDX so I didn't have to lug my AES downstairs all the time for World Heroes 2 Deathmatch, and was left disappointed with a half baked emulator).
The game shelves downstairs, moved the Wii games upstairs, and the 360 games have hit overflow and have been landing in the drawers in the tables in the media room downstairs until I have time to think of a better idea (not too long ago, hit 300 360 games, though, not sure if that's something to admit to
Upstairs, nothing much has changed, other than the row of Neo Geo AES titles on top of my Xbox and Atari Jaguar shelves, and getting caught up on a few Gamecube releases I missed out on originally (such as all of the Mario sports titles) That, and much to my wife's chagrin, two more 200 count record crates that sit on top of the ones that were already there (to the left of the mini-couch in the first photo). Though, I do share her sentiment, as it blocks that much more of the handrail, but LPs were piling up and I was running out of places to stash them.
Oh, and going back and looking at that first photo, we did finally source a piece of antique glass large enough that matched some of the other glass in the house to replace the temporary piece of safety glass we were using (when we bought the house, it just had a piece of clear Plexiglas in the window, and we replaced it with that "white" safety glass to give our daughter a bit of privacy). Don't have a new photo of it installed, but I do have a photo of the glass itself:
A vast majority of my free time has been sunk into restoring the front porch, which was the last big project on our exterior list (the interior list was long since crossed off). Trust me, it needed it. The original decking was half missing and replaced with plywood and the entire thing covered in outdoor carpet to hide the fact, the rail was questionably attached to the columns, and a number of columns were suspect.
Warning, complete lack of video game discussion to follow.
Here's a good single shot closeup of how things looked before we started (and had been this way since we bought the place):
First we removed all of the decking and braced up the entire porch ceiling, and once we had that out of the way, removed the rails:
So that we could then remove the columns. That's when things got scary (structurally), like, this sort of scary:
Granted, it moved off the base a bit as we were taking out other columns, but that big gaping hole was covered by a piece of metal being used as a patch and simply painted over to match. Thankfully, there were a number of columns on that side of the porch, so it wasn't holding everything up on it's own.
We also removed all of the capitals and stripped them and realized, as much as we wanted to save them, they were going to have to be replaced:
I hung on to that one, which was the only one that came down in a single piece. Most came down in 2 pieces or more, as when the were originally installed, or some time after that, someone used some huge nails and ran them through the capital and into the top of the porch (where that big hole came from in the one above), I guess to keep them in place, which did a number of splitting most of the capitals, and they were only kept in "one" piece by paint and pressure.
I found a guy that was able to cast new capitals and had that done, and had a friend that's a master carpenter, and he totally hooked us up with the column restoration (for a fee of course):
New bases being built (the existing ones were mostly no longer originals, and were in poor shape and ended up in the trash):
Repairing some improper railing installation work:
And of course, fixing the lower portion of said shady looking column above:
All of that to get us to something that looks like this:
Thankfully, nearly 2 years into it (started ripping things apart October 2011), the porch project is finally coming to a close (new brick foundation, all new framing, new curved upper knee wall, restored columns, restored rails, replacement recasted capitals, new custom milled decking to match the pieces of the original decking that were left, and don't get me started on the 200+ pieces of "blocks" I had to cut, sand, paint and install for the dental molding):
