Archive for October, 2005

Recommended: Vonage for Phone/Long Distance

Tuesday, October 25th, 2005

I’m a big fan of word-of-mouth recommendations, so I’m hoping to periodically recommend services and products that have been useful to us and that we love enough to want others to experience them too.

Vonage – we’ve been using Vonage instead of a regular phone line for almost 6 months now. It’s been great. Not a single complaint. We pay $24.99/mo for unlimited long distance (within US and Canada) plus an extra $5 for a Vancouver number so that our family there can call us via a local number and it doesn’t end up costing us or them anything (day or night). We haven’t had any problems, so I can’t speak for their customer service. You provide the broadband internet (cable/dsl/etc.) and a phone, and they provide the rest. Shipping was surprisingly quick, and you can even transfer a normal phone number if you’d like. One of my favorite features is the ability to log in on the website to instantly and easily set up call forwarding and other features. We’ve got call forwarding set to ring at our house for 15 seconds and then forward to our cell. Email me or leave a comment and I’ll send you an email that will get you the first month of service free (and we’ll get credit for it too). There’s also no contract, which is really nice to know that you can cancel at anytime.

Note: In the interest of full-disclosure, some of the things we may recommend might offer incentive to us to get people to use them or sign up for them. Regardless of whether there is incentive, we’ll never recommend a product for that reason alone – we’ll only recommend something that we thoroughly use and love and want others to use and love too.

Posted in Tips | 5 Comments »

Exterior Before and After Photos

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005

Though we’re not finished with the exterior of the house (the most drastic change will be paint), I thought it would be fun to see some photos of the exterior before we purchased it and what it looks like now.

Before:
This was before we purchased the house.

After:
This is what the house looks like now.

Here’s a shot of the entry to the front porch.
Before:
Entry before we purchased the house.

After:
The entry as it is now.

I haven’t posted details yet about our new front door, but here’s a good shot of it anyway.
Before:
It's hard to imagine that we lived with this door for several months.

After:
This is the new (old) front door.

Posted in Our House | 2 Comments »

Answered: Quick Question – Electrical

Saturday, October 15th, 2005

I’m running the new electric line for the dryer – it’s 30A, so it needs to be 10AWG, but does it need to be 10-2 or 10-3? The plug I’m using is three-pronged (2 hot, one neutral/ground). Someone I asked said 10-2, but I’m not confident whether that is correct.

If I use 10-2, I’d use the black and white each as a hot, and the ground as the neutral. If I were to use 10-3, I’d use the black and red as the hot, and the white as neutral, but then what do I do with the ground? Do I get 10-3 without ground?

Any quick answers would be great – I’m hoping to wrap this up tonight, but wanna make sure I’m doing it right. Thanks!

Update: Thanks Leigh and Greg – I ended up getting the 4-prong plug and using 10-3 with ground. It meant that I had to put the 4-prong cable (plug) back on the dryer, as I had replaced it with the 3-prong already, but it’s better to do it the right way, even if it is a pain in the you-know-what.

Posted in Our House | 4 Comments »

Finally Posting Again

Friday, October 14th, 2005

It’s been a quite a while since we posted. I’m not real sure why that it, but sometimes it’s hard to start again once you’ve stopped because of the feeling of having to catch up. Regardless, we’re back at it and rather than catching up before we can post about what we’re currently working on, I figured we’d start current and then catch up as we go.

The big (well not really that big I guess) project for this weekend is building a wall in the laundry room so the electrical can be run for the dryer hookup, as well as the vent. We’ve had the washer hooked up for a few months now, but have been using the clothesline outside to dry everything. The weather is getting colder now and we realize that we won’t be able to do that for much longer, so tomorrow we’ll build the wall. I’ll make sure to post more details, as well as photos, sometime tomorrow (Saturday).

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