As I've said before, venting our dryer is a project that's been on my to-do list since the day we walked through this house with our real estate agent. Thinking the project through, there were two major undertakings that were clearly part of the job: I was going to have to drill and chisel a hole for the dryer vent through the three-brick-thick wall that surrounds our house, and most of the venting ductwork would have to be run through the dark, debris-filled crawlspace that runs beneath our kitchen. Both of these led to a major bout of procrastination on my part, and it wasn't until I was in the crawlspace tracking wires a week or two ago that I learned some good news -- a prior owner had already punched a vent through the brickwork, more or less in the exact spot that I had figured would be the best option. As I lay there on a pile of bricks in the crawlspace, I wondered why I had never seen the vent from the outside before, so I hopped out and went around to the back. That's when the reason became clear: more recently, someone had seen fit to plug the vent with concrete. The whole thing gave me something to think about for a bit, and this weekend, I decided to tackle the project once and for all.

Saturday, I went to our local hardware store and bought a four-pound handheld sledge hammer and a dryer vent attached to a segment of four-inch-diameter rigid aluminum vent. Three strong whacks later, the concrete plug was in pieces on the ground, and it became clear either that I'd have to figure out a way to attach a new vent to the duct that had been plugged, or I'd have to yank that duct out and replace it with the one that I had bought. Being more a demolition man than a nuance man, I went with the latter, and three or four minutes of work with a vise grip later, I had the old duct sitting on the ground next to me. The new duct snugly slid into the spot, and I was off and running... to the hardware store again, to get the remainder of the rigid ductwork I'd need for the run from the dryer to the vent.

Returning with 13 two-foot sections of rigid aluminum vent tubing, four elbow joints, a roll of aluminum tape, and a roll of galvanized steel strapping, I pulled the washer and dryer out from the wall and got to work. Getting the elbow and tubing attached to the dryer turned out to be harder than I thought it'd be, mostly because I wanted to make sure that it stayed securely attached after the dryer was back against the wall. I then needed to cut a hole through the drywall that separates our basement from the crawlspace, and run the duct all the way up to the joists forming the roof of the space. After estimating the right angle that the duct's path would have to take to get to the vent in the wall, I ran and attached everything up against the joists, and then spent about five minutes of trial-and-error before getting the elbows right in the connection between the duct and the vent. I finished everything off by taping all the joints (with the aluminum tape I had forgetfully left back in the basement), and then tested it all out. It was incredibly satisfying to turn on the dryer and feel the rush of air coming out of the vent -- after all the time I spent on my belly and back in the crawlspace, I'm not sure I could have taken it if there had been a problem somewhere!

Jonesing after that effort, I spent another half-hour cleaning all the organic debris out of our crawlspace (including three cardboard boxes, a half-dozen empty soda bottles, a bunch of cut two-by-fours, and an inordinate amount of other bits of wood, sheetrock, and whatnot), and then cleaned up all the dust that I had kicked into the basement. I polished the whole project off by hanging our iron and handheld vacuum on the brick wall next to the washer and dryer, and then took a very long shower. It felt good to get that project done, and it felt even better to see that the basement stayed nice, cool, and dry when Shannon started a few loads of laundry today.

During the househunting process, one of the very few things that Shannon and I didn't like about what has now become our home is that it pretty much has not a single usable clothes closet. The house is over a century old, and the two upstairs closets are between 13 and 15 inches deep -- not even close to deep enough for a clothes hanger. So we stressed and fretted about how we'd solve it in the weeks before we moved in, and ended up with a series of solutions that we're really happy with.

In terms of the clothes storage problem, we shopped around quite a bit for a closet system that would work in the space we had available in the master bedroom. One idea that I really wanted to work was EasyClosets, a company that provides you with the ability to design wall units online, and then ships you the materials for self-installation. Unfortunately, the place we wanted to put the closets was on an old plaster wall that wasn't exactly plumb and has a door right in the middle of it; after talking to a rep, it turns out that the EasyClosets system requires an uninterrupted back wall on which to mount the main hanging equipment, and it's not easily adaptable to weird situations like ours. We played around with a bunch of other ideas, but found our solution at (of all places!) Ikea, their modular PAX system. Using their 93 inch-tall frames, we ended up with three different levels of hanging space along with shelving and drawers galore, enough space to replicate both of the closets we had back in Brookline and then some. The whole unit sits perfectly against the back wall of the master bedroom, and took about five or six hours in total for Shannon's father and me to build.

Of course, that left us with another dilemma -- what to do with the two pre-existing closets! As shallow as they are, it wasn't hard to decide; we ended up getting 3/4-inch plywood cut down to size as shelves, and I spent the last few days hanging them up. We now have a great space in the bedroom for off-season and decorating storage, and a great linen closet in the hallway, and all it took was a bit of wood, a little circular saw and sander work, some paint, and some screws and anchors. And with one of the remnant bits of wood, I was even able to put a mini-shelf into Shannon's basement knitting area! All in all, we went from closet panic to closet and shelving nirvana, and all it took was patience.

I know that this doesn't come close to being a do-it-yourself project, but how cool is this: a Manhattan family has added a bona-fide porch and garden to the rooftop of their sixth-floor apartment. Complete with a screen door, the whole setup includes a newly-sealed roof, a layer of soil (leveled with chopsticks!), 2,200 plants, and a porch swing, with a view that looks out to the Empire State Building. The whole thing is incredible, and worth a look.

Talk about a DIY project! The Coopers are a couple who, through their participation in Maryland's Resident-Curatorship Program, have taken over the restoration and maintenance of an 18th-century Prince George County mansion in return for the right to live there rent-free. From the sounds of it, they assume any costs of the restoration and provide the labor, and get the chance to live in the Hazelwood mansion (and on its surrounding 11-acre land) as a result; Pam Cooper has gone so far as attending masonry conferences in order to restore the home to perfection. It's clearly not the answer for a handy person who's looking for a cheap place to live -- I'd imagine the costs of a restoration of that size are pretty hefty -- but it's a neat idea, and for the right people I bet it's fun as all hell.

In my continuing quest to get a network cable or two up into the study on the second floor, I decided this evening to investigate a weird wire that runs up the outside of the house, from the base of the back wall up and through the second-floor brickwork. (On the right of that picture is an obvious phone wire; it's the one on the left that has me confused.) Just on the other side of the wall that that wire goes through is a telephone jack, so I've always assumed that it was an exterior phone run that was put in by a telco installer sometime in the past. Looking into it, I got a bit of...

Good news: rather than a two-pair phone cable, the wire is a twisted-pair cable with eight wires! This gave me a little bit of hope, but given that the prior owner painted the cable from end to end, I wasn't able to read anything on the sheath to tell me whether it was network-grade cabling. Since the end at the base of the house is attached to nothing at all, I decided to slice off a six-inch bit and check it out, and that led me to the...

Bad news: it's Cat 3 cable, so it's pretty much useless for getting anything but a slow-as-molasses connection up there. And looking behind the telephone jack faceplate in the study, it doesn't look like the Cat 3 cable comes into the outlet box in a straight shot, so I don't think I can use it to pull a Cat 5 cable through the same set of holes through the brick and drywall. Knowing that a phone wire and the Cat 3 cable both go through the exterior wall, I assumed that I'd find just the two inside that outlet box, but instead I got a bit of...

Confusing news: sure enough, behind that faceplate is a phone wire connected to the jack, as well as the other end of the Cat 3 cable. But then there are the ends of three other wires in there, all phone-type cables, and I have no idea at all where they run. I've traced and accounted for every single wire in our basement and garnered no clues; I can see that a few of the three mystery wires run upward out of the outlet box, but there's truly nothing up there at all for them to run towards. It's baffling to me, and worthy of some thoughts about how to investigate further.

Now that we have most of our boxes unpacked, one of the tasks that made it onto my to-do list yesterday was getting some of our in-house network cabling done. Our internet service comes into the basement, where I have a shelving unit full of computers and networking equipment; for the past week, we just threw a wireless router down there and used our laptops up on the first floor. The signal doesn't reliably get up to all of the second floor, though, meaning that our office up there was more or less a no-computer zone, not something that's optimal for long-term life. Thus, I really wanted to get some cabling in that would allow us to move the wireless router up higher in the house, and maybe even provide wired network service to the desktop computers.

I decided to start simple, and planned out the wiring between the basement and the first floor. I figured that the logical place for the cabling to terminate was the living room -- on the baseboard just behind our television stand -- and this turned out to be pretty easy to achieve thanks to the stack of stairways that runs behind the wall against which the TV sits. I ran two category 5e cables across the exposed basement ceiling joists, through the single sheet of drywall that forms the inner wall of our basement stairs, up the wall about six inches, and then straight into the area behind the baseboard. I was (needlessly, it turns out) hesitant to install keystone jacks and a flush faceplate into the baseboard without also putting in an outlet box, so I used a double surface-mount jack box at both ends instead, and then punched the cable down into the jacks. After testing everything out, I had two connections in place from my basement up to the living room, both capable of supporting up to gigabit ethernet speeds.

Moving the wireless router upstairs has been great, and the second connection meant I was also able to move the Vonage phone adapter out of the basement as well. (We have a wireless phone system hooked up to the Vonage line, and now we're able to have the phone base up in the living room where it provides a bit more reliable coverage throughout the house.) My problem, though, is that this has whet my appetite to also get wiring from the basement up to our study on the second floor, and I can't see an easy way to do that without either ripping into walls or running the cabling outside. We have a mixture of plaster-and-lathe and sheetrock walls (with the sheetrock ones mostly framed in front of the original plaster ones), and we don't have any obvious clever places (like stacks of closets, or perfectly vertical plumbing pipe columns) that connect the basement to the second floor. I'm going to have to think this one through a bit, and in the mean time, set up a wireless router as a repeater on the second floor so that I can put our printer onto the network. Here's hoping for a solution!

(Postscript: I had all intention of taking a few pictures to illustrate this post, but got buried in the paperwork I need to fill out to start my new job tomorrow. Sorry!)

Over the past week, Shannon and I moved from Brookline, MA down to Washington, DC, hence the silence here at Doing it Ourselves. Yesterday, I penned a long post that went into some of the tools and tricks that I found were critical to making the move as painless as possible -- and as I was doing a final read on the post, my Powerbook hard disk crashed. Hard. (Seriously, it's making noises like a jet engine.) So I'm off to the Apple Store tomorrow morning to see what they can do for me, and I'll try to get that post up as soon as my depression lifts.

(Not-so-funny fact: I backed up all of my computers that were making the move in the day or two before the truck arrived. But, since my laptop was going to be with me rather than on the truck, I didn't back it up -- and it's the only computer that is now dead as a doornail. I have a backup from late February or early March, so I'm in OK shape, but it's a lesson learned.)