fluffy rambles: Kitchen day 7, things coming together

Kitchen day 7, things coming together

January 22, 2020 6:50 PM (4 years ago)

Huge progress. All of the cabinets are in the right place, the range hood is installed in a way that DOESN’T have spikes coming up from my living room floor, and the electrician also came and finally updated my outlets to GFIs (which I’ve only been putting off for the past 8 years) while also adding the switched outlet for the under-cabinet lights.

Also last night I was fiddling around with the old phone and ended up hooking it up to an unused SIP adapter and have 85¢/month VoIP service with voip.ms which is working well (for incoming calls, anyway). Tricky part was figuring out how to get my SIP adapter to do a 30Hz ring signal; in 1965 when my phone was made there were several competing standards and it’s 20Hz which won out. Fortunately while poking around in the adapter’s advanced settings I found that it lets you do any frequency from 16 to 60Hz. (And 30Hz should still work with modern phones, which only look for a particular voltage rather than caring about frequency; frequency matters on old phones with mechanical ringers for what should be obvious reasons. See also: why TV framerates are 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in the US.)

I don’t know if I’ll bother getting outgoing calls working; that’ll require finding a SIP adapter that understands pulse dialing, or maybe get a pulse-to-DTMF converter (which exist but are expensive). In the meantime I can just use a DTMF tone generator from my iPhone, which is sort of roundabout and misses the point to using a phone made in 1965 but whatever.

I had entertained the notion of pranking the contractors by having someone call the phone (I had told them I don’t have a landline – which was, and still is technically, true!) and then pretending to be the ghost of the old fire chief who would then tell them that they’re doing a really good job, but they just had to take it down to do actual work on that wall. The nerve.

Anyway! The contractors are taking tomorrow off. Theoretically the countertop folks will be arriving on Friday to measure everything (and take my sink with them), and the contractors will finish up the wall surfacing then. Then it’s just waiting for the countertops (which should take a few days) and then the appliances (which arrive on the 31st) and then this project will be done! I’ll probably end up painting the walls in the interim while waiting for the countertops. I’m trying to decide whether I should match the existing paint or just go with nice bright “antique white” with a visible delineation between kitchen and dining room. Because like hell am I going to go through the trouble of painting the ginormous wall in common between my kitchen, dining room, and living room upstairs.