I've been very busy with home related work this past week or so - my wife is starting to refinish the clear maple cabinets, bookshelves and mantlepiece in our great room/kitchen area. Not the floors, just the cabinets, bookshelves, integrated desk, butlers pantry, mantle over the fireplace and bookshelves/entertainment center. This is a significant quantity of work, but she's taken it on herself (with some minor help from me - I know if something gets screwed up and I'm the one who was doing the job, then my ass is grass...) to sand, clean and then primer and finish paint the items. I convinced her to do one piece at a time starting with the mantle - and that was a strategy designed for success. She's done the mantle and it looks really good! AND it also identified some best practices for her to apply to the next items - which I think will be the case throughout the job. At the rate that it's going, I believe that the project will take us through the rest of this calendar year and into the next, since it took a week to get the mantle done, and there are roughly 13 more items of varying sizes to get done. My consolation for the ongoing work is that concentrating on a bit at a time will ensure that patience will endure and make the job that much better - it already looks very professional and except for needing to learn how to do the between coat sanding better to make it smoother, the finish is very nice.
Ok, enough of the cabinets... The Theater Room project is winding down as the screen has been hung on the wall with care, and the wiring of the power and HDMI cabling is completed to the ceiling, as is the ceiling portion of the projector mount. What's left is getting the proper screws and washers for the projector to attach to the bottom section of the mount and then hang the thing up and complete everything. We've talked about how we'll replace the 1080p projector after a while with a 4k projector (once they've dropped in price - holey cow they're expensive!) but after this is done I'll be looking into a larger screen since the 92" could be larger considering the distance the sofa is from the screen.
The Theater Room still hosts the SpaceMuffins drumkit - they sit all nice and pretty in the alcove to the right of the screen. I'll bring out the BRIX unit and hook it all up to an A/V receiver once the furniture for the a/v center arrives, with a Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo to drive the system. The BRIX will double as a Media system that is implicitly attached to a Media NAS hosting movies, tv, music, etc - so that we can use some of the external media services or do DVR through hosted application instead of renting the Comcast equipment. This is our "dream"...
The BRIX will have a third use for me - a remote recording system for when I want to track drums up in the Theater Room. The Media NAS will host the projects that get sucked into the downstairs DAW station in my office, and then I can just work away happily doing guitars, keyboards, drums and then pick and choose to do vocals up or down stairs. Given my ever accelerating difficulties seeing up close due to declining eyesight, it might get to a point where editing and such will be performed upstairs on the projector, and mixdowns/mastering in the office downstairs. I'm already starting to look at 30"-32" LED monitors to replace the twin 27"s I have now. Mounting the 29" Panoramic ultrawide monitor on the wall will definitely free up desk space again, and the new DAW and it's onboard Intel HD Graphics will extend my desktop space on the computer nicely.
Finally - for something that was supposed to be a quick update - heading over to JH's for a jam session. Details to be reported later...
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