Live from Shangri La...Part Two!

With both of us feeling relatively lousy, and with the shorter than expected time to be up here, we are tackling smaller projects rather than attempting any big projects.  After posting yesterday I got a small second wind and installed the new shower head.  That was it for the second wind, and we called in a night pretty early.

We woke this morning around 6:30 and took our time getting our butts moving.  We finally got ourselves cleaned up and fed, and then headed in to Rogers City to pick up a few items for the planned projects.  On today's agenda:  Installing a new wax ring on the toilet, installing a shampoo dispenser in the shower, and connecting the TV to the outside antenna.

The toilet project went smoothly.  I was concerned that the old wax ring had been leaking long enough to cause damage to the floor, but was pleased to find I was unnecessarily concerned.  We did find that the back and bottom of the toilet tank was covered in black mold.  The water from the well is ice cold, even in the hottest part of summer.  That, combined with heat and humidity in the house has the outside of toilet tank sweating like a glass of ice water on a hot day.  We bleached the wall and the tank to kill the mold, and now that we know it's a problem we'll be keeping an eye on it.  We're thinking that a spray of Lysol into the narrow gap between the toilet tank and the wall whenever cleaning should keep the mold from reoccurring, and we can make sure to wipe down the bottom of the tank whenever cleaning the bathroom fixtures.

The shampoo dispenser was a simple project, but one that makes a huge difference.  All of the bottles of shampoo that are currently cluttering up the shower will be gone!  We have one of these in our shower in Columbus, and it makes a huge difference.  I like the one that Shelly bought for up here, as it allowed for corner installation and takes up less space.

The last project planned for the day was to connect the outside TV antenna to the TV.  This was complicated by two things.  First, the antenna cable coming into the house was run to the master bedroom.  We wanted the TV in the living room but the cable wasn't long enough.  An adapter to convert from the two wire antenna cable to coaxial cable and a 25' length of coax solved this problem.  Second, the TV up here, though a nice unit, is an older model and is not capable of receiving digital stations.  We had to track down a digital converter box.  We hunted for one yesterday.  Wal Mart didn't have any, the Radio Shack that the GPS led us to was shut down, and the next closest GPS recommended Radio Shack ended up being a private residence.  Oh, well...we had a nice drive.  I went online today and found that Rogers City has a Radio Shack.  They had just one converter left on the shelf.  That left just running the cable and hooking everything up.  I drilled the necessary hole to get the cable from the basement to the needed spot in the living room, ran the cable, and hooked everything up.  Now, we both agreed that we'd be happy if we could just get a few local stations with a good signal.  We ended up with eight channels, all coming in extremely clear and strong.

The house is fully equipped with Dish TV.  I hooked it up to see if it all works, and it does.  The only hitch, we're not up here nearly enough to pay for the service.  Eight channels for free that we can watch whenever we're here, or satellite TV with a ton of channels that we can pay for even when we're not here to watch it.  Eight channels it is!  Heck, we've got too much to do around here to be sucked into watching TV, anyway.  It is good to know it works, and when we eventually move up here I'm sure we'll end up switching to satellite.

One small add-on project was to add a clock in the living room.  I found an older digital clock/radio in the basement, and with a bit of elbow grease it cleaned right up.  The radio even works well.

Not sure what we'll be tackling tomorrow.  I'm pretty much at the tail end of being sick, and am feeling better today than I have in a while.  Shelly feels better today than yesterday, but it's still kicking her butt pretty good.  I may start the prep work in the spare bedroom for the eventual painting project.  If I can get a good portion of the prep work done tomorrow maybe I'll be able to paint over the next long weekend up here.  Shelly's talking about clearing out the hall closet and maybe installing some shelving in the spare bedroom closet.

As promised, pics will be forthcoming.  Stay tuned!