With just a couple of days to go before we fly out to the Middle East, we’ve been making some improvements to the house and setting other things in motion.
A few days ago, our new Arclinea kitchen cabinets were installed. Finally, we have enough storage space for all of our plates and glasses, as well as our food. I thought we would be sacrificing the look of the kitchen for the more practical storage issue, but it turns out that the kitchen actually looks better now — much more homely — with the new cabinets installed.
The Lundia bookcase we purchased for my office now has two rows of rails in one of the cupboards to accommodate hanging files, so we can finally clear up and file away all of our old invoices, bank statements, etc.
On Friday, we had a new floor partially laid on the bedroom balcony. The people who came to do it turned up at 08:00, which was pretty rough. None of us are used to getting up at that time of day, especially not I.
Anyway, the work was being done to fix a leak in the ceiling above our dining-room table, where the slanted glass roof attaches to the upstairs balcony. That annoying leak is now hopefully a thing of the past, but the workmen still need to come back on Monday to finish the job.
The sitting-room sideboard arrived a week ago and has really added to the quality of that room. Finally, we have some cupboards and drawers into which we can stuff all of our downstairs items. It also looks great and gives the room a more homely feel.
One of the things I’ve been looking forward to doing (but procrastinating with) has been getting the house wired for sound. The time has finally come to put in a decent sound system. Given that much of our music collection is already stored as compressed digital files and that the future of music definitely lies in this direction, it was a more or less obvious decision to choose a Sonos-based installation.
We’re going to divide the house up into various zones, each of which will be able to stream music from either the server in our cellar (which houses our own collection) or across the Net, for example when we want to listen to Internet radio stations. This is basically what we already do in the living-room, thanks to the MythMusic module of MythTV.
The multiple zones will each be able to serve their own music, so Sarah and I could be listening to different things in living-room and office, for example, whilst friends in the guest bedroom listen to their favourite radio station from back home in the US.
More on all of this when we get back from our trip, at which point all of the equipment should have arrived and be ready for installation. It’s going to be cool.