As the year draws to a close and we prepare to head off to Providence at the end of next week, the last bits of work on the house and its grounds are being done.
The roofers are in to replace the roof on the garden house. Once the slates were off, the beams underneath turned out to be completely rotten, so they must now be replaced. It’s a big and very expensive job, which won’t now even be finished before we leave for the US. I hope there are no more nasty surprises in store, but that seems unlikely, because everything remotely related to the roof has already been demolished and is now ready for replacement.
Last Thursday, I the electricians came in to do some new cabling and rewiring for me.
Firstly, they ran CAT5 cables from the meter cupboard (where the phone line comes in) to the stair cupboard (where the patch panel and the DSL router are located). This was to allow me to disconnect the PBX (home telephone exchange) from the ISDN line in the meter cupboard and connect it to a new (not yet set up) PBX in the stair cupboard. Then, the new PBX will be connected to the ISDN line, hence the need for at least two new cables.
I had them run five new cables in total, which provided the capacity for a network jack panel to be put in place by the computers that handle the various security cameras around the perimeter of the house. These are located in the cellar, opposite the meter cupboard.
This allowed me to network these two machines, which means that I can now use VNC on the laptop and the desktop in the office to view the images from the outside security cameras in real time. Not that there’s much happening out there, but I like the idea of being able to view my front doorstep from Providence over Christmas. Well, why not?
Finally, all of the relevant cellar locations are now interconnected and the equipment in those areas is able to address any other device on the network. This is exactly as it should be.
The electricians also rewired a couple of extension sockets in the living room, so that whatever’s plugged into those is no longer controlled by one of the wall knobs by the door. This allows us to use the knob to control our lovely new standard lamp, without turning off the Sonos when we turn off the lamp at the end of the evening. Previously, the sockets connecting these things were all on the same circuit.
The new year will see the return of the electricians for a few more jobs here and there, including the repair of a few of the security lamps around the building. I’ve been extremely happy with the work they’ve done on this and previous occasions, especially now the way has been paved for me to fit a new PBX with VoIP capabilities and an advanced dialling plan. Watch this space.
The garden, too, is ready for a major overhaul. The architect has received our approval for her rough plan and is now going to work out the design in detail. The garden should be laid in the first quarter of 2008 and will feature, amongst other things, playing apparatus for Eloïse.
This will be a thorough reworking of the current garden and is, without a doubt, the most ambitious project that we have ever commissioned. I can’t wait to see what the end result looks like and what Eloöse makes of it.