Once again, I am quite far behind in blogging my progress, so I’ll try to create some posts to catch up. For this one, I figured it would make more sense to show it through several stages over time, to explain why things were done the way they were.

In the corner of the laundry room, I have a bulkhead that runs a 4″ dryer vent up and outside. I also have an air conditioning line that runs outside, and happens to drop down lower than my ceiling will be. It extends out close to a foot into the room before it gets high enough to not be a problem.

I ended up finding a cabinet that would fit above the washer/dryer, and built a bulkhead to fit around the A/C line, but that would fit with the cabinet so I didn’t have a strange bulkhead sticking down. This was big enough to cover the line, but also not look too unnatural. I built a frame from some spare pieces I had left over, and screwed it into the wall. Note, this does go over part of the drywall.. but unfortunately I didn’t have a solution to this when I put the drywall up, so that’s the way it goes.

After some drywall and mudding..

..I have a finished cabinet, and bulkhead covering the tiny, unfortunately placed A/C line.

A friend brought over a Compaq Presario x1000 with a temperamental power button (which took many many presses to turn on), so I agreed to have a look.

First thing I did was disassemble it, which I didn’t really document. I took the back (partially) off, which I don’t think helped - really, the bezel above the keyboard (where the power button is) is important, and a couple screws in the back to take the keyboard off are probably all you need. This part by far took the longest.

Next thing I did was verify it was in fact the power button at fault. Pressing it manually did the same as the plastic button above (which just pushed down on this) - which is to say, nothing. Using a probe to manually connect the pins instantly turned it on every time, and there was nothing visibly wrong with the solder connections, confirming it really was the switch that was defective.

I looked around for a similar button to use, or something I could jam in that would work, but didn’t really have anything suitable. I decided instead to re-purpose the mute button (hopefully he will at least change the power settings to put it in suspend, rather than turn off.. I probably should have suggested that in retrospect). It had a ribbon cable connecting it to the motherboard, and shared a common ground with the power button, so I just had to route it over to the power button. After finding the correct wire with an ohm meter, I pulled it out from the ribbon.

Finally, some soldering and that’s it. The mute button now functions as power, and the old power button does nothing. I haven’t yet heard how many times he’s accidentally turned off the system..

As I mentioned yesterday, there is another door which is access to a little room built for cat litter. This basically came about because we were trying to figure out where to store the cat litter (right now it’s in the kitchen, which is terrible). The laundry room is an obvious choice, but it’s not really that big, so having cat litter would be a bit inconvenient there. My girlfriend also wants to be able to hang black clothes in there to dry without them getting white cat hair all over them (eg, shut the door).

I basically used the area inside the crawlspace to build a 2′ x 3′ room, and then provided access to it in the lower half of the wall joining the crawlspace. Here’s a couple pictures from earlier in construction to give you a better idea:

It’s hard to see, but it’s actually elevated a bit because there is a row of cinder blocks separating the main basement from the crawlspace, so I just built the floor of the cubby hole to the same height as the top of the blocks. The second cubby hole you see is for a bar fridge (there is a power outlet inside that one, which is not visible in this picture) - the fridge will basically just be flush with the wall. Again, this was just a way to get more out of the space I had - it adds a fridge into what would otherwise just be a plain wall.

I also installed a vent in the top to try and keep it not overly stinky and allow some air circulation (I may put a small fan in the vent, if necessary). There’s another vent in the fridge area to allow heat to escape out the top.

After cutting down the door to fit, I also installed an actual cat door (one of those flapping ones). I basically just took my jigsaw and cut out the trace of the door.

I had trouble finding a pet door actually, I had to go to a pet store and they only had this one and a really fancy one which used RFID tags to only allow in your pet (which is a great idea, if you are installing this on an exterior door). The problem with this is that it looks like it’s designed for either a solid core door, or a 1/4″ thick door. When you put the two pieces on, they do not connect - so with my hollow core doors, there would otherwise be a giant gap between them. I ended up using some 1 1/8″ pine to fill in around the hole, and then painted it to match the door.

The end result looks pretty good (considering what it is). Obviously I’d rather not have this at all, but the weird door with the cat door in it looks better (in my opinion) than a litter box sitting in the open. I’m not going to actually install the pet door yet though - I want to make sure my cat learns she has to go in there to do her business before also having to learn how the flap works. The consequences to the new carpet are just not worth risking it..