New House, New Baby and a Geek’s Home Office

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Three months ago we found out that we were expecting a baby; four months ago we bought our first house.  Take a peak at what we’ve been up to…

The Stats

In three months we:

• Moved house (with the help of some great friends, until mid-night!)
• Painted over 200sqm of walls and ceilings
• Fixed 15m of new skirting boards
• Replaced 5 light fittings
• Had 26sqm of new carpet laid
• Fitted 25sqm of laminate flooring
• Had a new en-suite bathroom installed
• Filled a hole in an outside wall (one of my favourite jobs)
• Removed a kitchen unit to install our dishwasher and did the plumbing (also fun)
• Made 10+ trips to Ikea (lots of meatballs enjoyed there)

The Geek’s Touch

I had to add my own touch to the house, so here are the highlights:

Idea Paint

I wanted a big whiteboard in my home office to be creative on, but then I thought, why limit it to a board, why not use an entire wall?  The folks over at IdeaPaint made this possible.  I now have a 4sqm whiteboard to dump all of my ideas on to!

 

 

 

 

 

Baby Cam

Some of my family live overseas and there are times when I am away with work.  What better way to share the first months of our baby’s life with family then a webcam monitoring the cot?  I chose the Y-Cam Black, an awesome IP camera (also supports WiFi) and InfraRed for night-time activity.  I’ve fixed it to the wall with a cable connection to the network.  All you need to do is forward a port on your home router and the Y-Cam does the rest.  Password protected of course.

 

 

D-LAN

We just upgraded to Virgin 10MB broadband, so rather than lose more than half of it over at best poor WiFi, I decided to invest in Netgear’s 85MB PowerLine D-LAN solution.  These handy little boxes plug into the mains and give you a decent wired network connection anywhere in the house.  They also work across different ring mains and I have even got one in the garage for a future project.

 

 

 

 

Home Office

The home office was my little project, and I put some time into it as I’m now going to be spending a considerable amount of time each day sat in there. I repainted all of the walls and made a nice feature wall using Dulux Intense Truffle Feature Wall paint.  I fitted a new Ikea light and lots of Ikea Billy storage.  We got given a very nice futon which you can see in the photo – currently in use to get some sleep in-between the baby waking up!

As mentioned before I have an awesome whiteboard wall and some subtle touches to give it a slick feel (e.g. the fancy low-profile black light switch).

All-in-all we’re very pleased with our new place, and grateful to everyone who helped us get it ready in time!