(There are quite a few shelves still to come.)
This one goes around the TV. First step, bolt the TV bracket to the wall.
Looking good.
I will have to make a plan with the white wall behind the TV.
The reason I’m doing this in stages is that I wasn’t sure exactly where this unit would end up. It could have been 5cm to the left or the right. Now I can measure the remaining space and design a bookshelf to fit.
It takes one kilo-calorie to heat 1 litre of water by 1 degree C. A calorie is 4.184 joules. In science-speak : “The specific heat capacity of water is 1 cal/gram-C or 4.184 Joule/gram-C”.
A Joule is also a Watt-second. Which relates to the well-known kilowatt-hour by a factor of 3 600 000.
In mathematical terms :
Q = mc(DeltaT) : m = mass, c = specific heat capacity, deltaT = amount you want to heat the water (or anything else) by. The important thing is that all the units match, to get Q in Joule you need c in Joule/gram-C.
The optimal jacuzzi temperature seems to be 39C (102F). So if the water is at 15C, deltaC = 24.
And thumbsuck : the typical jacuzzi is around 1000 litres.
Q = 1000 x 4184 x 24 (Note the sly dropping of the decimal from 4.184 — this is because we’re working with litres not grams, a liter of water weighs 1000 grams) = 100416000 Watt-seconds = 27.89 kWh. Which at the current 47.38c/kWh equates to just over R13.
And with a 4kW element, this will take almost 7 hours. Of course this ignores any losses, anything that’s warm wants to cool down, so it will take more energy and time to actually heat the jacuzzi to 39C.
I’m contemplating keeping the thing at say 25 degrees or so, that won’t lose too much heat to ambient and it’s halfway there, energy and time speaking.
Our kitchen is rather small. 3650 x 2860 or thereabouts. There’s also not much in it that we can keep, see Tanya’s blog for pictures.
Firstly, we decided to move the door(way). That opens the kitchen up, or splits it down the middle, depending on how you look at it. The opening can’t be too far to the left, because the electrical distribution box (DB) and prepaid electricity meter is there. Also, it gets too close to the semi-private area. And it can’t go too far to the right, since that infringes on my (I’m the cook in the family) work space.
Currently I’m thinking that either the fridge or the oven should go in the corner. I’m also thinking I can steal some space by using the hole in the wall where the door currently is. Putting the fridge way over there splits the work triangle, but keeps the kids out of my hair when they do the “let’s stare at the inside of the fridge” thing. Putting the oven in the corner means that the fridge has to go somewhere else, which in turn means that the new door will probably move to the left, which takes it further away from the living room on the right.
Ommmmmmmmmmm…..
We had my folks over last Sunday, they couldn’t contain their curiosity any longer I guess. I told them I’m prepared to ignore any advice they wanted to give :-)
One of the opinions was that trying to fit a bedroom + en-suite bathroom into the ex-single-garage is crazy. Too cramped.
Well, OK, we know it will be tight. But we think we can live with it. On the other hand, I’m now doubting this (while I say that I happily ignore all advice, in truth… I don’t).
So the measuring tape came out again.
As a sanity check, I measured Tanya’s existing bedroom last night. She lives there full-time, I only sleep over two or three nights a week, living from a tog bag. What I’m saying is, we’d need more storage than she currently has.
But storage isn’t the main concern, it’s being able to move around the place without having to climb over the bed to get to the loo. We sort of manage at Tanya’s place, but it’s not ideal.
So I CADded to compare. (Top is Tanya’s existing place, bottom is work in progress).
The good news is, I just realised that the bed I’ve been using for these exercises is a king, and we were planning to use a queen, so I gain a whole 200mm!
So there we were, sitting, talking, drinking red wine (this is the planning stage, see?)… and we talked about which way the bathroom door should swing. And a few minutes later we’d moved the kitchen door.
OK, to understand all of this you would need to look at the rough floor plan. See that area labelled “Hall”? It’s semi-private space — between the bedrooms and the communal bathroom. But the kitchen also opens up into it. So what happens when you have a party? I don’t know about you, but our friends hang out in the kitchen. And that makes the “hall” public. Not good for the kids who maybe want to withdraw from the party.
So, we decided to close the existing kitchen door, and to relocate the doorway to the wall between the “entrance” and the kitchen. I’ll then build a cupboard or something into the dead corner — unused space has always bothered me, and in this house design, the “hall” area is not used for anything more than a glorified passage. A good house design doesn’t have passages :-)
It’s a long story, starting with an idea which didn’t work out, progressing via choosing a high school for Jessica, and culminating in a decision to look at places in Fish Hoek. Budget : under or slightly over a million. Which is pretty much entry level in Cape Town at the time of writing.
So I phoned all the agents in the area (or at least the ones I could find on the web) — later found out that the agents in FH work together in a strange way, unlike the agents I know. Not that that matters, Major Kim phoned back, took us to see four places. The first was great but in need of attention, the next two were too small, and Tanya didn’t like the other one at all. So we put a very low offer in on the first place.
And got it, after a round of negotiations… for a little under a mil. So when you hear reports of the property market in downswing — we pretty much started it :-)
So now we have… one fixer upper, in Fish Hoek, close to everything (except the liquor store, but that’s Fish Hoek for you).