This project was one I’ve wanted done for a long time, effectively doubling the square footage of this house, now up to 2800ish from 1500 when we bought the house. This was a very long and complicated project with a great many ups and downs, but all in all took about 1 full year to finish end to end with everything in between.

This project required me to prepare everything for the future while working on it - I wanted to drywall the ceiling and have minimal access panels, this all therefore took a lot of work to get the basement into “finishing shape”.

Basement Design

The worst part of the design was positioning of everything I wanted. Comprimises had to be made several times due to the size of the basement. The unfinished basement had only the bathroom (already finished), and the closet at the bottom of the plan.

The original garage was 30ft in size, so I will be capturing some of it back with a small office.

The TV is hung directly in front of the window is the only flaw in the design. The TV could not be mounted facing the garage wall because of the support beam’s awkward placement in the imddle of the basement - right in front of where the seating would go. I had an option to seal the window, but I thought the extra light would be nice when not in use. I think this was probably a mistake tbh, but only time will tell.

The List

After Photos

Entertainment Area

Theater Area

Office

Kitchen Area

Bar

Wine Cellar

Murphy’s Door

Bedroom

Bathroom

Ya it’s small, but it’s a full bath.

Laundry Room

The cabinet here is hiding 2 junction boxes, and a radon pipe. But is also used for storage.

Mudroom

Storage Closet

The third photo is the second radon mitigation system I installed and a largely unnecessary sump pump.

S3G security is a training platform LMS (Learning Management System) that provides a business to business model to help train their employees on how to handle an active shooter situation. The course was architected by Jim Warwick, who has traveled across the United States providing different institutions with in-person training.

Today I’m going to be discussing the small, but insanely powerful stack implemented under the hood on how we keep this website online with a 99.9% uptime.

Requirements Engineering:

Good software engineers cannot underestimate the power of communication with the customer, so let’s talk some Requirements Engineering.

A Modern Sleek Agile Model

Let’s not overcomplicate things, it’s a small team.

Every week Corey meets with Jim to discuss new features and to live demo current features in development or testing. This is one of the coolest parts to me. Corey will ask about wording and styling of pages and change them on the fly for Jim, completely different relaxed feel from a typical customer demo. I wish more companies interactions with their clients were nearly as relaxed. Before we continue, let’s mention some core concepts of this application:

Some Large Responsibilities of the Application:

• The application will have 3 primary user-facing roles. A “user” role who will be watching the videos and taking the training. A “management” role” for employers to keep track of whether users have completed their training, and an administrator role for Jim and his company to have complete control over the application and adjust as needed.
• The application will provided tracking of a video to the user role that will record whether or not the user has seen the videos in the training. The application will also quiz the user at the end of every video.

Requirements Level Tools

Gitlab is exclusively used to maintain all issues, and feature tracking. It’s important to not over complicate this step. The entire concept of requirements tracking boils down to a few simple core details:

1. Effectively communicate requirements clearly to your team and the customers so everything is clear.
2. Transparantly give deadline estimates - and be clear when estimates are falling behind or not tracking.
3. Appropriately coordinate with customers with alternative viable options to accomplish their ultimate goals.

It’s simple, so keep it simple. This is exactly what gitlab’s issue tracking offers, it’s all integrated with the development work flow so if you don’t need (and no one should) detailed metric tracking, you can ignore the concept. All that matters when you work with a customer is time estimates, money, and the features.

The Company Stack

When Corey first started he evaluated many different products on the market to come up with the most integrated approach to development. We both have worked at companys where this is an oversight: and you end up with 3 or four different poorly integrated developer tools that don’t synchronize effectively. The primary goal was to avoid this and make it so everything you need is in one spot while also being cost effective for his company.

Developer Level

Since S3Gs inception Corey has developed it with future developers in mind, which has made on-boarding simple. Let’s talk about the moving parts and what they mean to a Software Engineer:

Backend

When I present architectures, I like to start at the micro / software development level and work my way out, so I will be referencing the same pieces and we will work our way towards a macro scope of our full project

C# is used as the backing language: starting in .net 6 and recently is in .net 7. The C# service is simple, effectively acting as a CRUD with fancy handling on the backend with a backing Mongo database.

The Mongo integration is code-first. Providing the developers with the flexibility of adjusting the relatively simple models and collections overtime to accommodate the agile interactions he has with Jim. When a model needs to be altered a simple code change occurs. Each change to the code driven models is evaluated to be backwards compatible so as not to break the deployment. It will be discussed how breaking changes are handled during the deployment section.

Front End

The User Interface is a generated with React following their more modern functional programming dialect. The front end used to be decoupled from the backend, where requests are simply forward to the backend with a standard pass through reverse proxy that is integrated into the startup of the app. The point of this was an attempt to scale one of them in deployment but not the other. This was found to be relatively pointless as the load of the user interface was negligible during performance testing. The two (backend and front end) therefore are served together using SPA so only one docker container is used in production to maintain the front and backend.

Testing

The backend is tested using XUnit, a standard testing framework for .net core. There is 95% code coverage at the time of writing. When a feature is written it is a requirement to maintain coverage before it is submitted.

The front end is unit tested minimally. Instead integration tests exists that cover the flow of the backend to front end using an awesome page object model integration that Selenium now provides. Most modern e2e frameworks are moving towards this paradigm.

The lack of unit tests in the UI is a hot topic in the agile world. Your standard young software engineer would likely scoff at the thought of no unit tests in the user interface. When I was an intern it was a standard practice to slap some generic tests around your pages using Jest or Jasmine to make sure the UI is functioning as intended. But there really is no crazy logic going on, the logic is bound to the roles. This article will not go into too deep a dive on why I believe they (UI based tests) are an artifact of simple claiming a higher code coverage, but rest assured the core of the application is tested through the integration tests.

Primary Backing Third Party Software

1. Auth

Firebase is used to keep track of authentication and authorization, this is because the stack is google cloud, roughly most user federations and SSO providers do the same thing so the choice isn’t complicated here. We simple go with what the stack supplies.

1. Video provider

Many video servicing softwares were evaluated during initial development. Ultimately the winner due to feature support was Vimeo. The primary downside to Vimeo is under the hood is has some whacky calls to it’s underlying CDN (content distribution network) that look like garbage. So we have to give the customers a whitelist for Vimeo specifically.

1. Theming

The theme is a third party supplied item built on-top of material ui. Branding and logo were all developers in-house, and the color palette is chosen based on the branding, everything else is built off the initial theme. Designing based on this prebuilt theme gave a solid foundation where theming and styling was never a concern during development. I would recommend this for any small company. UX development can be easy, but often incredibly tedious unless you live and breath the stuff. Simply choose a branding and stick with it. The important part is to make sure all subcomponents you import inherit from your theme, keep the experience consistent, and don’t retheme every page.

These are the big ones (in my opinion) worth nothing. There are many smaller components that are used but have a smaller impact on the overall application.

Devops

As we have evolved our code base overtime, all of the features of gitlab have been fully unlocked. If you start your projects by using the full toolkit available to you, your life will be made easier overall. This is the methodology that we move forward with as we build and add more features to S3G.

Continuous Integration

Gitlab pipelines are leveraged for the build process. Each commit kicks off a multi stage process for build, testing, dockerizing,scanning, and an optional deployment. Displayed above are the first steps in the pipeline process.

Leveraging all features of Gitlab

And here are the remaining steps.

Continuous Deployments

Integration with GCP

The docker containers are pushed to GCP in a private store associated with our account. We then have a helm chart in this single repository that contains the the configuration for how to orchestrate the deployment. The optional deployment uses the branch name slug as the subdomain and it is attached to the wildcard root domain. This domain is requested from google and is usually generated within a few seconds, however a dynamically generated certificate is requested from google that is slower. It takes roughly 30 minutes to provision. This is the only limitation we’ve run into for GCP since they don’t have wildcard certificates. The deployment is triggered through a manual step and this is used to verify features during our reviews and quality assurance testing. DAST scans are optionally applied after this manual step.

Dynamic Domain Provisioning

The deployment takes place using a helm chart. The modifications happen dynamically from some clever usages of integrated environment variables in gitlab. For these QA deployments the build is locked so you need a dynamically generated user and password to get in (in the event a crawler is trying to route to our private QA deployment). This is also done with some clever helm magic.

Production

Production deployments are done manually to prevent automation catastrophe. But the process is simple. We simply perform a helm upgrade on the production branch with the production gcp configuration. A tear down has never occurred. At the time of writing I believe it is on helm revision 60, all that happens is a simple chart change followed by the typical blue green deployment helm provides. There is no need to over engineer an application like this with canary or some other complicated deployment strategy at the time of writing since the customer base is all on the east coast. Deployments can be timed appropriately.

In the event a catastrophe or a db migration script must be run, an alternative deployment configuration exists by toggling a helm deployment variable (the 0.01% downtime). This fails over to a simple static web page which displays a maintenance message while we work on the hot fix or db migration.

Additionally, every day a backup is made of all data and stored in the event a disaster recovery needs to occur, this is a simple toggle in GCP.

Scaling Scope and Load Balancing

The application scope and load should always be determined by how the clientele will be using the application. GCP provide automatic DOS prevention, so this will be ignored when considering scaling parameters. The way our application will mostly work is a very low load day to day with intermittent massive spikes of network traffic from customers.

The highest portion of bandwidth is not delivered by our content, that would be Vimeos CDN. Instead our content is all lightweight json from loading our pages. Our clients have at most had a thousand or so on at once. We were able to load test spikes of several thousand at a time with no crazy amount of cpu or memory usage.

So it is likely we would not need to scale. Regardless, the deployment in production is scaled out so that 3 pods are running at once the standard round robin since least load in our case would be next to useless.

As our customer base has grown we have been monitoring cpu and memory usage, however it is never enough that we have considered a dedicated load balancing solution.

Thus our final Diagram:

Conclusion

The scope of this architecture is to help budding startups and smaller companies realize how much you can get done with a minimal team. This application has been developed over the course of 3.5 years to publishing and has a generous number of clients. If your architecture is simple from the start, you are setting yourself up for success. Shortcuts can be taken when your team is properly experienced, and nothing ever has to be “by-the-book”. This is an architecture that has worked for us, and has been relatively cost-effective when considering the full scope of the application and revenue.

Overtime this idea grew and wanted it to have a wood stove too. 🔨

As this was a larger project, I got some help. I had a structural engineer come out to tell me if the garage could bear the weight of an extension on top of it, he confirmed it could carry probably up to about 2 stories. There were indeed 18 inch footers in the ground; light footers, but they were deep enough and no structural error seemed to be present.

After that I bid some time to save some money. I hired contractors at Prince Builders LLC to initiate our house building endeavor. The deal we worked out was they would be responsible for getting a subfloor, walls, windows, the roof, exterior wall leading into the sunroom knocked out, and exterior of the extension waterproofed. I would be doing the finishing: drywall, trim, electric, insulation, siding, wood stove, and hearth.

The contractors and I worked at the same time on a few things; I took a week off while they were working to attempt and get a lot of the nitty gritty stuff done.

Before long walls were up and roof was done, whole project took about 1 month until it was livable, and 3 months total to get it into the shape that it is in the pictures - had a few setbacks.

Worst part of this extension is now that i have all the extra light i can see the dog hair all the time 💀. Worried a little bit about AC too, but haven’t had a hot enough week to know if its bad or not.

This project was started in October, and ended in January

TLDR Before/After Shots

Inside

Outside

Google Drive of Photos

Located here 🏚️

Difficulty List

Usually I get asked about what the hardest part was, here is a table of what i thought was difficult and what wasnt

For the wood stove, to get it over the stoop coming in i actually built like a makeshift ramp out of two-by fours. By some miracle nothing got injured. The thing weighs over 400lbs

Injury

There are photos in the drive about when I cut off the tip of my finger. Was just me being an idiot. I saw online people cutting these vinyl planks with their utility knives and thought “hey that looks easy” It wasn’t, it slipped while i was cutting with a lot of force.

More After Photos

The whole project took roughly 4 months, mainly wait time for cabinets to arrive, wait time for the tile, wait time for the countertops. Overall it was about 2 weeks worth of actual DIY work, where 1 full week of that work was demo and cleanup.

TLDR Before/After Shot

Before

Floor plan

This is the floor plan before.

Annoyingly, everything in this house is two 3/8 piece of plaster that i’ll have to remove. Heavy. I will only be removing the walls, and the closet wall. I can work with the ceiling. I’ll be cutting a panel into the ceiling for any electrical work, and i’ll just nail it back up and spackle when done.

Photos

Below are pictures of what I’m working with.

Some more from all angles:

The Plan

So we’re not left with much room in here. I went through about 5 different iterations for how I wanted the floor plan to work out. Our primary goal was to use this as storage for our fridge and for the rest of our food. My secondary goal was to include a space to store our brooms and cleaning supplies. Her secondary goal was to give us a neat place to store appliances.

The next step was to shop around and figure out what I could do with a reasonable amount of money. The most expensive part in this project is the cabinets. I will get into that in another section. But I really needed to work on cabinet configuration. Eventually this was the decided iteration.

The Work

By now i’ve remodeled 3 rooms, so i have strategies.

1. Get everything out, turn off circuits, remove hardware i want to keep (nothing).
2. Cut the radiator supply line, remove it
3. Remove all doors, put up plastic sheet seperating this room from the other rooms to keep dust out. Tape it.
4. Begin demolition, leave carpet for quick cleaning of dust. Start with closet wall.
5. Use reciprocating saw for all demolition, nothing else besides hammer and crowbar are needed. Throw everything out the window into a garbage.
6. Rince and repeat for the other walls that are connected to the exterior wall.

The exterior walls are the only ones we demolish b/c i need to insulate those. The other walls and ceiling we can keep.

Demolition

I lied about removing everything, fridge was too heavy for me alone, i did it after demo.

Framing, Electric, Plumbing, Insulation

I ran a separate circuit for each outlet in this room, all 12AWG. That’s technically 4. 2 For the previous closet wall (now appliance station). One for the coffee corner, one for the fridge. One plumbing line to supply water to the fridge.

Most time spent here was redoing all of the electric in this room. The wiring in this house had all lights in the entire first floor on a single circuit. So i traced it into the bedroom and had to remove another switch.

I use rockwool at the recommendation of Matt Risinger. My house is just stucco on block so water can seep from time to time. I’d rather it seep on something that doesn’t mold.

Drywall

Spackle, Cementboard

Like 3 days of work for patching all holes and spackle. Here we finally remove the carpet, and replace with cementboard after spackle is done for tile.

Finish Bedroom

Did this in a day with hot mud + skim coat. Bought new trim. Painted with leftover.

Paint

2 Coats at 1 hr a piece. First time cutting instead of taping to save dry time.

Tiling

3 Day job after work. One day to cut and lay them all out, two do place first and second half.

Cabinets, Countertops

Installing cabinets alone sucks. Basically the trick is to grab 2 2x4s and cut them to the size of the area you’re hanging them. Make them like the floor of the cabinet. Haul the cabinet up, with predrilled screws, then smash cabinet against the wall and screw it in. I had to build out the wall slightly because i didn’t have any good studs to line up my cabinets as well.

The worst part about all of this was jiggering a way for the small 9 inch floor cabinets to be stacked ontop of one another. They make a 8ft cabinet that is 18inches wide, but not 9. So i had to get creative. I made a small support for the cabinet to rest ontop of the other cabinet, keeping the weight on the sides of the cabinets. I then cut a large piece of white mdf painted board and put it on the side to hide the stud.

The countertops were a little tricky. To get one done, you buy a piece of MDF board, cut it to the exact size you want it. This is called a template. Then you bring it into a countertop store and they will cut whatever you want to that size. Use labels on the mdf board so they know which sides to finish. I forgot to take photos of this process.

Special Sliding Shelves

I had to get creative (once again) with the sliding drawers that tyler wanted in the 9 inch cabinets. The brand is called “Rev-a-shelf”. To install it, I popped off the door of the cabinets, then shimmed the shelf so it was centered, I then nailed the door back to the face of the rev-a-shelf. I then placed a handle in the center of the shelfs, and filled the nail holes with chalk.

Trim and Broom Nook

The broom nook I got lazy with, but i trimmed it out, and spackled as needed.

After

Pantry Door

This took longer than I care to admit to paint.

Broom Nook

Coffee Corner

Appliance Station

After Fridge & Cabinets

New fridge who dis?

Later Thoughts

1. Do not use marker to mark your drywall, its very hard to remove.
2. When purchasing drawers for your cabinets, if you’re doing the install yourself, just build the drawers, its far cheaper.

Each cabinet is around 1-2 hundred dollars depending on their size, then the sliding drawers idea we had to maximize the space were pricy to buy preconfigured as well, if i could go back i would just buy a router and build the drawers myself. The hardware is pretty standard and i can get at lowes for cheap.

Door: 500$ (it took like 4 months for the door to arrive)

Screen Door: 300$ (same day depot run)

Exterior Trim and Jamb extension: 120$ - I opted for that new faux wood plastic stuff they sell at lowes. Rot proof and holds up.

Extras (free): Interior Trim, spray foam, caulk

Total: 920$ ish

Front Door Before and After

The area above the door I left to make my life easier. I will eventually be ripping it out for a portico.

The Adventure

When I removed the door, it was about a week after the new door arrived. I set the new door against the house, and a strong gust of wind came and blew the door onto my railing. The railing impaled the door.

I was able to fix this with Bondo all-purpose fiberglass patch in about an hour. I have yet to paint the door.

Yes, I plan to paint the remaining wood trim white, and replacing the rest of the luan doors.

Open Floor Plan

Should have seen the garbage pileup from this. Something like 30 bags had to be hauled by my brothers and I down the driveway.

Kitchen Entry

No more extra useless cabinet, fridge moved into the “pantry” which we have yet to remodel. For info on how i did that live-edge light you can see my post here.

Kitchen Counter

I really wanted (and still want) to redo these cabinets.

Living room

Living room, featuring a new bay window and part of our 3-zone ductless minisplit, which I think gives our house a more modern vibe.

Bathroom

For more photos and info you view my bathroom post here. This was quite an undertaking.

Guest Bedroom

These bedrooms light remodels. Redid carpet, doors, trim, paint. Still gotta do those windows, they taunt me. My ceilings are small (7.5 ft) so i also removed the ceiling fan, which would wobble whenever you turned it on. You’d be amazed how many things in this house were held in by a single screw. Believe it or not, the previous owners hooked up the fan to an old dimmer switch. You could hear the fan motor arc when you played with the dimmer.

View from Entry

View from Corners

Main Bedroom

View from Entry

View from Corners

No before shots, they were hiding some holes and bolts in the walls. Also hiding a really bad paint job.

New Trim

Some Notes

I plan to do a whole lot more with this house. A never ending project. And I got a greenhouse to build soon, a basement to finish, a detatched in-law suite, and an attic to finish.

Total price: ~162$. Money Estimated saved from professional install: 700$

• 3/8s Drywall (2 slabs) - original construction was two 3/8s piled ontop of one another, so i continued the trend. - 11$
• Spackle - 7$
• Drywall Tape - 3$
• Floor Trim - free, had some spare
• Door Trim - 32$, prefinished to increase speed
• Door - 40$, taken from a 48” byfold door. My access panel is a portion of this cut to 12 inches
• Hinges: 5$
• Handle: 4$
• Modular closet hangers - ~60$
• Odds and ends - drywall screws, some spare 2x4s

Before and After

Before

After

Why I did it

Appraisal was happening soon and I wanted to beef up value by increasing sqft and including this closet that I destroyed from a remodel.

How I did it

• Start by framing the access panel, i had some spare wood i could use. I had to plane the wood to fit around the shower control valve. Keep it plumb with the surrounding studs, if they aren’t plum shim them. - Drill, wood screws, level
• Paint the frame you just made to match your trim color, you do this because the wood could stand out a bit by itself and you want everything to jive. - paint and paint brush, 1 coat is fine it doesn’t need to be perfect, just so when you open up the closet you don’t see ugly unfinished wood
• While you got paint out, paint the access panel door or any trim that needs painting.
• I decided to insulate the left/right stud cavities just because I had some spare rockwool lying around. This will do nothing in terms of heating/cooling but it adds some mass for sound dampening from the tub/shower. I did this to my whole bathroom before to dampen any noise before too.
• Hang the drywall, give yourself enough room around the frame to fit hinges, around 1/4-1/2 an inch - drill, drywall screws, utility knife, P100 Mask
• Spackle, I set the heat to 80 degrees in the room to promote faster curing and ran a fan. This step usually takes several days but you can speed it up with a few tricks. Be sure to do thin layers of spackle, no thick build ups your life will suck. I always water down my spackle with about a table spoon of water until i get a smooth consistency. I want to see no bubbles of spackle as i apply it to the wall. This helps you apply thinner layers too. About the consistency of soft serve ice cream. I was able to get done spackling in 3 coats over 15 hours. - spackle, putty knives, fan, drywall tape, drywall fiber tape.
• Paint the walls - use Killz or some other thicc paint or you’ll have to do like 10 coats. Spackle and raw drywall will soak it up like a sponge. I had to do 2 coats with a thick primer, i didn’t bother painting a color overtop. Its just a closet.
• Trim the door and access panel door - I recommend nice thin trim, but that’s just my style. - mitre saw, measuring tape, nail gun or hammer/finishing nails
• Trim the floor - same as above
• Caulk the trim - Some DAP white caulk, caulk gun, paper towels

Pro tip for cutting trim with mitre saw: Go big, like 1/4->1/2 an inch bigger than expected until you get the hang of it, cut back if its too big. It’s easy to mess up cutting trim like this, so cut larger than expected. Save yourself a trip to the depot.

Pro tip for mudding: don’t fall for the cute metal inside corners they sell at the store, they make your job harder. Use drywall tape, fold it in half in about 2ft segments. Put a light coat of spackle in the corner, then put the tape up, squishing from the center out so you have no bubbles. If your hands are clean during this you’re doing something very wrong. Make sure 100% coverage exists underneath that tape, or throw it out.

Spicy Construction Photos

I also took the time to document inside that access panel every model number used, you can see it in the third photo.

This project was originally done around December of 2019

Total price: ~300$

• Wooden slab (cherry wood) - 200$
• Dimmable 4 Inch Lights - 60$
• LED Strip - 16$
• Dimmer AC/DC Inverter - 20$
• Odds and ends (stain, wires, hot glue, etc)

Money saved from etsy/bought equivalent: ~$1-2k

Before

After

Why I did it

Light fell out of ceiling because previous owner did not affix it to studs or use anchors. Needed stylish replacement.

How I did it

• Measure location for lights
  • Evenly space horizontally (wider) across the entire slab, mark the location. On each of those marks, take the measuring tape and mark the absolute center vertically (thinner). This will give you a perfect center for the holes - measuring tape and pencil
• Cut holes for lights - 4.25 inch hole saw (specification of light), drill
• Flip it over, and finish the wood
  • Sand with 80 grit until even
  • Sand with 120 grit until even
  • Sand with 220 grit until even
  • Fill holes, and apply a sand dust coating - this will make the surface glossy with varnish
  • Sand with 300 + grit until even or until desired smoothness
  • Stain if desired, then Polyerathane evenly (3 coats)
    • If you mess up like I do with everything in my life, varnish stripper will take off the varnish. Then you’ll have to start over the whole process. from 120 grit.
• Flip it back over. Decide where the junction boxes where go so they will be hidden - keep them away from the absolute center, your led strip will go here
• Use a forstner bit (or more properly a router, but if you’re cheap like me a forstner bit) to go about half way down for the junction boxes in the wood, this will make them invisible when your slab floats from the wall. - forstner bit, drill, screws
• After junction box secure, run the wire through all of the junction boxes in parallel, the center most box will be the point of entry from your ceiling junction - wire secures, 14/2 awg wire.
• Install dimmer the same way you did the junction boxes, give extra space for the wire runs. - forstner bit, drill, screws
• Put the LED strips vertically centered across the wood. If your wood is curved like me, divide it into multiple strips, and link together with a small 20awg wire, solder and hot glue. - hot glue, 20 awg wire, soldering iron, solder
• Test that there are no shorts - multimeter
• Anchor to the ceiling: get 4 hook & eye anchors, and find the studs in your ceiling. Take many measurements to get everything perfectly lined up.
  • if you’re measuring correctly, this should take a while, remember your wood is not completely flat, so the anchor locations will be staggered.
  • required - stud finder, pencil, measuring tape
• Use a small drill bit, drill into the studs on your marked locations, this will give the anchors an easier time, put the hooks in the ceiling
• Use a small drill bit (recommend drill press for this) drill half way down into your wood, then mark half way down on the eye with a sharpie, screw it by hand half way into the wood.
• Get another person to help you mount it to the ceiling, you don’t want your project to smash on the floor.
• For the junction connection, you can buy a “fan extender kit” from lowes or the depot. About 15$. Then cut the metal line on the extender kit. To get it to attach to the ceiling, i had to buy some pieces of metal, and bend it into shape with pliers, then attach with a self drill screw, but this was because i was being cheap and had metal laying around.
  • Remember that no weight is barring on the decorative kit, just the wire is running through it to your junction box ingress.

Spicy Construction Photos

All Photos

To view the entire process of building the light, go to the drive.

Total Price: ~435$

• 6 gauge copper wire (150ft) - 250$ - my inlet location is roughly 100ft from my panel, just got some extra
• Inlet - 40$
• Conduit (150ft) - 75$
• Conduit fittings - 10$
• Interlock kit - 70$

Money saved from professional install - ~1-2k. There are 3 ways to make a generator “to code”. The first is an interlock (piece of metal that keeps you from turning on the generator without disabling the main breaker), the second is a transfer switch (basically a sub panel of ~10 circuits that you can transfer power to the generator at will), and the third is the “whole house” transfer switch (similar to interlock, except this switch comes before the main breaker so you don’t need to flip that off). The latter 2 are $400+ just for parts. Some running up to 1.5k for an “automatic” transfer switch. Most electricians will talk you into (2) because it takes a good bit of time to install and is the most standard. You get charged per hour for an electrician to do this.

Finished Product photos

Interesting parts:

Conduit:

Why I did it

Lost power like 5 times within the first year living hear, more times than anywhere i’ve ever lived. The power lines run through a mass of trees so usually a tree falls on the line and disconnects it from the transformer. The longest I was without power was 3.5 days. Gotta love living in the country. After the 3rd time my dad bought a new generator and gave me his hand-me-down. I have a fair bit of knowledge of electrical work, so what I did was splice the cable and feed it into the panel with a breaker i had laying around. Worked, but i would have to run the line through a window and would let bugs in. This would take about 30 minutes to hook it up, and if it was wet outside it was a struggle. Needless to say this is not “to code” either.

Some notes before how-to

Most generator inlets are 30amps (or 50) with a “surge” which will allow more than 30 amps to pass through for a second or two. This is completely fine, your breaker will not trip, and wires can handle this surge for a second. Say the controller module breaks, and it surges for too long, then you will have heat build up in the line, which could cause a fire hazard. I know the likelihood of this is small, but i also wanted to make this “future proof” incase I want to install one of those big bad whole house automated generators at some point. Also go big or go home. You should use copper for this project because aluminum can corrode overtime, no matter how water tight your box is, water will always get in. So go with copper for exterior electrical projects.

How I did it

The worst part of this was boring the holes through the stucco and concrete block. I was very cheap and just used what i had laying around. I had 4 bits of increasing diameter, and got it up to about half an inch. I needed a full inch for conduit clearance. I took a chisel and broke apart bits of the wall after that, couldn’t get it even through to the other side of the block. I had a galvanized iron pipe laying around (courteous of previous owner). I took the pipe, and a sledge, and hammered it the rest of the way through until i was clear of the other side. Luckily living with 5 acres means i have no neighbors to question my idiocy. I did this twice, once for the panel, and once for the inlet install.

I like to keep things identical with electrical code for future inspections. Before any electrical project i read about what i’ll be doing fully. For running electrical lines through an unfinished area you must have a conduit to protect the wire.

• Punch the holes for the inlet - drill, many drill bits, iron pipe (see above) - this would be easier if your house isn’t stucco or block.
• Measure length of wire needed, cut, then run through conduit. - electrical lubricant (or fishing wire), wire cutter, patience
  • I didn’t bother with a fishing wire, i just forced it through the conduit fitting with lubricant, took some raw strength, and i hated my life for a solid hour
• Install inlet - level, conduit fitting, pliers, exacto knife, drill, caulk, some anchors
  • choose where you want it, put the box up with a level, and drill the holes.
  • put the anchors in the holes with some caulk, prevents water from getting in wall cavity, then fill anchor with some caulk too.
  • screw the box into the anchors, caulk around the screws, then cleanup the caulk to give it a clean look
  • attach the inlet conductors to the wire.
  • close up box, pushing wires in first to prevent a fallout.
• Install Interlock - drill, interlock kit and assembly, pliers
  • Directions come with interlock kits they’re all different. But something that no one ever notes is slapping some di-electric greese on the breaker in the back - it prevents corrosion of the bus bar to your breaker, and takes 1 second to do. Just be sure to slap that on before you do it
  • Also because the gauge wire I had was so large I could not put my neutral wire into the neutral bus bar. Luckily i had a “double up” nut i was able to use to get it to attach to my busbar

Wiring photo

Here’s a bonus photo of the wiring, this kit by reliance was a chinese piece of crap that fell apart when i went to clamp down the wire. I had to reassemble the entire thing from scratch. By the time i got to the point where i got 1 wire to clamp i got excited and took a photo.

Total Price: ~80$

Before

Sorry for potato quality on before photos, i took some of them half way through.

After

How I did it

The exterior of your house does not matter for capping windows. You cap windows for aesthetics and to make it so you don’t have to paint anymore. With it comes a risk of trapping moisture which could end up rotting your wood if water is aloud into the space between your window and the capping material. I’ll probably uncap one in ~5 years to see how well I did. I don’t mind replacing them if they end up rotting.

• Remove caulking around window - utility knife and caulk scraper
• Remove Old trim of the window that does not match the new windows and any rotted wood - hammer, ugly stick, multitool with wood cutter attachment
• Sand down window - multitool with sander attachment
• Paint the wood - paint/brush
• Fill the area around the window with some spray insulation - apparently the previous installer did not.
• To get it to match the other windows, i measured the other windows the capping to match in “height” - the area of the capping that faces you; then Lots more measurements:
  • “Height” for every window as mentioned before - this is where you will bend
  • Inner length, the part that faces the window - this + height is the total “width” of the piece to cut
  • Length - from where the stucco meats the window (or whatever material you have) - my windows have a small jutt out from the bottom, no measurement is a perfect square, so i use the longest for bending the metal, then trim later.
• Score and snap the pieces of metal off the roll with the total width and length
• Bend the metal with the jig - you can google metal brake jig to see one, costs about 40$ to make vs a 1000$+ metal brake. - jig (angle metal, wood, lots of clamps)
• Take the metal to the window, trim to fit, hammer in place with a max of 2 nails, any more and you’ll hurt the metal. Order is bottom first, then sides, then top. the side nails are hidden by that top part (seen in photots). The rest of the nails are hidden by caulk. - hammer, nails, finishing nail tap (so you don’t hurt the capping), tin snips
• Caulk - 2 tubes of caulk per window, seal everything - don’t hit the window weep.

Photo of the Jig

I recommend if you make a jig bending the metal with a long piece of wood so the bend is even and you get no kinks