Things We Love — Filtrete Wireless Thermostat

A long time ago, Young House Love gave away a wireless thermostat.  I was incredibly intrigued and started researching the heck out of the Filtrete Wireless Thermostat.  I have an obsession with any household item that can be controlled with my phone, so I was  sold.  It has a few dings against it in the reviews for ease of hook-up, especially pertaining to a certain “C” wire.  Having NO clue what a C wire was, I sent it to Steve and crossed my fingers for good news.  Sadly, we had no C wire, but Steve knew how to add one, so add it he did.

The trickiest part of the entire process was getting it to sync with the router.  It took several hours and finally we gave up and called customer service, 40 minutes later, we were in business.  My favorite part is the ability to turn it to “away” when we’re gone.  I always forget to turn the thermostat down when we leave the house, so now, I can pull it up at my phone and set it to away…when we’re close to home, I can take it off away and the house is a nice reasonable temperature when we come back home.  You can also create custom programs (as you can with other, cheaper thermostats) for different days of the week/times of the day.  We’ve had it installed for nearly 3 months now, and the cost savings on our gas bill has far exceeded my expectations.  The thermostat has already paid for itself and then some.

And yes, if you were wondering, I do pull out my phone to show people the temperature in my house at any given moment.  :-)

All in all, if you are thinking about upgrading your thermostat, I would recommend it.  It will take a bit of patience though and possibly a call to your electrician if you don’t have that background knowledge to do it yourself, but it’s been worth it for us.

Source

Anyone else obsessed with programming their house to run via phone app?  My next request is the ability to double check that my doors are locked from my phone and my oven is off…the second I find something for that, you’ll be the first to know!

Let me know if you have any specific questions about the installation, I’ll check with the brains behind the operation and let you know!

Laundry Room Report

We’re making progress…we’re at the slow part because each coat of dry wall mud needs to dry 24 hours before it can be sanded and recoated and we have put a LOT of mud on the wall to get everything all even and squared away…we’re in the home stretch on that, so you know what that means!  Paint time!

After some consulting with my paint book, I selected Martha Stewart Tidewater.  I decided to get a sample of it when we were at Lowes so I could make sure it was the blueish/grayish/greenish I was picturing in my head.

LOVE IT.

It looks a little more toothpaste-y in this picture than it is in real life, but I still like it.

I’m hoping to get started painting this weekend…we’ll see how our attempt at ceiling texture goes though first.  Hopefully more exciting news on this front coming soon

The Olive Office

Our office needed some paint and I needed something to do to amuse myself while Steve worked on mudding the laundry room.  A match made in painting heaven.  I quickly selected on an olive green tone from True Value my paint book and set off to Lowe’s.  I can’t remember the exact hue and I lost the swatch somewhere along the way…helpful, I know.  I’ll let you know if I find it.

Before:

and after:

It needs white trim and a spruced up fan, but I’m loving the green.  Much MUCH better for an office than dirty baby pink walls.

Anyone else randomly decide to start painting while their S/O does dirtier home improvement projects?  Have you went olive recently??  Realize you forgot to publish your Thursday blog post on Thursday?  I’m ready for the weekend…