More IKEA Finds

As I’ve mentioned in previous entries Jenny and I love IKEA. We took a trip up there a few weeks ago mainly for a new dining table but always end up coming home with a few other things as well.

The main thing we went up there for was a new dining room table. We’ve had a smaller four seat one for years that was the biggest we could fit in the dining room of our old house. Now that we’ve got more space and with Thanksgiving and having both sides of the family over on different days we finally got a larger one. It also helped that it happened to be on sale in November for a hundred dollars less than usual. While it seats up to ten we only bought six chairs for the moment but may get two more eventually.

Along with the table we also wanted a chair for the corner of the morning room. We had picked up a simple couch last year but it took up more space and never got used much. So we replaced it with this chair which was the perfect fit for the corner.

I also picked up two cheap, useful tech items.

Above is how the underside of the desk (also from IKEA) in my home office has looked up until now, a tangled mess of cords. Thanks to this nifty little add on, the Signum cable management bracket, however it’s now completely cleaned up as seen below.

I also found this cheap little stand for all of two dollars. Normally on my desk my 13” Retina MacBook Pro perfectly is docked with an older 24” Apple Cinema Display running at 1920 x 1200. While this is usually enough screen space ocassionally I want to run dual display but I’ve always found it annoying to cope with the lower height of the laptop’s screen when it’s sitting flat on the desk. While the stand is designed for tablets it fits my Mac perfectly and gives it just enough height to make it useful.

Water Savers

This happened back in the summer but I had forgotten to write about it until a recent post in Ryan Homes group on Facebook reminded me.
Around early August we started having issues with the water pressure in our master bath shower. Along with that we were having intermittant hot water outages. I called our service manager who felt like it was the water saver in the shower head but arranged for a plumber to come out just to be sure. And that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
Inside the shower head is a little rubber ring that when it functions correctly is supposed to save water. It’s prone to clogging however and when it does it causes the water pressure to drop which in turn causes the water flow rate to drop to the point where the tankless hot water heat shuts off. The simplest fix is to unscrew the shower head and remove the small rubber ring inside. I didn’t get a picture of the exact one from our shower head but I found a picture via Google below.

On a side note we also had a similar issue with the faucet in master bathroom a few months before this as well. While we didn’t lose water pressure it take forever and a day for the water to heat up. Removing a similar ring from the facuet spout took care of it as well.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that the removal of the ring results in far harder water pressure coming out of the shower head. (It’s noticable in the faucet but not nearly as much.) We were slightly concerned this would lead to a higher water bill but in the months since we really haven’t noticed much, if any, of a difference.