Category Archives: Benefits

Installing the Rear Garage Door

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Posted on December 31, 2016 by

Contents
  1. The Video
  2. Bells and Whistles

We had not left quite enough room for a standard garage install and had to get creative with our rear garage door. Here is the video…

The Video

Bells and Whistles

The door was from Lowes and came with the S3 winder so I wasn’t too worried about the torsion spring.  I got a side mount garage door opener, specifically a Liftmaster 8500, and was really happy with it.

One interesting side thing: The Liftmaster 8500 had a bunch of extra special features, such as a wireless light, programmable control, etc. but the most interesting thing (to me anyway) was the way the sensors worked.  Every other garage door I have owned had a sensor so that if you walked past as it was going down, it would stop and open up.  This is the sensor that you always “hop over” if you want to sneak out of the garage as the door is going down. How do you improve on such a basic sensor function? When I first installed it, it didn’t seem to be working, but then I realized that the improvement is simply to wait and see if the obstacle is there for more than a moment.  If you just walk past, it doesn’t trip it, no special hop-while-ducking required.  You need to interrupt the beam for at least half a second to stop the door from coming down.  Pretty minor, but it makes a nice difference 😉

Park Royal Tower, Singapore

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Posted on June 21, 2013 by

This building is very different from the Magic Mountain in Chile.  Clearly, the people working at WOHA Architects are much more serious group of people…  This recently finished hotel features 15000 square meters (161400 sf) of green space, much of which is disguising the above ground parking decks.   The concrete building gets top marks for environmentalism with its solar panels and reclaimed water, etc.  You can google search it for more info, or book your stay for less than $250US, but here are some pretty pics.

First, some artist renderings…

Another artist rendering, most of the 15000 square meters of green space disguise the parking decks

Another artist rendering, most of the 15000 square meters of green space disguise the parking decks

A view from the top, not the water features...

A view from the top, not the water features…

An artist rendering of the terraces at the Park Royal hotel

An artist rendering of the terraces at the Park Royal hotel

 

And then a pic of the final construction…  It is not fully grown in, but it is on its way.

The actual hotel, recently completed and not yet as overgrown as the artist renderings...

The actual hotel, recently completed and not yet as overgrown as the artist renderings…

 

Quotes

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats–the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill–The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it–and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the lefthand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

 

J.R. Tolkien- "The Hobbit"

∞Posted on July 5, 2012 by

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