A New Car Stereo

I've been a little behind on posts so I also wanted to throw up a photo of my new car stereo. It's a JVC and I got it from Crutchfield for $30 (after discounts and rebates) plus $50 for an iPod adapter. It has HD Radio which is very awesome. I now have some new favorite stations because HD Radio allows radio stations to broadcast more stations in a digital format. And it's free unlike satellite radio. I got all the adapters and trim kit from Crutchfield for free and installed it myself using their pretty thorough installation guides for my truck.
So it's not bad for 80 bucks. It also has surround sound for cars which makes it sound simply amazing. I'm almost tempted to get some new speakers because you start to notice the distortion as you crank it up. I'll have to save that for another time. I'm getting a little sick of all these projects. BTW, the whole reason for the new stereo was that my old one had died and nothing is worse than driving without music. It's actually quite awkward because of the silence.

A Little Kitchen TLC, part II

The other thing bugging me about my kitchen was the lighting it was always dark. I also wasn't a fan of the track lights that were installed because they looked cheap. A few weeks ago I got some new track lights that were on sale at Home Depot. I got 5 lights to make sure there would be plenty of light. And as usual this project turned out to be more complicated than I hoped for.

Once I removed the old lights I realized that the previous owners had not painted or textured the ceiling behind the track. I was hoping that the new track ling would simply line up with the old one and cover the old paint but that would have been too easy. The new track was shorter and didn't line up perfectly because it was mounted differently.

Home Depot was able to match the ceiling paint perfectly and I managed to get the texturing to look pretty good. You can buy different kinds in a spray can and it works pretty well. You wouldn't notice the differences unless I pointed them out.

Anyway the new lights look awesome and the kitchen is much brighter.

A Little Kitchen TLC

So there are two things that have been really bugging me about my kitchen. One was the faucet which corroded a few month after I moved in and would not let you move it side to side. It was stuck in one position and I could not make it budge. I finally fixed that over Memorial Day weekend. By that time the drain under the sink had developed a leak and I was using a bucket to catch the water. So I learned a lot about plumbing that weekend but got it fixed.
The finished job.