I took the weekend off from work to try and get some things done around the house. Saturday I finally grabbed the gallon of ‘Garden Sage’ colored paint from beneath my studio table and set out to paint our other son’s bedroom. The color is off of our Sherwin Williams / HGTV ‘Global Spice’ palette.  ‘Garden Sage’ SW 7736 is a great neutral greenish color. We are huge fans of the color “sage”. We selected for our carpet throughout the second floor in this house, as well as our last house. Using the color on the walls of the bedroom makes for a really warm, soothing feel.

SW 7736 Garden Sage walls in the bedroom.

The sage walls go nicely with the sage carpet upstairs. Very warm, earthy and natural.

We’ve now used ten (10) colors off the ‘Global Spice‘ palette in our home. Each one is a knockout and in concert with each other it makes for a natural, visually warm, interesting yet calming experience.

Today I finally took a look at our Aprilaire 5000 Whole-House Electronic Air Cleaner. The little indicator on top has been flashing for a while, begging me to clean the unit inside. The  wife guided me through the maintenance directions she received quite a while ago from the HVAC guy. I guess life gets busy and we forget we have to take care of stuff. I opened the unit up and a few feathers fell out. I have no idea. I pulled out the filter core and it looks like there are about three main elements – 1) a expanded metal screen which was dusty, 2) super thin wires I’m not sure what they are for, but two were broken and all were dusty, and 3) a big fan fold filter which was filthy. Well I messed around with the whole ordeal, and the wife meticulously washed the metal screen, but other than that I’m not sure….I can order a new filter media thingy but you know what, realistically an HVAC guy should come out her and check to make sure the entire system is looking and working good. Also two of the thin wires are broke and I have no idea how those get fixed (or even what they do, other than they should be cleaned monthly).

The Aprilaire Model 5000 Whole House Electronic Air Cleaner opened up.

The back side of the air cleaner.

Point is all this stuff requires maintenance that is nearly impossible for me to remember to do. We need to keep a calendar or something. Quite frankly my head isn’t anywhere near where it needs to be to do “normal” house stuff. I worry about where our next meal is going to come from, so doing mundane home maintenance and chores is the last thing I care about.

But with this weekend being my self imposed chance to do some chores, I set the air cleaner project back on the “to do” list and instead I did one other easy one: I cleaned the  Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV). It’s a fairly simple chore; not sure when I did it last. You just unplug it, open it up, pull out two mesh screens and clean those. Then you pull out the diamond shaped filter out and vacuum that. I also vacuumed all the cavities inside the unit to get rid of spider webs and debris. Once the screens are dry, everything goes back together. It’s about a 15 minute job. Oh, for reference you’re supposed to spray some goo on the metal screens (and clean them every 6 months) but I am goo-less; will have to get some and spray it on at a later date.

Aprilaire Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) with the cover off. Core filter on left, intakes on the right.

That’s about it for this weekend. It was nice to get away from the computer and work and do stuff “normal” people do, again. Painting the bedroom was relatively relaxing and meditative. In a complex world, mundane tasks are king. Our son likes the color of his new room and hopefully it will be better for him compared to stark white walls. Now that his room is painted, I can only think of 2-3 rooms that need painting. I have one un-colored gallon that we bought on sale a while ago, so technically I can paint one of those rooms for “free”. We just need to pick a room and a color. Each room left is small so one gallon outta do it.

-Chris