Torrilin's Profile

For full albums, it really depends. Sometimes Amazon is cheaper, other times iTunes is... assuming both have it. If you're a hapless English speaker looking for French music, Amazon will make it ridiculously hard to find or even impossible. ITunes makes it easy. I'm not a major audio geek, but I'd also rather not convert a lossy format to a lossy format, so iTunes AAC only policy tends to deter me. So I deal with it by keeping a personal wish list, and I check for useful sales every so often. I don't buy a lot of singles.

For books, it also depends. I read a lot of SFF, and I much prefer my books DRM free. Tor and Baen finally succeeded in getting DRM-free books into all the major retailers... before that, I would buy the DRM-free versions direct from the publisher if I had the option. It was a pain, but DRM is a pain too. I love to read, and I want new stuff to read, so I'm happy to pay for it... but dealing with DRM is not worth it most of the time.

For apps, I'm not usually worried solely about cheap. Whether it actually works well for me tends to matter more. I also don't tend to use a lot of apps. The paid apps I use most often are Byword (one of the approximately gazillion Notes replacements that talks to Dropbox) and Goodreader. While I could get paid versions of the flashcards app I use and the tasks app I use, I haven't found it essential so far.

Wall mount the TV. The TV should be purchased to suit the most screen real estate intensive game you play. For us, that was Rock Band, and a 40-50" TV works well for group play in a small to medium sized living room.

Next, you'll want something for holding your router, cable box, games consoles, charging game controllers, network hard drives etc. Think about which devices need to be poked at often and which don't. Stuff that needs lots of poking should be easily accessible. If there's a DVD tray, it should have space to open and close. This spot is also going to need a *ton* of power outlets, and they all should be surge protected. Depending on your social circle and gaming style, it may also need a generous helping of USB charge outlets. Depending on the kind of internet service you have, you may also need an uninterruptible power supply for the router and/or cable box.

As far as game controllers... as everyone else noted, it's not just the goofy console style controllers. Depending on the game, you may need keyboards, headsets for voice comms, mice, joysticks, fake plastic guitars... plus TV remotes, and remotes for anything else hooked up to the TV. All of that stuff needs a place to live when it isn't in use, and it needs to be actually usable for gaming. For our household, laptops are a big part of the solution, since we're both comfy typing with a laptop on our laps, and it minimizes cables everywhere as a trip hazard. What works is going to vary by gamer, and since we're a multi-gamer household there was some very real compromising to get a workable solution.

The couch in our place is comfy for long term sitting, and it goes across from the TV. In a world of infinite money, we'd have an additional 2-4 seats worth of kibitzing available that are also good for long term sitting. For now, we have a couch that eats people, and side chairs get moved around to suit the social situation.

Our living room is by far our most used room, so we cheerfully will spend money on stuff that makes it nicer to be in. But since it's the most used room, we also spend a good bit of time thinking and working out what the right thing is before we buy.

Get a parrot. Turn wall into a parrot play space.

I'm staring at the space imagining the acrobatics my sister's Alexandrine parakeet could get up to. And well, a parrot can be very pretty... Done right it could be very artistic, and easy to change around.

(obviously, not a good solution if you don't love birds... but this is totally a parrot's dream apartment)

Think of trim as the frame for your room. While I'm not fond of stark white trim as the only choice, if you're bothering to put color on the walls, white trim is a good starting point. White is particularly helpful when you're building an overall color scheme for your house and you want unifying details to flow throughout. White also tends to bring out the details in more elaborate trim.

We've actually done a fair bit of trim experimentation with this place. We're redoing one room at a time, from the flooring on up. Most of the carpet is nearly as old as the condo (so close to 30 years) and it's just not in good shape. We're replacing it with ash hardwood floors, and the two finished rooms have matching ash baseboards. This still gives a nice framing effect to the room. The original trim is a weird stained material... it might be wood, or it might not be. Hard to tell. While the material isn't very good, the chocolate brown stained color works surprisingly well for a framing effect with a lot of different wall and floor colors. In a good quality hardwood, the effect would be lovely.

If you'd hesitate to frame a dozen assorted pictures in a given color, it might not be a good choice as a trim shade. And while I might not hesitate to frame a dozen pictures in fire engine red... my partner (rightfully!) would hit me over the head with a cluebat if I tried. But gold, silver and black frames are used on a wide range of artwork, and stained wood works with a lot of art too, so it's not like white is the only possible trim.

Probably the most expensive thing in my kitchen is the tea kettle. I'm a tea addict, and my partner is a coffee addict. A sturdy whistling tea kettle gets used for at least 1 French press pot of coffee and 1 pot of tea every day, and it often acts as an aide de camp for other things. Risotto is a lot easier if you can just pour in dribbles of near boiling water. It's $40 or so for a nice kettle, so it's not a huge splurge. I don't particularly like the electric sort since the auto-off features tend to mean I boil and reboil the same water... better to have a loud and annoying whistle.

The next most used items are my Lodge cast iron. I could get by with the 3 quart dutch oven with a skillet lid, but it's a lot nicer to have a proper griddle and a large frying pan to go with. The 3 quart size is perfect for making 4-6 servings of soup, or a braised dish to feed 4 people. Lodge makes larger Dutch ovens with skillet lids, but for a household of 2 it's not real practical.

I've used knives ranging from really expensive to really cheap, and I honestly don't care as long as they're sharp. It perhaps says a lot about my cooking philosophy that I have decent knives even for camping tho... and that I always know where the whetstone and steel is.

When we purchased our condo, the seller was required to provide a copy of the association by laws for us before we closed. The document was really clear and understandable compared to what I'm used to with real estate legal documents, but I'm also from a state where it matters that you have clear title to the land's mineral rights and a geological survey to be sure the property isn't going to randomly sink 100 feet. If the by laws had not been clear and understandable to us, I would have consulted a lawyer to be sure I understood them.

I was also able to talk with the property management firm before we closed to clarify enforcement on a few details that seemed a bit ridiculous. Under the by laws for example, it's specified that only one bicycle can park in a unit's parking space. It's pretty easy to fit 5-6 bikes in a parking space tho, so provided the bikes are not interfering with other parking spaces, the rule is not enforced.

In the case of this grab bar, I would have clarified it with the property management firm before I signed. I'd want to keep a reasonable length of grab bar for my mom's mobility issues and in case my partner or I have another accident that puts one of us on crutches for 6 weeks. But a full length wheelchair accessible grab bar is excessive for our second floor unit in a no elevator building.

There are a ton of apps that permit voice or video conferences. Google Hangouts work but on most devices take a couple minutes to get set up if all you need is voice. The main reason to have it IMO is if someone you talk to regularly is on an Android based device that's having issues with the Skype app. Skype is a lot better at handling voice primary, and it's easier to turn video feeds on and off as needed. Ventrillo and Teamspeak are the granddaddies of voice chat, and they work well for large groups, but they're not necessarily fast to set up. I haven't used Mumble yet. I'm sure there are other options too.

Grey can feel warm. A lot depends on the textures that go with it. A room with grey walls, sleek leather sofas, wood floors, linen curtains or Venetian blinds and a lot of glass or plastic modern pieces is going to feel cold. Soften the space with a cozy cottage style sofa, a Turkish style rug and other fabrics that are nice to touch and the room will feel better. A lot of old libraries are built around slick marble walls yet they feel cozy and comfortable for reading.

If I were buying something like a Pottery Barn or Crate and Barrel sofa where you can buy multiple slipcovers for regular washing, a pink option isn't necessarily bad (but for a sofa like that, I'd budget for 2 slipcovers right away, and an extra in 3-5 years). If you're buying a sofa where you can't wash the fabric regularly, and pink is not an integral part of your personal style... no way. Since my sister has been a pink girl for almost our entire lives, I'd tell her to get a pink sofa in a heartbeat. If I were thinking of a pink sofa, she'd make me go get my head examined, even if it was a slipcover, because I destroy pink things and love red and aqua ones.

Really, the same goes for any other "unusual" color choice.

We share an aesthetic, and have a lot of the same dreams and wishes for the "perfect" house. Fortunately tho, we don't have a vision that's exact enough that we're fighting over every detail needing to be perfect.

For example, we both like sofas with rounded arms, fairly high arms, 3 cushion seats, and a fairly traditional look. But neither one of us is 100% committed to an exact design. There are a lot of sofas that fit that general look, so the next step is to find some samples to sit in. For allergy reasons, we've also got a mild preference for leather over fabric, and that does narrow things down rather... but by itself it's nowhere near enough :). It's still a huge amount of design territory, and there are scads of options.

A more contentious example is our shower curtain. We agree that a certain block printed curtain is gorgeous, but $70 and dry clean only is not acceptable. So far we haven't managed to find a washable design that strikes us both as equally pretty. We can agree easily tho that washable is a very important trait in a shower curtain, and that it's better to do without a pretty curtain until we can find a compromise.

Our current construction project is a bit trickier. We've been gradually changing the floors in our condo from ancient carpet to professionally installed engineered hardwood that mitigates some subfloor issues. Then we add customized trim and built in furniture as required. We're agreed that the current room needs a window seat, but that means we've got to design one, and build it to fit our tastes AND build it to fit the demands of the room.

We spend a lot of time looking for win/win solutions in other words. And we're very practiced at doing without until we find the thing where we both agree.