On the Mend

Grandpa is doing a lot better. I spoke to him on the phone both yesterday and today. He's in good spirits and is on the mend. He's been up for a walk, and has been watching the news. His visitors keep him busy ;)

Long weekend for Grandpa

While Anna and I were in Morris, Grandpa stayed in the hospital. After we left on Thursday, he began bleeding again. Nothing serious at the time, just that he wasn't well enough to leave yet. He has some more transfusions. By Friday the Doctors were talking about surgery some more, but again, only if needed. Grandma had stopped bleeding again so things were again looking better. By Saturday things were still roller coastering with good and waiting to leave (silly homogloblens), so the doctors decided to o some scope work to look around. First they looked around his intestines and they all looked ok, so they went back in to look around the stomach, everything looked good there too. Their conclusion was that it had to be his diberticulitis. Come Sunday, his rollercoastering has meant he had had 11 transfusions. You can only have someone have 12 transfusions before the body begin to seriously reject the new blood. It was decided that on Sunday he'd go in for surgery. The surgery was slated to begin about 9am but that slowly crept back to about 10:45 or so. It was going to be a 3 hour surgery. While they were in fixing this problem they also decided to do some other things as well. He has had a hernia for 20+ years and his colostomy was difficult to maintain where it was. They decided to move and update is stoma, remove his fiscula, and remove his hernia (which was likely the cause the problems anyway).
Anna and I headed back to Eau Claire and got back about 4:30pm or so. We had thought we'd be back a couple hours after his surgery so that he'd be in the recovery room. We were surprised to find that he was still in surgery! Coincidently there was a major storm heading to Eau Claire as well. He finished surgery around 5pm or so. He was moved to a recovery room but because of the storm, and the hospital moving everyone from the rooms (avoiding windows), we didn;t get to see him in his room until about 8:30pm.
He was in alot of pain but was coherent. It was a long and tough 6 hour surgery. I'm 28 and 6 hours of surgery would be brutal for me, he's 80!
Late Sunday night/Monday morning, about 4am, he was moved from his regular room to critical care for closer monitoring. He's been making progress to recovery. He's coughing better and has been keaning up more (up to 25 degrees). The doctor stopped in and they're working to get him sitting up today or tomorrow.
He's still got a tremendous amount of pain and is fighting low blood pressure but is doing well. He's in good spirits, and is looking forward to his trip to Alaska with my cousin Johnny (who is graduating this weekend). He had one of the nurses talked into going too, until he told her she'd have to drain the sewer ;)

Welcome to Morris

Anna and I made it to Morris Mn, thanks to out new Garmin 260W GPS! It was a test drive of the GPS before our big honeymoon trip! We were the first to arrive in Morris (Anna's Sister, brother in law, children as well as her parents were also going as well, they had a 8-9 hour drive from Marinette).
Dave and Becky live on campus at UM-Morris. Its a town of about 2000. Their apartment was quite nice. They have a full kitchen, living room, and 2x bedrooms.
More about the trip later!

Get better Grandpa

Last Wednesday morning, about 1am, Grandpa decided he should drive himself to the hospital. He was having some bleeding issues and he finally had enough and wasn't feeling well. When he got to the hospital, they gave him a bit of a scare by asking if he had a power of attorney. He made a couple of calls and my Mom Sue and my Aunt Deb were at the hospital faster than you could say Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
I finally received a phone call about 7:30am Wednesday. Shortly there after I decided to head over to Eau Claire. (Anna and I had been planning to head over to Morris, MN Thursday to see her Brother Dave and Wife Becky.)
I made it to Eau Claire about Noon. Grandpa was on the fourth floor. He was in good spirits, laughing and joking. He had a couple of blood transfusions and his bleeding had stopped. Anna took part of the day off and came to Eau Claire early Wednesday evening. By Wednesday night the thought was that'd he be getting out sometime Thursday. There was talk of surgery but only if needed. He was all good to go but he needed to have his hemoglobin go up some more. Grandpa likes to pronounce it hemo-glob-en. :)
Upon Grandpa's recommendation, Anna and I stayed at the Antler Motel. Its a great, clean, cheap place to stay in Eau Claire if you're ever in town.
Thursday morning, the prognosis was still good. Anna and I left for Morris, Mn.

Put up that wall!

Along the Front and Left side of the house we have some red lava rock for landscaping. The front of the house has always had a retaining wall to separate the yard from the landscaping. The left side of the house though just had a plastic separator. The separator hasn't been doing a good job! (The lawn mower can attest to that!). We decided to finish the wall and have it wrap around the left side of the house.

We ran to Menards and purchased over a ton of blocks. They guy at Menards thought it was funny for me to ask how much the blocks weighed. I told him I had a car and ding, he understood. 2000lbs = 2 trips with the trailer.

Funny story. Anna and I were loading the trailer. Anna wanted to have me put the blocks on the trailer (she didn't want to be responsible if they broke) so that meant she was getting the blocks from the pile and carrying to me on the trailer. A lady walked up and gave me a scowl. Here I am 'making' Anna do the hard work. I mean it's obvious I, the Man, should be doing that! And on top of it, poor Anna, the lady thought Anna was a cancer patient and gave her a big hug. Turns out I wasn;t 100% bad... The lady said "Well at least he's on his knees!"

We dug up the grass where we wanted the wall. Flattened it all out. We put some pea gravel down and started laying the blocks. Oh the description sounds so easy! Well a full day plus later, we have a new wall! We're proud of the work we did. Go team!

Garden Planter

We've been wanting to start a garden but haven't figured out where. One day while we were shopping at Menards we came up with the idea of building our own raised garden bed. We looked at lumber sizes to get some ideas. The next day I asked around for ideas on how to build it. I heard tons of great ideas. Slowly I settled on an idea. Last Sunday my buddy Adam and I drove out to Menards to get supplies. Did we have a detailed plan? No. Did that stop us? Heck no. Once we got there we made some quick sketches, picked some lumber(easier said than done), and headed home.

Once we got the goods back home, we started to get to work. I'll spare you the construction details but the dimensions are roughly 8ft x 2ft. Tonight it got finished up by adding the outer lip and putting in the inner liner. You can see Anna demonstrating its size. As Adam says, I'd be a great coffin maker for NBA players. ;)

Its going to be an awesome garden! Can't wait for the deliciousness!

New blogging tool!

Hey, I just found out about a new blogging tool! It's called Windows Live Writer. I know, its from Microsoft. Believe it or not its just amazing, and FREE! It supports blogger quite well. You have more configuration than you do on blogger itself (WYSIWYG type stuff). I highly recommend trying it!

FIRST - Atlanta

FIRST update from the Championship competition!

.E.W. Apple Corps Robotics Team #93 attended the Championships held in Atlanta GA this past weekend. There were approximately 340 teams divided into 4 divisions at the competition this year. We were part of the Archimedes division with 86 teams. As with the other competitions the N.E.W. Apple Corp attended this year Thursday is tech inspection and practice. The team used this time to update some of the electronic controls to help us in knocking a ball off of the overpass in hybrid mode and also fine-tune the robots control software. The team was ready for qualifying matches to start on Friday. We would play 7 matches starting Friday morning ending Saturday at noon. Unfortunately the matches did not go as well as we had hoped.

We lost our first 2 matches 122 to 70 and 88 to 76 winning our next 2 matches with scores of 58 to 30 and 92 to 56. The last match of the day was one of the strangest we've seen in sometime. The first 15 seconds of the match is know as hybrid mode. Robots can run a preprogrammed string of commands or a student armed with a TV remote control can send the robot a command.

Our student or AKA Robocoach has 2 commands stop and raise arm. If were lucky enough to have a trackball on the overpass ahead of us we will try to knock it off by raising the arm. Unknown to us at the start of this match one of our teammates used the same remote commands and told our robot to raise it's arm. Because of the custom high power remote they made our Robocoach could not get our robot to stop and if that wasn't bad enough our robot raised it's arm to high. Our robot basically clothes lined itself landing on it's back with in the first 5 seconds of the match. Needless to say we lost that match even though we were with two very good robots.

On Saturday we would split our last two matches winning 94 to 64 and losing 120 to 104. Leaving us with a 3-4 record ranked 42nd out of 86 teams. We were picked by the 2nd seed alliance for the elimination round. In the quarter final round we lost the first best of 3 match before working out a winning strategy to win the last two. In the Semi finals we won the first match but, one of our team mates had a transmission problem that we couldn't repair 100% ending our run towards the finals. Tobor 11 this years robot has held up remarkably well due to the hard work of the students on the team. Not once has team 93's robot been unable to help their alliance partner in a match because of a mechanical break down.

On a side note as with all of the championship events you never know who will be there . This year was no different than in the past. During Fridays opening ceremonies one of the presenters was none other than our 41st President of the United States George H. W. Bush. One of his comments seems to have become very popular with the FIRST community. Buttons started to appear on Saturday quoting the President " FIRST robotics is like the WWF, only for smart people."

N.E.W. Apple Corps Robotics, Team #93 continues to be a very well respected and competitive team among our peers.

We had some free time while in Atlanta. We arrived mid-afternoon Wednesday, just enough time to buzz through The Georgia Aquarium. Because we got there so late they gave use 1/2 off out admission! After our hurried (but fun) underwater exploration, we decided to see if Coca-Cola World was still open. Surprisingly it was! They closed the ticket booth already but one of the security guards got one open for us so we could pay and get in as the doors were closing.

Last tour of the day (sweet). This is the new facility they recently built. It was great!And the taste testing lots of good stuff! yum!

I brought my Wii along too so we had a blast with that. C'mon guys, fight!

One thing that was very apparent as we walked around near the Georgia Dome, was the aftermath of the tornado that had struck there earlier in the Year. Lots of broken windows, torn metal sheathing, and broken glass on the sidewalks. Yikes. Scary to think of a tornado rolling down a big city street!

A Stitch in Time

I made an awesome discovery for my camera! It's an open-source software package to run on my Canon camera! Here is a link to an article about it: CHDK. It brings out all sorts of options for my camera. The coolest one is changing the shutter speed. I can now set shutter speed at 1/8000 to 1/60,000 of a second! This is fantastic for high speed photography. After learning that I setup the faucet to drip and started taking a ton of pictures. I caught some fantastic pics!


Another awesome feature is time-lapse photography. I downloaded a script that allows me to setup my camera to take a picture every X seconds. Now I am on a lick to take time lapse photography of a lot of stuff. From fixing the trailer to pruning trees.

One more item that seems useful, though I haven't yet tried, is bracketing. Its a technique where you take say 3 pictures of the same scene. Each photo is taken at a different exposure setting. This is useful for when you take a picture and the building is fine but the sky is all washed out white and the ground is dark. Now you take 3 photos, one where the building is good, another where the sky is good, and yet another where the ground is good. You then mix the pictures and get amazing results.

Of Gates and Axles...

[Sunday April 6th]

The fence gate behind our 2nd garage has been annoying me. It just doesn't close right. I took a closer look at it and realized that the gate itself was too wide! I decided to shorten it. Now that may sound easy but its harder than you might think. You've got to take off the gate, then take off the chain link of the fence that is stretched on the fence, so it's a little tricky to get off. After that you have a basic frame to dismantle, cut shorter and reassemble. Some elbow grease and some big swings of the hammer breaks the pieces lose. Unfortunately it also breaks one of the corner pieces ;) After getting the frame and new parts together, how does one stretch the chain link back onto the gate? Enter some cranking tie down straps! I used them to pull the chain link tight.

Now that's out of the way, time to start a challenging project. Relocate the axle of the Teardrop trailer! Turns out that the tongue weight of the trailer is 185 lbs, a little hefty for my Ford Taurus who's limit is 175lbs. It's close but I'd feel much better if it were under! My theory? Move the axle forward and the tongue weight will be less! After several hours of wrenching around, I managed to get the tear axle moved ! Not only did the tongue weight go down, but it looks alot better too! After weigh it, we dropped from 185lbs tongue weight down to 120lbs! Not bad!

Teardrop!

[Sunday March 30th]
Anna and I have been toying with the idea of buying a teardrop camper. We did a lot of searching for companies that make them. As it turns out they are becoming more and more popular . All the manufacturers we spoke with had hefty backlogs.

Anna looked on http://www.craigslist.com for used trailers and found one up in Sandstone, Minnesota. Since we were in Minnesota for FIRST already, so we decided to drive up to Sandstone after FIRST and check it out.

On our way up there we stopped in Hinkley, home of a big casino. Unfortunately their hotel was booked so no crazy night of gambling for us! We pushed on straight to Sandstone itself and found a classic country highway motel 'Motel 61'. Ah, Motel 61... It had the essentials ;)

As you can see by the pictures, we bought it! The couple selling it were very nice and let us take it for a test tow. We took it out on the highway and around town. The car pulls it very nice. We got inside and checked it all out. We found ourselves starting to say things like "we'll do this, or that". Then we knew we were going to buy it.

The guy who we bought it from built it himself. Its primarily plywood sitting on a commercial frame.

So what is it? Its a lightweight trailer for camping ;) The inside has a bed thats just a little smaller than a full size bed. 4'x6' with a foam mattress. It also has some cabinets, a ceiling vent with fan, and lighting. Around the back, and under the hatch, is a kitchenette. It sports a three-burner gas stove, sink, and cupboards. Other items to note are the AC outlets so we can plug-in at campsites as well as a battery and inverter so we can run stuff without having an electric hook-up.

We're very excited! We're planning on taking it on our honeymoon.

FIRST - Minnesota

Team #93 attended the Minnesota Regional competition held this last weekend in Minneapolis. The team was firing on all cylinders and had a great weekend. We received four new trophies and a banner! The trophies are for being part of the winning alliance, Rockwell Automation Innovation in Controls Award, Underwriters Laboratories Industrial Safety Award, and Johnson & Johnson Gracious Professionalism Award.

A special thanks to everyone who came out to watch the event and support the team! Anna, my fiancée came out all weekend. My Grandpa Dick came out on Friday and Saturday. My Mother Sue, sisters Taylor & Elizabeth, Aunt Deb and John, her son Johnny came out on Saturday. Anna's brother Dave made it on Friday.

Thursday at the competition was a practice day set up for most teams to work the bugs out of their systems. We had most of our bugs worked out from the Milwaukee regional, but made some improvements to the autonomous modes. One major update gave the robot the ability to navigate over an entire lap in 15 seconds without a driver! Very cool. This allowed us to gain critical points at the beginning of the match. During the practice matches the driver and operator got the feel of the robot back after not working with it for two weeks. Everything was working very well and it appeared to be the makings of a very good weekend.

In addition of the 54 teams there were 30 rookie teams at this competition. Many of the rookie teams were struggling to have even partially functional robots. Because of this many of the mentors and students from our team went out to help as many of the other teams as possible. We rewired an entire robot for another team, provided multiple teams with software support, helped teams work through many mechanical issues including a robot that was 60 pounds overweight, and countless teams came to us to use or borrow tools and learn from us. Near the end of the day a mother of a student from a rookie team walked by our pit where we repair our robot. She made the comment that we are one of the most intimidating teams there due to our experience and professionalism. One of the mentors responded that we’re not intimidating…we’re inspiring. We were once again ‘doing FIRST’.

Friday during the qualifying rounds we ran very well. We were in the very first match of the day and proceeded to rack up nearly ninety points. Unfortunately we were outscored by 12 points and lost this match. It was a very tough opening round but was a great way to get the crowd pumped up for this inaugural regional even. We won the next six matches and ended the day with a record of 6 wins, 1 loss, and were ranked in 2^nd out of the 54 teams attending.

Also on Friday I got terribly sick! Anna and Dave went to go get me some medicine and when they got back they found me leaving the bathroom looking 'green'. Everyone knows that it takes a lot for me to throw in the towel but after some coaxing I went back to the hotel to get some rest and get over whatever hit me.

On Friday there is a partial awards ceremony that follows the qualifying matches to recognize teams that have unique accomplishments. During this ceremony we won the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Controls award for features implemented on the robot to conserve power during the match. This award celebrated an innovative control system or application of control components to provide unique machine functions.

Saturday morning I was feeling better and headed back to the competition. We had two remaining qualifying matches. Both matches were very close. We won the first match. During the second match we had a sensor feedback failure which rendered our robot arm unusable and we lost by a very close margin. At the end of the qualifying rounds we had a record of 8 wins and 2 losses and were ranked 3^rd overall.

After the qualifying round there was an alliance selection process where the top 8 teams can pick two other teams to join them. We were in a position to either pick two other teams to join us for an alliance or be picked by a higher ranking team to join their alliance. During the alliance selection the first ranked team picked us and we joined them. Together we selected another team that complimented us and the alliance got the robots and teams ready for competition for the afternoon of best-of-3 elimination matches.

During the eliminations rounds we went up against groups of strong alliances. We had a purely offensive strategy of brute-force outscoring our competition by using two robots to hurdle the ball and the third robot operating as a race car running laps. Our alliance consistently scored between 94 to 102 points every match. Because of our strategy and well functioning robots we were able to win the quarter finals, semifinals, and finals rounds without loosing a single match.

During the awards ceremony that followed, awards were given out for various accomplishments. We won three additional awards during this ceremony.

Because of the organized manner, cleanliness, and safety features displayed we won the Underwriter Laboratories Industrial Safety award. This award celebrated the team that progressed beyond safety fundamentals by using innovative ways to eliminate or protect against hazards. The winning team consistently demonstrated excellence in industrial safety performance that showed throughout the competitions from uncrating to re-pack.

Due to the tremendous amount of support we provided to other teams we won the Johnson & Johnson Sportsmanship Award. This award celebrated outstanding sportsmanship and continuous gracious professionalism in the heat of competition, both on and off the playing field.

The third award was for being a member of the winning alliance for the robotics competition.

N.E.W. Apple Corps Robotics, Team #93 continues to be a very well respected and competitive team among our peers. We’re already looking forward to championship event coming up the weekend of April 19^th in Atlanta!

Taylor's Trip

[Sunday march 17th]
My sister Taylor went on a school trip to Argentina and just arrived. Here's the latest news!

I am in Mendoza, It is so beautiful! The plane trip here was amazing, despite the 12 hour ride. Being in another country is great, the culture is so different and laid back. The drivers are scary! Today we took a bus from Mendoza to Uspallata with a Geologist from Buenos Aires who specializes in the Andes. I can barely comprehend how incredibly enormous the mountains we have seen are, and we have´t even reached the snow capped Andes yet! They automatically serve wine here every time you sit down, and boy is it strong, it tastes like nail polish remover. But, I try to be polite. I just got back from walking around with some students around town. Their food places don´t even open until 8 or 9, and right now it is so busy out! Everyone inlcuding their kids are out right now having a good time. There are so many shops all around and people are very kind. Well, I must go to bed now. We have a long day tomorrow hiking around. We are headed for San Jose I believe it is. I hope you guys are doing well! I love you all!

FIRST - Milwaukee Day 3

[Saturday March 15th]
Well here’s the summary of the weekend! The weekend started out fairly rough but ended awesome. We got two new trophies! One trophy is for being part of the alliance in the final rounds. A second trophy is for winning the Engineering Inspiration Award. If you want the details, keep reading…

Thursday at the competition is a practice day set up for most teams to work the bugs out of their systems. We took most of the morning on Thursday to make various electrical updates to clean up a ‘crows nest’ of wires and then turned the robot over to software to implement several updates. One major update gave the robot the ability to navigate ¾ of a lap in 15 seconds without a driver. This allowed us to gain critical points at the beginning of the match. During the practice matches the driver and operator had several communications issues and the robot ended the last two matches on its back with no way to recover. It appeared to be the makings for a very long weekend, but it was better to get the bugs worked out then than during the regular matches.

Friday during the qualifying rounds we ran very well. We lost our first match, won the next four, and lost our last match of the day. We ended the day with a record of 4 wins and 2 losses and were ranked 14^th out of the 60 teams attending. We didn’t like the losses, but felt good about our performance mainly because we were the primary scoring robot and were getting better with every match.

Saturday morning we had two remaining qualifying matches with good alliance teams and won the matches. At the end of the qualifying rounds we had a record of 6 wins and 2 losses and were ranked 8^th!

At the end of the qualifying round there was an alliance selection process where the top 8 teams can pick two other teams to join them. We were in a position to either pick two other teams to join us for an alliance or be picked by a higher ranking team and join their alliance. During the alliance selection the fourth ranked team picked us and we joined them. Together we selected another team that complimented us and the alliance got the robots and teams ready for competition for the afternoon of best-of-3 elimination matches.

During the quarter final rounds we went up against a fairly strong alliance, but because of our strategy and well functioning robots we were able to defeat them in two matches and moved onto the semifinal rounds.

In the semifinal rounds we went up against the first seeded alliance consisting of three extremely tough teams. Our only strategy was to brute-force outscore their alliance. They had two robots that could rack up a lot of points, but they had some weaknesses. The first match we won with an 88 to 62 victory. The second match we tied at 70-70. There was some confusion leading to the announcement of the score and we were all on the edge of our seats. Between the second and third match the opponent called a time-out to fix something that broke on one of their robots. They were not able to completely repair one of the robots, so it was no longer able to score very effectively. During the third match the opponent alliance (#1 seed at the competition) decided to double-team defend *our* robot to keep it from scoring. We still managed to rack up a pile of points and won with a score of 72 to 48. This moved us on to the final rounds.

The first match of the final rounds we won by a close victory of 66 to 60. During the second match one of our alliance partners had a breakdown of their drive train which meant we were playing 2-on-3. We lost this round with a score of 44 to 80. Between the second and third match we called a time-out to hopefully give our alliance partner time to make repairs. The repairs took longer than the timeout period, so a backup team was brought in to replace them. During this last match our other alliance partner had a breakdown and again we were playing 2-on-3. We lost this last with a score of 36 to 64 and ended up taking second place.

During the awards ceremony that followed, awards were given out for various accomplishments. In previous years we won the Sportsmanship Award because of the support we provided to other teams during the competition. This year we took it a huge step forward and won the Engineering Inspiration Award. This award is given to a team that advances respect and appreciation for engineering within the team’s school and community. This is the second highest award that FIRST gives out. We won this award because of the work done by the team at various community events including Oktoberfest and Walleye weekend, hosting various robotics camps for grade school students during the summer, and the many links between Team #93, the Tesla charter school, Plexus, and other supporting engineering companies in the community.

N.E.W. Apple Corps Robotics, Team #93 continues to be a very well respected and competitive team among our peers. We’re already looking forward to the next regional competition the weekend of March 28^th in Minneapolis!

FIRST - Overdrive

There have been some questions about what the game is all about. Here is the introduction video shown by FIRST at the kick-off event. It'll fill you in ;)

FIRST - Milwaukee Day 2

[Friday Saturday 14th]
Happy Pi Day! Today was our first actual competition day in the Milwaukee Regional. Yesterday was a practice day. It was a very exciting day! We tried our robot out on the field for the first time. We were all very nervous putting it all together and trying it out. For us Software guys, running autonomous was worrisome because we've *never* ran all our new code with the real robot, and the little testing we did do wasn't on a full-size field! The first autonomous clip you see here is our very first run! We try and run thr robot around the course and do a lap. The robot has to know how far to go, when to stop, when to turn. On our first run the robot quickly goes full speed, all the way across the field with no sign of slowing down or stopping! Image us, running un-tested code, seeing that clip. My heart was racing. I didn't think it would stop! Full speed ahead like the titanic right into the way. Whew, stopped in the nick of time (and thats no small feat!)

By the end of the day we had a 4-2 record and were ranked 13 out of ~60 teams. We're really happy with how well things are going. We did get one of our tusks (grabbers) bent out of shape on the last match but we were able to get fixed right away and move on. Tomorrow is our big day. Who are we? 93!

Sunroom

This is the first in a series home improvement posts. First we'll start with the Sunroom! This was one of our first projects.

The previous owners did a great job assembling this room. The entire room is lined with beautiful stained wood. They furnished it with offwhite coaches and green blinds. It was a country feel.

One common and reoccurring theme was the previous owners had dogs! Hair everywhere! Our allergies to dogs, we decided to rip up this carpet and start new. Who knew how hard that'd be!

Ripping up the old carpet wasn't hard. We found a nice solid sub-floor atop the concrete subfloor.
Anna and I went shopping at a local carpet seller/installer not far from the house. Since the subfloor is concrete we decided to go all out and buy some super thick (aka warm) carpet. The carpet was so long, we were a little nervous we wouldn't be able to clean it (allergies). We made a point to ask if there were any special care instructions , we were assured there weren't.

We got the carpet installed and it was amazing! You could lose your whole hand in it! We loved it! Eventually the time came to vacuum it. We have 3x vacuums (that seems like a lot for 2 people 'eh?). We tried the first 2 with nothing too exciting happening, except the long carpet bogged down the motors. When we tried the 3rd, thats the charm! We frayed our new carpet. D'oh, what a bummer!

Our installer was really understanding and offered to replace the carpet. We decided not to go with the same carpet (maybe we'd end up fraying it again). We went into the store and selected some new carpet and went home. The next day an apologetic sales associate called us and explained that we selected a different brand of carpet and we had to go select again to select the same brand. I was frustrated that we needed to select again. We went back in and selected some new samples to take home and try out. While we still had the new samples, we got a call and found out we could select any brand. Yippee, we really liked our initial re-selection and placed an order.

Not too long afterward the new carpet was installed, awesome! The new stuff was less thick but great. After that fresh new carpet feeling went away we noticed a distinct line parallel to a wall about 4 feet away. I gave the installer a call and they asked how we liked the carpet. To their credit they mentioned the line on the carpet and wanted to see if it was a problem for us. We decided it was a little to distinct for us. Turns out its rare, it usually only happens in large office installations, etc, but as the carpet is rolled out the color sometimes changes. Our rool is wider than a roll of carpet so they unroll one strip and then fill in the remainder with then next section off of the roll.

We eventually got the correct carpet installed, it fantastic! We also installed new outlets installed and new blinds installed. Voila, our new sun room!