The Den of Slack

emilymorganti.com

Page 137 of 238

Notice anything different about the blog? (Hopefully not!)

March 10, 2013 / / 3 Comments

This weekend I made some updates behind the scenes that hopefully haven’t broken anything. In December, 1&1 (my webhost) sent an email saying they would discontinue support for php 4 on April 1 so I needed to update my site to php 5.4. Naturally I waited until mid-March to deal with it. I actually wanted to do this update a while ago, because my blog was running on an ancient version of WordPress (2.9), but for a long time 1&1 only supported php 4 and the newer versions of WordPress need php 5.

Switching the php version turned out to be a simple matter of selecting the new version number from a drop-down menu in the 1&1 tools.


You can switch the php version setting by clicking Global PHP Version in the 1&1 Control Panel.

Of course, once I did this my blog displayed as a blank page, because my ancient version of WordPress didn’t work with php 5.4. As it turns out, newer versions of WordPress also require that the database is MySQL 5. Mine was using MySQL 4, because that’s what was available from 1&1 when I created the site. Switching this was not a simple matter of selecting a version number from a drop-down menu, however. I had to create a new database and move everything from the old version into the new version—a task that’s far beyond my comfort zone as far as this stuff goes.

1&1 has a fairly straightforward FAQ that explains the process… problem is, if it doesn’t work exactly right, they don’t tell you what to try next! According to an article from 2010, fewer than 6% of WordPress users were using MySQL 4 even then. (Lucky me!) So the problems I experienced probably apply to a relatively small number of people, but if you’ve found this post because you’re a 1&1 user who can’t figure out what to do next, here’s what worked for me.

Continue reading

The Great Stair Extravaganza

February 13, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I knew all along that getting stairs into the Queen Anne rowhouse would be a challenge. The stair holes were positioned in a place that wouldn’t fit a regular straight staircase. The original kit may have come with stairs that turned a corner, and apparently Houseworks used to sell stairs like these because I’ve seen them a few times on eBay. But the only half scale stairs readily available now are the straight ones, so bashing was my only option.

From looking at the photo of the old Houseworks stairs and at the stairs in my own house, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I got as far as cutting the staircase into two pieces, back in September, before my head started to hurt.

So I put them aside until my parents came to visit last week. My dad is good at figuring out this sort of thing, and he knows how to use power tools! Here’s the basic design we came up with.

Initially I cut the staircase into two pieces: 6 stairs at on the top piece and 7 stairs on the bottom piece. But I was concerned about headroom, so we ended up making a 2-step landing and removing one additional stair from the bottom section.

The stairs were easy to cut with a miter box. For all of the other pieces, my dad used the scary circular saw. (I didn’t take any pictures of that, too busy covering my ears…)

Continue reading

Ceilings and knee walls and carpets, oh my!

February 1, 2013 / / 4 Comments

Haven’t had much time for mini-ing lately, but this week I finished a petitpoint carpet and a few weeks ago Geoff helped me cut some wood to make ceilings and knee walls for the rowhouse’s attic rooms, so here’s a hodgepodge of pictures for all of my restless readers.

The Queen Anne rowhouse has two large attic rooms that I plan to use as a bedroom and a rec room with a pool table. I wanted to add ceiling lamps but the peaked ceilings makes this tricky. And I never really like dollhouse rooms with slanted walls, they just don’t seem realistic to me. So, I wanted to cut pieces of plywood that could be used to create a flat ceiling, and a short wall.

Since these pieces will meet the ceiling at a 45-degree angle, their edges need to be cut at 45-degree angles. Geoff did this for me with his table saw. (What a guy!)

We used scrap plywood that isn’t the nicest, but it’s going to be covered up with wallpaper and ceiling paper. The house isn’t quite square so it took a few attempts to get the sizes right.

The ceiling piece is about 2-1/2 inches across and fits right into the triangular area above where the roof piece that swings opens is hinged. The wall piece is 1-7/8 tall. (I read on Wikipedia that a knee wall is usually under 3 feet tall, and these would be almost 4 feet tall. So maybe it’s not technically a knee wall.)

Here’s the basic idea.

The ceiling is only truly visible if you duck and look up from underneath, or through the window. But it will make it much neater to add ceiling fixtures in here since now I can hide the wires.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

Follow

RSS

Subscribe to Blog Updates

Fine Print

Privacy Policy

Calendar

July 2025
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

© 2025 The Den of Slack

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑