It’s not over till the fat lady sings
For weeks on end, our home and office has been like a construction site. But today, our last (planned) renovation project – a brand new office air heat pump – was installed. This calls for celebration indeed, however, I don’t think we have earned it just yet. There are still plenty of extremely small things that I think needs to be taken care of before we can claim “mission accomplished”. Things like scanning the lawn for leftover screws and nails, small chunks of insulation, packaging materials, leftover wood etc. And finally, a proper house-cleaning. One should be careful to claim a project is over prematurely.
This time, for some reason I can feel that we ain’t done yet. I have a cooled bottle ready in the refrigerator, but I haven’t felt any urge at all to open it. It just hit me that the primary reason isn’t just the remaining trash here and there. It is because I haven’t defined clear goal conditions. So, let’s do it now. That’ll bring some accountability to the equation too, by the fact that you are reading this sentence. Let’s say that the target is this weekend, with Saturday evening as the deadline. By then, the bottle shall get opened. And I will:
Do a proper session of scanning the lawn for debris.
Store every ladder and tool in its proper place.
Drive the bigger pieces of trash to recycling.
Clean my office and make it tidy.
Clean our house and make it tidy.
Then, we have earned it. Then we can claim “mission accomplished”.
If we were to celebrate now, the probability of me not finishing points 1-5 in the coming week would increase substantially.
Another thing just hit me with the new air heat pump. It is dead silent in comparison to the old terrible unit. Unfortunately, I haven’t had my sonometer with me for the past weeks so I couldn’t make a before/after measurement. But a subjective evaluation from yours truly, one of the biggest noise nerds in the world, is that the dBC level went from around 50-55 dBC to inaudible. Now it is just a quiet whispering whoosh from the fan, and that kind of sound never gets nearly as annoying as having a ship engine on idle, rigidly mounted to your office wall. I obviously went with an oversized heat pump for my house, so that I can run it at a lower speed, which reduces the noise level. Practice what you preach, mr Acoustician. Why should anyone take me seriously if neither my home nor my office fulfills even the minimum legal standards for new buildings? Well not anymore.
I just got goosebumps writing this because I just realized that my office, where I spend the majority of my waking hours, just became a 1000X healthier and nicer place to be. The importance of getting rid of the low frequencies cannot be overstated. It brings serious health benefits. You shouldn’t think twice about investing in yourself and your health. It is an investment that just keeps on giving and giving, no matter what happens to the stock market. At first, I was reluctant tot shell out another 20000 SEK on a new heat pump, but now with the results in hand, I curse myself for not biting the bullet sooner. The old unit was on life support and was about to break any day. I had to service it often, because it tended to become a block of ice every now and then. That’s several wasted work hours per winter that have been freed. And the icing on the cake is a dead silent – and warm – office, which increases productivity. Those 20000 SEK were a no-brainer all along.