Saturday we had a birthday party for Connor's first birthday. The pictures haven't been uploaded quite yet, so I'll have to post about that later on.

Sunday I seized the rare opportunity to get somethings done around the house while Jen's mom was in town, and could help watch Connor. Namely fixing the creaking stairs and replacing the broken garage door opener.

The stairs have been creaking and making noise for years now, so I finally had enought and went crazy on them. The shims were all loose underneath (you can access them from the basement stairway) so I pounded them all in nice and tight. Then I went construction adhesive crazy...killed two tubes of the stuff, but they are almost silent now. So I probably lost a couple hundred braincells from all the fumes, but I probably didn't need them anways. I mean I can still count to yellow, and my favorite color is R.

A few days ago, our garage door opener decided to shred it's main gear. After talking with some people who said this was a common issue, we decided that rather than replace the gear and bushing we would just replace the whole darn thing. So after looking around we picked a belt drive unit from sears.

It's scary to see just how small the box is. I've never installed a garage door opener before, so I really thought it would be at least a little bigger.

The whole installation went pretty smoothly, except for me dropping the old opener as I was removing it. The torsion spring prevented me from lowering it to the ground, so as I was trying to figure out what to do gravity decided to expedite the process.

My only real gripe was with the installation directions...Step 3 tells you to put up the header bracket for the new rail....and then step 4 tells you that if you have an old "clevis" style bracket (which I had) that you could use that instead of replacing it. Of course by that point I had removed it already....so I was a little annoyed.

So it's all installed, got the down force adjusted to back off a 2"x4", and everything is done. Sure is quiet compared to the old chain drive we had. In the end it took me about 3 hours to put it in, plus now we have fancy "anti child crush" sensors on this model.