Antennae

I spent pretty much all of yesterday, a gorgeous sunny Sunday, worrying about television antennae. I hate being in these situations where I really just do not have a clue as to what to do.

Yesterday unfolded this way:
1. My furniture is coming sometime this week (yay!) so I need to figure out as best as possible how I am going to lay out my house.

2. I'd really like to have a place where I can easily have largish sit-down dinner parties.

3. The sun room is not large enough to hold a table that will sit more than four (and four tightly).

4. So if I am going to have my wish, I need one of the two public rooms in the main part of the house to have a dinning table.

5. The obvious room for that is the back room, which is next to the kitchen.

6. The back room is about a foot longer, front to back, than the front room, and the door to the bedroom in the back is placed closer to the corner of the room than the equivalent setup in the front. As a result, the back room has significantly more usable space.

7. Both public rooms are narrow, so my sofa (6 ft+) will fill up whatever wall it is on, which means that I cannot have my preferred tv arrangement where the tv is at the foot of the sofa. I do not want it to share the wall across the way with my armchair, since almost all of the time, I like to watch tv sitting in my armchair, and I believe that the angles are such that this won't work (though as I type, I think I should investigate that assumption further....)

8. The "tv point" as it is called here--the jack along the wall that connects to the roof antenna--is on the back wall of the back room. I can (and currently am set up this way) arrange to put the tv against the wall shared by the bedroom in the back. This is a nice solution to the tv placement problem if the living room is the back room.

9. If I do this, however, the back room is out as far as a dining room. Given how long a trek it is from the kitchen to the front room, I don't think it makes sense to set up as a dinning room. Though I could do it, since I'll have a small table in the sunroom and will eat there on a regular basis, and maybe the trek is worth it on the occasions in which I want to have a real dinner party. (Much as I'd like to do so regularly, I suspect it will not happen every week!).

10. I know this is torturous, but this is my day yesterday, chasing these thoughts around in circles.... Anyway. I have two other large items that need to be reckoned with (and why this is important to figure out now): a desk, which is really a door laid across two filing cabinets and therefore huge (also will take up an entire wall) and a piano. The piano has a far smaller footprint than the desk, but will also take up most of the wall it is against. It is also very heavy and not easy to move around if I change my mind.

11. I could put the piano against the back wall of the front bedroom, turning it into guest room/piano room. Which is a little less gracious for the guests (but not horrible) and makes sense in other ways, since it is unlikely I'll be practicing tons when guests are around (or ever, really) so if that room is to be dual purpose, that is a sensible pair.

12. There is no point in putting the piano in there if I'm not going to have half a room dedicated to a dining room, since then there would be one room with just the desk in it. (Again, as I type, I think maybe I should examine this assumption as well). I might as well leave more room in the guest room for bedroom-y sorts of things, and have the front be joint desk and music room.

13. So to my mind at least, I need to decide the dining room conundrum in order to figure out the location for the piano, which is the one piece I'd really like the mover to put in place then not move again.

14. Which brings me back to antennae. My tv reception mostly sucks. I get terrible ghosting (see, I have learned the technical terms--not a good sign!) on all channels and a weak signal on some. Also probably some other forms of interference, which I haven't positively identified. There are two possible reasons for this: my area gets bad reception or my antenna is out of whack.

15. I actually got up on my roof yesterday (no broken neck, mom!) to investigate the situation. There are actually two antennae up there. One attached to the chimney that appears to be facing a slightly different direction than the neighbors' antennae. The other lying on its side on the kitchen roof. Clearly not functioning. Both were connected to the wall jack through a splitting device that was probably installed wrong. I took out the splitting device and replaced it with a joiner for just the antenna attached to the chimney. The picture improved significantly, though still has problems with ghosting and is sensitive to exactly how the cable lies and the tv is turned etc.

16. (This has a point, sort of, I promise) I did lots of frustrating googling, and found that digital set top boxes can improve things remarkably under some conditions. So I bought a set top box at the local electronics store. It was unable to find any channels in its search and so utterly failed to help.

17. My current conundrum is this: if it is true that the problem with the box was with the box, not the rest of my set up, I could get a different box with a much better result. If it is true that a digital box will improve things markedly and if it is true my antenna is misdirected, it may be true that a good set top antenna plus a set top digital box would provide good enough reception for my tv wants. In which case, I could easily and cheaply have the living room in the front.

18. If I need the roof antenna to get reception, then perhaps I need to hire an antenna person to come and focus it properly and help with the digital set up. And then I probably want to keep the living room in the back.

19. I could give up entirely on broadcast tv and get pay tv. The cheapest of which is 39.95 per month, which isn't too bad, but I promised myself I'd live cheaply if I were going to pay so much in rent. And I don't like, on moral grounds, to pay for tv.

20. And it isn't clear to me how pay tv works here. As far as I can tell, it may be the case that the cable is actually attached to the antenna and the same wall jack would be used for pay tv. In which case I am back in the back room.

21. Or I could pay someone several hundred dollars to create a tv point in the front room. Now I'm paying lots of money (though just once) for tv again. Though in some ways, it would be buying a dining room, which I approve of.

22. Yuck! What should I do??? Where should I put the piano???