About

Hi! My name is Andreas Olofsson and I am an electrical engineer living in Lexington, MA. For work, I spend my days on the laptop designing invisible electronic circuits to be manufactured in pristine semiconductor factories. In my spare time I enjoy getting my hands dirty working on larger hardware projects for my family.

Projects

Tree House (2016)

Building a tree house is such a fun and whimsical project. I built a few when I was a kid, but they weren’t really very good. For my boys, I decided I was going to do it right and honestly, I went a bit overboard:-) I basically built a tiny house, complete with proper framing, New England style shingles siding a roofing, sliding windows, flower boxes, and insulation. (In retrospect, the insulation was a mistake that was only usd by squirrels for nesting.). I can’t say my structural analysis was very scientific, but the house is still standing strong ten years later and it definitely gets its fair share of compliments. I did learn a hard lesson in the importance of worker safety! As I was finishing up the interior, I took a step backwards and fell through the ladder opening. Amazing how quickly gravity accelerates you! I ended up in the emergency room, but thankfully there was no major damage. The tree house is now occupied by a large family of happy squirrels.

Garage Makeover (2018)

The previous house owner was a general contractor who used the garage for storing the lumber and equipment. The garage was huge, but a complete mess with narrow shelves running along the sides. The picture below shows the “before”.

To make better use of the space, I sub divided the garage into sections for different purpose:

• A storage bunker inside the garage to hide away all my old Parallella stuff (out of side, out of mind)
• A cubby hole style shelves for storing all our sports equipment
• An electronic workbench for all the hobby projects I plan but never get around to actually doing. Each one of the projects took about one weekend of work.

Garage Gym (2019)

To give the family a fun play space for the cold New England winters, I turned the garage into an indoor gym complete with a climbing wall, climbing rope, pull up bar, tennis wall, boxing bag, and padded floors for olympic style weight lifting. This turned out to be a life safer when the Covid era came around. The climbing wall was the most tedious project as it involved drilling and installing hundreds of climbing/mounting holes. Most of the mini projects were one weekend projects. The usage model has evolved as the kids have grown up, but the gym has served us well.

Patio (2020)

During the Covid era, the Olofssons like the rest of the US, were going stir crazy at home and I was looking for things to do outside the house. One of the projects on my todo list had been to create a proper sitting area in the back of the house. To keep things simple, I decided to install a patio rather than a full raised deck. It was about a week of hard physical work, but I am pretty happy with the results. Five years later, some of the tiles have settled a bit, so if I ever do this again I will definitely pay a lot more attention to laying the round work. (big life lesson in there!)

Planter (2020)

This was another covid era project. There was a dead spot next to our greenhouse that had been used as a parking space by the previous house owner. An order of pressure treated wood, an order of top soil, some drip irrigation piping, some chicken fencing and voila, we had a nice planter for all of our earthy project. Over the years, we have grown potatoes, carrots, herbs, and flowers in that spot.

Trampoline (2022)

A friend moving away asked me if I wanted the in-ground trampoline installed in his yard. Of course the answer was yes! All I had to do was dig out the trampoline legs from his backyard. In then end, I ended up digging up the equivalent of a small swimming pool in my own backyard. Yes, I could have rented an excavator, but then I wouldn’t have gotten the equivalent of 2 months worth of gym membership in terms of workouts:-). My youngest son (the gymnast) ended up spending countless hours doing flips on the trampoline, so all the digging was definitely worth it.

Landscaping (2025)

Over the years, I had been using the back corner of our lot as a dumping ground for rocks, dirt, leaves, tree branches etc, and it was starting to look pretty awful. It was time to do something about it!

During this project, I was stressed out at work and in no mood to do everything manually, so I rented an excavator. Well, just like in the book “you give a mouse a cookie”…if “you give an engineer an excavator he will look for things to do with it”. What started as a clean-up project, turned into a complete backyard make-over project. I ended up moving our garage driveway, making an old school fence out of 20 giant boulders, and laying down sod on the old driveway. I started the project in september and it had to get done before the winter/frost started. In total, this was a ~6 week project with many 4-6 hour hard labour weekend days and thousands of pounds moved manually. At one point I pushed a bit hard and ended up injuring my back badly. There was not stopping winter, so I just loaded up with Advil and kept going. I can’t tell you how much respect and sympathize with anybody doing hard physical labor on a daily basis.