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Before you take a floor sander to it, consider how much you don't want to blast fine particles of lead-based paint everywhere.
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Sep 14, 2017 02:42
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Given the amount of spackle work that wall's going to need now you might as well just neatly cut out a square of drywall and physically look for studs.
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Oct 4, 2017 12:35
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eddiewalker posted:That wall would have been perfect to assess with a cheap magnetic stud finder. Oops. I actually use a bottle opener that sticks on my fridge with a phenomenally strong magnet. Just wave it over the wall and BAM, it pulls itself to any nails hidden in there. Weirdly, though, there is one wall in my house where it is attracted to the entire surface. I haven't figured that out, and I'm sort of scared to investigate.
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Oct 6, 2017 13:55
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Might be an expanded steel mesh with plaster over it? I was considering it, but it would be the only wall constructed like that (as far as I have examined). This is the wall in question:  The wall to the right, with the coat hanger? Not magnetic. The one straight ahead? Magnetic. The walls of the stairwell and upstairs? Not magnetic. The one upstairs that runs parallel to the magnetic wall I know for sure is just drywall over studs, because when we were investigating a leak I cut an approximate 16" by 12" hole to investigate pipes I could not access otherwise. Given that this is the house with a demon-pit in the front yard, I just try to leave things alone when possible.
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Oct 7, 2017 11:32
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IncredibleIgloo posted:How deep is that terrifying looking demon pit? Precisely zero meters now.  It was maybe 42-48" deep, all told. The surface was remarkably smooth. I suspect the second owner put it in, since he -- according to my semi-demented neighbor who occasionally speaks of Alan in the present tense in the creepiest fashion imaginable -- was a nature-lover and strikes me as someone who would have had a pond installed. The construction appears to be fieldstone (Wissahickon schist, like everything else around here) that was then mortared over. Should I decide to return it to pond status it will be extremely easy, as it is deep enough that I can remove the gravel, pour concrete into the drainage hole this solution necessitated, and keep pouring until there's a few more inches across the entire bottom.
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Oct 7, 2017 20:27
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w00tmonger posted:Could have had a dope demon pit, man It was disgusting. I mean, utterly disgusting. Four feet of water that had filled over time with leaves, pine needles, and probably dead animals. The surrounding plant life had actually started growing over it -- it was not visible at all when we moved in due to surrounding brush plus overgrowth. It was filled with a black ooze, and when I poked it with a stick, it bubbled. This might be less interesting, but it's a better choice for something within thirty feet of the road.
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Oct 8, 2017 01:09
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Subjunctive posted:Just wanted to spend a moment on the fact that I still love that painting of your dog. It seriously makes me happy every time I walk through that door. We need to let the oil set for a bit more and get it revarnished before we frame it, but I'm looking forward to putting a ridiculous frame around it.
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Oct 8, 2017 20:55
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I don't know if I'd bother. If I broke into your home and saw a normal interior door with a keypad, I'd just try to kick it the gently caress open since a) interior doors tend not to be sturdy compared to exterior doors, b) I've already made noise and a mess, and c) there's probably some better poo poo back there to grab fast.
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Oct 10, 2017 15:10
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Bird in a Blender posted:This seems like a good place to ask this. One side of my house has a sidewalk adjacent to the foundation wall. My basement is carpeted (I'm planning to rip this out very soon though), and I noticed during a recent storm that the carpet had a wet spot on it. My assumption is that I'm getting some water seepage from the outside into my basement. Wet carpet suuuuuucks. We started getting water in the unfinished side of our basement soon after moving in (and there was nothing we could do about it, as it was noted that the basement "got damp sometimes" and apparently this provides way too much coverage to lying sellers). It wasn't too big a deal for the most part so long as we laid down some towels, but then we had three big storms secondary to hurricanes further south come up and hit Philadelphia in one year (one still technically a hurricane), and water would pool between the sidewalk and the house, because the front landing of the sunroom didn't allow drainage. The water would saturate the stone wall, and once it built up sufficient pressure it would literally begin shooting out of holes in the parge. There's no floor drain, so that was a long, wet night. ... and then we noticed that the finished side of the basement had sprung a leak. I had to rip up about an eight by six foot portion of wet carpet and padding. The first solution was to make a white-trash water-displacement system with tarps to prevent water from getting in the house in the first place while we figured out the rest. Our Google Maps image might still show those loving tarps. The next part was to spend $16k to fully waterproof the front half of the house down to the foundation -- excavation, application of a tarry membrane, some thick plastic over that, exterior drainage, and then backfill it all. Finally, we ripped out all of the carpet and replaced it with fake wood planking.  Other than the repetitious grain and being a bit too shiny to be real wood, it's got good texture to it and looks pretty reasonable.  It also will not cause any problems if the basement gets wet again. In your case, yes, caulking will provide some degree of protection provided that you are really good about keeping up on it. If you get real winters, though, freeze-thaw will destroy that stuff pretty quickly. I wonder if applying a seam of mortar and then a liquid waterproofing membrane might help in your case? You might also consider chiseling out a channel six inches out from the wall to divert the water to the sides if it's your sidewalk and not the city's.
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Oct 19, 2017 21:37
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Bird in a Blender posted:^^^ If the drainage situation behind the house is better, I'd totally just cut a channel to funnel the largest amount of water away, and then deal with the seam. I wonder if bentonite might work well at the seam as well?
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Oct 20, 2017 02:41
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It's a wet, cold environment. If you insulate the interior and prevent heat from reaching the wall, water that penetrates the brick and mortar during the day will crystallize at night, and walls that have stood solid for decades can crumble away in several seasons. See also: "Why I have not insulated the wall cavities of my 1920s home and at times curse the fact that I did not build new."
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Oct 28, 2017 15:00
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I only realized just now that the refrigerator is so far away from the cooking surfaces, which is a pain. If you can open up the floorplan to consolidate the kitchen appliances, great. If that long wall is a shared wall, it's not going to be a heating issue since presumably the entire wall will equilibrate based on your inside temperature, the neighbor's inside temperature, with some decrease due to thermal bridging with the brick of the side walls. So no insulation should be necessary there. Make extra sure that the roof at the junction of your house and your neighbor's is nice and tight, though, you don't want those bricks getting saturated when it rains. That's just scuffing and not a water spot near the table and chairs, right? I honestly would not rebuild the side walls, to be honest. Like I mentioned before, if you get seasons where it freezes overnight, you could end up destroying the outside brick if you cut off the house's heat from going through the wall cavity, though you might just get condensation in the walls which also is suboptimal. Your heat losses through the glass door and that relatively large window will minimize any gains you could make. I'd take the money you'd spend on rebuilding the outside walls and put it toward knocking down the partition and renovating the kitchen; then if you could stand to lose a little bit of room height you could put a radiant floor in to minimize how cold the room feels.
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Oct 29, 2017 16:00
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Time for a new dishwasher! I'm considering a Bosch 800 series (probably this one, though I have to admit I'm a bit intrigued by this back stainless one here). It sounds like Miele is a smidge more reliable but a fair bit ore expensive -- anyone here have any experience with the two lines? Also, the current dishwasher is hardwired. The second Bosch says ,"Hard-wire junction box included," and the first says, "Power cord included." Can I assume that the one with a power cord can have the cord removed in order to be wired up directly? I mean, I could have an outlet installed without too much difficulty, but I'm fine with keeping the dishwasher hardwired.
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Nov 17, 2017 17:02
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H110Hawk posted:... and I regret buying one with front controls (1 year old kid) ... The reason we're finally replacing the one we've got is because we have a kid on the way. I hadn't even considered this, and thank you for it. I don't see any Bosch models with hard food disposals, but it looks like their filters are pretty easy to clean. None of the models I'm looking at -- in fact, none of the black Bosch dishwashers at all, according to their site -- have a water softener, which is a shame because our water is super-duper hard. Well, I've been considering a water softener anyway, so maybe now's the time ...
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Nov 17, 2017 18:20
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Oh, hey, the murder room finally has some cold storage.
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Nov 18, 2017 01:16
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Flooring first is what made retiling our broken kitchen floor so awful. I WISH he'd tiled after putting in the cabinets.
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Nov 28, 2017 21:08
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Bird in a Blender posted:Ahh the classic home improvement dilemma. You fix one thing and leads to having to fix four other things. Almost true. You find something that needs to be fixed, but it requires four other things to be fixed first. And then it leads to another four things that need to be fixed.
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Nov 29, 2017 14:53
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eddiewalker posted:How much performance should I expect out of my bypass humidifier? I’ve changed the pad, opened the damper and turned on the water supply. What's the outside temperature?
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Dec 10, 2017 19:39
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eddiewalker posted:Around 30F lately. Okay, you've still got some room, then; you don't want it above about 40% at that temperature. Where are you measuring 27% -- at the vents, or elsewhere in the house?
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Dec 11, 2017 03:36
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Yeah, when air enters a home and heats up, the RH drops, which is why I asked where he was checking the RH -- if it had been at a register with warm air, that 27% RH would be higher when it cooled further airway from the vent. Anyway, the reverse is why you don't want much more than 40% RH if it's around 30 degrees outside, as it can cause condensation damage.
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Dec 11, 2017 19:01
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Okay, so I've got some quotes on water softeners, but I'm still a bit confused regarding whether I need a chloramine reducer (yes, I've confirmed our supplier uses chloramine and not chlorine). From the installer I'm leaning toward using, the chloramine-reducing system: - Is two-tank instead of one-tank - Has a larger capacity (which I guess is just from the two-tank design) - Has a ten-year warranty on the catalytic carbon The regular system: - Has an automatic salt-level detection - Has a lifetime warranty on the activated carbon These are found here and are the ERRC3702 and the ERR3700, respectively. Cost including installation is $500 higher on the chloramine-reducing system, which is not a big deal to me. The automatic salt-level detection on the smaller and cheaper unit, on the other hand, might be nice, though it looks like all it means is that when I add salt I don't have to go through a menu on the main tank and say to what level I added salt, which looks pretty simple. Anyone have any thoughts or opinions? One competitor offered a simpler model and did not specifically address chloramine during the visit (though the literature implies that it reduces both chlorine and chloramine, it seems like generally you use different types of carbon so I'm not sure how that would work) for about $1300 more but also has emergency service. Another competitor uses pricey Kinetico systems but has no emergency service, and they run about $2000 more than the first folks.
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Dec 15, 2017 16:24
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If it's underground the temperature will be acceptable for storage of pretty much anything other than instruments even if it's totally cut off from home heat, which it won't be. Just get a good dehumidifier for the space.
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Dec 26, 2017 22:33
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Counterpoint:
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Dec 26, 2017 23:22
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I don't care how stupid the name is: I bought a 42" Manplow and it took easily under half an hour to clear my ~3500 sqft driveway of 3-4" of snow. There are more expensive models that have edge guards, deeper curves, etc., but this worked great.
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Dec 31, 2017 14:33
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His Divine Shadow posted:Looks like what people around here use, come in plastic or metal variations: I have one of those too. That's for a long scooping-and-dumping run. The plow-type "shovels" move a bunch of light snow like, well, a plow; the type you have there generally doesn't clear as wide of a swath but is better for heavy and wet snow, or where you're making multiple parallel runs where the plow-types leave trails on either side. They're all a fuckton better than a regular snow shovel when you have a huge driveway.
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Dec 31, 2017 23:42
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Dick Trauma posted:I once bought my father an electric snow blower and it was the best toy he ever had. He couldn't wait for it to snow, and he even got a longer cord so he could help the neighbors. It wasn't even a beast, but it was so far beyond using a drat shovel. I have a snowblower, actually -- 28" zero-turn 243cc Craftsman with their Quiet Engine. It's pretty nice, but if I want some light snow cleared fast, using the plow plus sled shovels are the way to go. It's not worth firing up the snowblower for three or four inches of powder. Since a lot of my driveway-clearing happens when I get home from work at 6:30a, I'm sure my neighbors appreciate the lack of engine noise -- the Quiet Engine thing apparently reduces noise by 45%, but that means "no ear protection needed," not "your neighbors will love you."
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Jan 5, 2018 01:26
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Well, I had four old windows renovated in a room that needed some lead abatement and repainting anyway. I considered just replacing the windows, but a) I didn't want to lose some light by just replacing inside the frame; b) I didn't want to lose all of the original trim by going full-frame replacement; c) since there are triple-track aluminum storm windows the energy savings would be minimal; and d) if possible I'd like to keep as much of the house original as possible. (There are other reasons, but those require more explanation.) Anyway, the windows look great, but I noticed that they're a bit more rattly, and I noted surrounding gaps that weren't there before. I first noted that that they did not replace the flanged weatherstripping that mates with the groove in the bottom of the lower sash. I e-mailed the guy and he was nice about saying he'll get someone out here next Wednesday to take a look at and correct the issue. Whatever -- that's easy, you can buy that stuff everywhere. I noted after that, though, that the meeting rails on the old windows also had interlocking weatherstripping. It should look and work something like this:  At first I thought they removed it, but on closer inspection it's still there -- the new parting bead was pushing the windows too far apart for the flanges to interconnect. Over the phone, the guy said that didn't make sense, since the groove was already cut for the parting bead. Well, I looked closer, and my old parting bead, which appears to be made out of zinc, also interlocks with some zinc strips on the outside edges of the sashes. I cannot find any place that sells the stuff. I can't even find any good examples of it online. It looks like this at the bottom of another window:  It looks like this at the top (how it interlocks with the sash is visible here):  My best guess at what it looks like in cross-section is this, with a nail driven down the center to hold it:  So you can see how a full-width parting bead would push the sashes apart and not let them interlock, plus how lacking this would allow more side air leak and slop in the side by side movement. But like I said, I can't find this stuff anywhere. Accurate Metal Weatherstrip Company seems to come close but no cigar. Sweet's Catalogue of Building Construction seems to reference some now-defunct companies. The guy acted like I had four heads when I said that the other windows had zinc parting beads even though his guys disassembled the freaking windows. So: does anyone have any freaking idea what can be done here? Will they have to disassemble the windows and replace this stuff with plastic parting seals? Is this available somewhere that I just can't find? I figure that at the very least Painter of Crap must have seen this stuff, since my house is just outside Philadelphia and was constructed at the same time as every other stone Colonial in Mt/ Airy and Chestnut Hill.
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Jan 13, 2018 16:43
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Jaded Burnout posted:He's definitely taken it to an extreme, for sure. I do walk into it every day though: My driveway costs about 75 bucks to clear each time. A heated driveway -- electric or hydronic -- wouldn't pay for itself in financial terms, but would keep my driveway clear when I wanted it clear, instead of loaded with eight inches of snow until they show up. If a storm system dumps two feet, I'm paying for MULTIPLE clearings, too. So I don't use them anymore, and bought a snowblower. When I build my garage and redo the driveway, I very well might put in some electric melters. Not for the full driveway, but two tracks down the incline, one patch in front of the garage and one where the city plows block it.
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Jan 15, 2018 01:05
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I've got a problem that I thought was going to be easy but it's turning out weird. Gonna go with: The grout is starting to crack around the edges, and the builder didn't use cement board under the tile. Despite the fact that I ran every faucet in the house three times and had no issues, the master bath leaked into the kitchen during the first shower. Ultimately what we did was use an oscillating tool to cut out all of the grout, and re-grouted with three-part epoxy grout. It's been good for about three years so far.
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Jan 20, 2018 13:21
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Gremlins.
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Jan 21, 2018 21:45
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Sir Lemming posted:Ooh, water damage chat! (Skip to the photos if you wish, since they may be all you need to know.)
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Jan 25, 2018 17:29
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w00tmonger posted:Would you not just drill a little hole and spackle it? cakesmith handyman posted:Unless you've a boroscope a bigger hole is easier to look through.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:27
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cakesmith handyman posted:I'm in the midst of building the stud wall for this project and it's taken me ages to identify the purpose of random lumps of wood in the ceiling. Oscillating saws are also awesome for precise cuts in drywall.
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Jan 27, 2018 19:56
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It actually doesn't look bad, so if it's holding up well I wouldn't touch it for the time being. (But this could just be because I look around my own place and see the patch of ceiling that I haven't bothered properly to skim-coat, consider the spots in the finished attic that also need patch work, think about the ticking sound I hear in the bathroom with running lots of water, think about the water softener I still haven't purchased, remember that the HVAC guy is supposed to get back to me about an air-handler motor and a humidifier system, etc., and just conclude, "I'm sure the moment I tried to re-side a garage I'd want the money for something else.")
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Jan 28, 2018 16:21
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Roctor posted:Sup Dudes! That looks great, good work.
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Feb 21, 2018 14:38
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Friend posted:Where the gently caress do y'all live? I've never seen gutters that do something other than shoot water away from the foundation It's super-common to tie downspouts into underground drainage. It doesn't even necessarily have to drain to the sewer -- our downspouts tie into the schedule 40 PVC around the foundation that eventually empties about twenty feet behind the house. The picture you posted is a terrible (though common) setup, because it saturates the ground right near the house. Put an extension on that thing, at least, people!
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Mar 3, 2018 21:54
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An oxygen concentrator can use a fair bit of power, but doing some quick Google work we're talking maybe 600 watts on the high end, which shouldn't be more than around fifty bucks a month. I'm guessing HVAC. Older single-stage blower units use a ton of power. We saw a big decrease in our energy usage in the summer when we had to replace an old single-stage A/C unit and put in a two-stage compressor and multispeed air handler. The old A/C unit was oversized, so it cooled the house down quickly but did not have a chance effectively to dehumidify. The newer units run more frequently but do a much better job of dehumidifying the house, which lets you keep it at, say, 73 instead of 68 and still feel more comfortable. You're also looking at a good chunk of money for a replacement, though, so your first step would be to get an audit of the tightness of the home's envelope and fix all of the leaky spots.
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Apr 4, 2018 14:22
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Nail gun is best of both worlds PLUS adds the possibility of penetrating trauma, the manliest of Emergency Department chief complaints.
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May 18, 2018 19:47
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We just add the next-manliest of Emergency Department visits -- fire -- and burn the posts out around the nails!
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May 18, 2018 21:32
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:52 |
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Network42 posted:I need to mount our mailbox out by the sidewalk instead of on the porch wall like it currently is. Is there any problem with just buying a masonry drill bit and mounting that mailbox in the picture directly to my retaining wall in that little corner? Just make sure you read up on the ordinances regarding mailbox height, etc.
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May 19, 2018 20:59
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