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Also the frequency of mowing should be such that you aren't removing more than a third of the height when you mow. In the spring thee are times I have to mow twice a week, then it moves to once every five or six days, dictated by how long above 4" it gets. By this metric, you can also see that keeping the lawn longer lets you mow it less often. Definitely mulch, and if you have a halfway capable mower and don't mow wet grass, the clippings shouldn't be offensive anyhow. It's side-discharge mowers OR mowing a long, wet lawn that leaves the rows of clippings.
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Aug 5, 2016 12:24
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Also sharpen your mower blade at the beginning of the mowing season, and maybe once more if it starts to get dull and you notice the blades of grass ripping/tearing instead of a clean cut across the blades. Sharp blades = healthy grass. Mulching is best as long as you don't have too much thatch build-up or are currently fighting a lawn disease (fungus/weeds) that could spread to healthy parts of the lawn. That's when bagging/dumping is better. Mulching is best for the lawn because it returns nutrients back to the grass and you can get away with fertilizing less. Speaking of fertilizer: I switched to Milorganite last year instead of the poo poo Scott's sells. Milorganite is an organic, slow release Nitrogen fertilizer that you can spread pretty much any time, and doesn't burn your lawn like the chemical poo poo from Scott's does if you use too much. It's good for all grass types and regions, and I even throw some on my landscaping and trees around the property.
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Aug 5, 2016 15:14
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Over the winter (I live in a warm place) I managed to get my lawn watering levels to just the right point such that I never had to mow but the grass didn't turn brown. But now I have to turn off the whole irrigation system because there's a huge leak somewhere and I'm going to have to dig out and replace that section of pipe
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Aug 5, 2016 19:08
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OSU_Matthew posted:Vacuum chat: How are robotic vacuums these days? Anything worthwhile for helping keep on top of things? I have an older model Roomba that I have scheduled to run 3 days a week. I like it since we don't otherwise vacuum very often. It makes a noticeable difference in how clean the room looks. It has some major drawbacks that I feel don't make it right for everyone. Maybe the newer models are improved, I don't know. You need to have a fairly open and uncluttered space for it to work well. It is very stupid and does not navigate a room as much as it just bounces off of poo poo until the battery runs out. If you have a lot of furniture it won't be able to get around. You need to not have stuff on the floor. Even lamp cords are a problem. I don't run it upstairs for this reason- we don't keep the bedrooms tidy enough. The layouts of the last few placed definitly would not have worked for a roomba. Our current house does though, due to the reasons above. I don't think it would be worth the full price that they sell for now- it really isn't a very good vacuum. It keeps our house cleaner than we normally would but if you already vacuum 2x a week you're going to have cleaner floors than the Roomba would be able to do. If I followed the Roomba around with a real vacuum I'd pick up a bunch of dirt that it missed.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:47
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Economic Sinkhole posted:I have an older model Roomba that I have scheduled to run 3 days a week. I like it since we don't otherwise vacuum very often. It makes a noticeable difference in how clean the room looks. It has some major drawbacks that I feel don't make it right for everyone. Maybe the newer models are improved, I don't know. You need to have a fairly open and uncluttered space for it to work well. It is very stupid and does not navigate a room as much as it just bounces off of poo poo until the battery runs out. If you have a lot of furniture it won't be able to get around. You need to not have stuff on the floor. Even lamp cords are a problem. I don't run it upstairs for this reason- we don't keep the bedrooms tidy enough.
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Aug 5, 2016 20:22
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^^ Awesome, thanks! That's exactly what I need, something to help stop the cat hair tumbleweeds from forming every week, and the downstairs is pretty open, so I might just go ahead and gamble in this 100$ roomba 650 I found on this sketchy site Fifty fifty shot whether I actually get a roomba, or my PayPal account hacked
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Aug 5, 2016 20:47
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Oh poo poo I bought a short sale that just blew all the leaves to the edges of the property. From the 9 years they had the house and then a year of vacancy. I have sections where I have to shovel up soggy cardboard thick leaves. Can I just take a can of gas and burn the poo poo all up?
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Aug 6, 2016 03:34
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OSU_Matthew posted:Vacuum chat: How are robotic vacuums these days? Anything worthwhile for helping keep on top of things? I splurged for a roomba 650 2 weeks ago, Target and Amazon had them on sale for 325. I honestly don't know how I lived without the thing. It doesn't replace vacuuming, but it seems like we can go a lot longer between vacuuming, and the house is much tidier throughout the period between. I read the whole sweethome article, they give good info about a couple models.
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Aug 6, 2016 06:16
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HiHo ChiRho posted:Oh poo poo I bought a short sale that just blew all the leaves to the edges of the property. From the 9 years they had the house and then a year of vacancy. I have sections where I have to shovel up soggy cardboard thick leaves. Do not set your yard on fire unless you really know what you're doing. Like you could maybe dig a fire break and burn the leaves safely but that would take more effort than just picking up the leaves. If you're interested in gardening at all, you could try setting up the leaves for compost. Look on the bright side, if picking up a bunch of old leaves is the worst that you have to deal with in a short sale house, that's really great!
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Aug 6, 2016 06:36
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uwaeve posted:I splurged for a roomba 650 2 weeks ago, Target and Amazon had them on sale for 325. Maybe there's a psychological component here, like you know that the floor has to be tidy in order for the roomba to work well so maybe you're keeping the floor tidier as a result? That'd be a neat benefit
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Aug 6, 2016 06:37
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Due to obstacles and how much time it takes to empty and clean it, we stopped bothering with our roomba. Our scooba, on the other hand, owns. Kitchen and dinette have a lot less obstacles (just move the dinette chairs), are easier to close off, and we sweep in there regularly but mopping is more of a chore to do by hand. It won't scrape food gunk off the floor but it's good at normal mopping and the floor dries after faster since it sucks up the dirty water. Emptying just involves a dump and rinse which to me is less onerous than pilling hair and crap out of the roomba's innards after every use. Honestly though if we hadn't gotten both for free as gifts I wouldn't have been happy with the return on investment. The time savings are minimal due to the constant manual maintenance, and if you spend two or three hundred on a good upright with steam cleaning and attachments etc you are getting vastly better cleaning. They're kind of fun toys and if you are a lottle obsessed about keeping your floors spotless, running one once or twice a week lets you only do manual vacuuming once every couple of weeks which is probably a reasonable tradeoff.
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Aug 6, 2016 16:43
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GameCube posted:I haven't quite maxed out all my credit cards since closing on the house. Leperflesh posted:Then again I don't give a poo poo and at this point my "lawn" is like 80% weeds, plus I'm in California so it's currently closely-cropped dead weeds and maybe some grass.  plus tax) that said it would be sufficient for 5-10 acres. I have 0.13 acres. I used a hand-crank seed distributor and spewed the whole bag, instructions be damned. Fast-forward to this year, we've got a major drought, the grass is patchy and dead-looking, yet the clover is growing hog wild and my place looks better than my neighbors' brown-rear end lawns. Bonus: I've only had to mow twice all year and that was only to keep the clover from getting any ideas on world domination.10/10 would spend $45 on birdfeed again Leperflesh posted:scooba
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Aug 6, 2016 19:04
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I've got an apple tree in my new backyard and it appears to have apple scab.  Every day, I get to pick up over a hundred scabby apples from the ground below the tree. I'll have to do some major pruning and fungicide in the fall and hope the scab doesn't come back next year.I seriously underestimated the sheer amount of apples a single tree could have.
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Aug 7, 2016 18:43
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HiHo ChiRho posted:Oh poo poo I bought a short sale that just blew all the leaves to the edges of the property. From the 9 years they had the house and then a year of vacancy. I have sections where I have to shovel up soggy cardboard thick leaves. The best thing to do with leaves is just mow over them. Mulches them into tiny little pieces that will decay much faster than whole leaves; it's good for your lawn and it's not much work. daggerdragon posted:What type of floor(s) do you use your Scooba on? I have laminate through the whole house and laminate generally doesn't like liquid, so I've held off on seriously considering one. My Roomba Jeeves, on the other hand, is the hardest-working person in this house. I've tried two Scooba models and not been particularly satisfied with either. Steam mops seem to be the best option right available right now; not much more work than vacuuming and they get the job done well. Just make sure you use distilled water.
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Aug 7, 2016 19:37
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Nessa posted:I seriously underestimated the sheer amount of apples a single tree could have. I have a sick and lopped many, many times nectarine tree and a small pear tree in my tiny Chicago backyard. The nectarine tree dumped all of its fruit in June and that is a hell of a mess to clean up. The pear tree seems really healthy so I hope my friends like Asian pears because I'm gonna have a ton of them. Now if only someone had the sense to plant a tree in the parkway before the sun baked all of the paint off of my south-facing aluminum siding. I think we're gonna cut the nectarine tree down, it's just too much space taken up in our yard. One tree is plenty in the city.
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Aug 7, 2016 23:26
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Do I need a storm door? My house has a storm door and I hate it. It's a huge pain in the rear end to have to open the stupid storm door and hold it while I unlock and open the real door. I've taken to leaving it propped open, at which point I might as well not even have the stupid useless piece of crap.
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Aug 8, 2016 20:20
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I've always had storm doors and never found them that horribly annoying. You don't really need one but they have the advantage of lessening drafts in the winter, and protecting your "real" door (typically made from wood or metal) from wind and rain. Plus in the spring and fall I like to leave the main door open, with a screen in the storm door so we get more fresh air in when it's nice out.
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Aug 8, 2016 20:47
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minivanmegafun posted:I have a sick and lopped many, many times nectarine tree and a small pear tree in my tiny Chicago backyard. What do you do with all the excess fruit? Just fill all your garbage cans with them? I picked 237 apples off the ground this morning.
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Aug 8, 2016 21:11
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Nessa posted:What do you do with all the excess fruit? Just fill all your garbage cans with them? I picked 237 apples off the ground this morning. Learn how to make preserves or booze from them?
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Aug 8, 2016 21:36
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Yeah if you juice them then making good cider is exceptionally easy, cheap, and delicious. Juicing apples is pretty simple but does take some effort
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Aug 8, 2016 23:04
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These are also scabbed apples, so even though they're safe to eat, they'd all have to be peeled as well, and that seems like far more trouble than it's worth.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:01
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daggerdragon posted:^ New thread subtitle, please. I actually tried seeding my "lawn" with clover one year, but I guess I didn't water enough the first week because it mostly didn't come up. Some of it came up this spring, actually, but it kept raining on the weekends so I didn't wind up mowing until some of it was really big, and I think mowing it killed it (again?). In any case clover/grass mix is very good because the clover helps to fertilize the grass, apparently. I love clover because bees love it, too. But generally it's not drought tolerant enough anyway. I want natives, which can handle the weeks of mid-80s to high-90s heat we get all summer without having to be watered daily. My plan is to dig up my irrigation system (which has at least one leak, somewhere, and is just a sprinkler system anyway), install an in-ground drip system to replace it, cover everything with amended soil, then cardboard as a weed barrier, then mulch, and then plant natives through it. I'll be fixing the (total absence of) roof drainage to the street at the same time, and replacing the ugly stacked pavers barrier at the sidewalk (my ground grades down to the sidewalk maybe a foot or two from the house to the street) with lava rock or something (I'd prefer a low brick wall but my wife wants lava rock and she's probably getting her way). We get some good rebates here for converting from a lawn to a drought-tolerant low-water system, so I should get some cash back against the cost of doing all of the above. My scooba runs on kitchen tile and bathroom marble flooring. We do not have kids, and we scrape up any stuck food in the kitchen first, because it really only "washes" the floor, it does not scrub it. I mop by hand occasionally too, just to get the good scrubbing in. We ran out of scooba juice ages ago and I'm lazy so I just follow the recommendation in the booklet to use white vinegar instead, which seems to work OK. The thing to do with loads of fruit is make jam, preserves, or juice them. Especially poorer-quality fruits. My neighbor brought us a five gallon bucket of fairly unappetizing apples and we turned it all into really good apple butter. We give away jars of jam and pickles as christmas gifts for friends and extended family members, which reduces how much money we spend on christmas to just the larger gifts focused on immediate family.
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Aug 9, 2016 01:51
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Leperflesh posted:The thing to do with loads of fruit is make jam, preserves, or juice them. Especially poorer-quality fruits. My neighbor brought us a five gallon bucket of fairly unappetizing apples and we turned it all into really good apple butter. We give away jars of jam and pickles as christmas gifts for friends and extended family members, which reduces how much money we spend on christmas to just the larger gifts focused on immediate family. We've just been putting the apples in our friend's dumpster because there's so many of them. How are you supposed to turn all the apples into tasty things if you're being bombarded by hundreds of them per day?
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Aug 9, 2016 05:10
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Nessa posted:We've just been putting the apples in our friend's dumpster because there's so many of them. How are you supposed to turn all the apples into tasty things if you're being bombarded by hundreds of them per day? It's a lot of hard work, but that's the whole point of preserving / juicing / fermenting them. It sucks that you'll have to peel most of them because of scab but if you get an apple peeler then that should at least make the process a bit faster. Realistically you probably won't have time to use them all without some help, and that's okay too.
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Aug 9, 2016 08:35
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^^ Completely unrelated, but I found a stray Apple tree riding my bike home last night, and I just gorged on apples. It was excellent, I need an apple tree. Have you considered composting the apples?GameCube posted:Do I need a storm door? My house has a storm door and I hate it. It's a huge pain in the rear end to have to open the stupid storm door and hold it while I unlock and open the real door. I've taken to leaving it propped open, at which point I might as well not even have the stupid useless piece of crap. Otherwise, you could just replace the door wholesale with a good prehung exterior door rated to stand up to the elements. It's a fairly easy job, hardest part is chiselling out the strike plate and lock bits. Menards has a good selection of exterior doors, and mine was only ~160$ for a basic security door with small window. Front door you'll probably want something more spendy, but it's an idea. Catatron Prime fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 12:26
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I've got a grill being delivered this week, but nowhere to put it other than directly on the lawn. What's a good temporary base/platform until I get the interlocking stone put down? Get an oversized patio stone?
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Aug 9, 2016 12:56
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Subjunctive posted:I've got a grill being delivered this week, but nowhere to put it other than directly on the lawn. What's a good temporary base/platform until I get the interlocking stone put down? Get an oversized patio stone? You could put down a grill pad like this https://www.amazon.com/Original-Grill-Pad-Black-Rectangle/dp/B003KAPI5O but it is probably fine right on the grass.
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Aug 9, 2016 18:33
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Economic Sinkhole posted:You could put down a grill pad like this https://www.amazon.com/Original-Grill-Pad-Black-Rectangle/dp/B003KAPI5O but it is probably fine right on the grass. Grabbed that in brown, we'll see how it works. Thanks!
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Aug 9, 2016 18:53
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Economic Sinkhole posted:You could put down a grill pad like this https://www.amazon.com/Original-Grill-Pad-Black-Rectangle/dp/B003KAPI5O but it is probably fine right on the grass. $50 for a rubber mat. Economic Sinkhole indeed. A few cheapo cement blocks would have been fine.
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Aug 10, 2016 01:39
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Any suggestion on how to deal with this? The discoloration rather than the electric plate. Those pictures are from the inspection I had done. The inspector wasn't too concerned as there was no smell and everything was dry but I just want to get it taken care of before we get moved in completely. Irritated Goat fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Aug 10, 2016 |
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Aug 10, 2016 16:09
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Irritated Goat posted:Any suggestion on how to deal with this? Paint it? I can't even tell what you're trying to show in that picture.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:47
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Yippee. Apparently no previous owner ever heard of primer so we were able to just peel off all the old paint down to the sheetrock. Neither I nor the painter have ever seen it before.
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Aug 12, 2016 02:53
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HiHo ChiRho posted:Yippee. Apparently no previous owner ever heard of primer so we were able to just peel off all the old paint down to the sheetrock. Neither I nor the painter have ever seen it before. My previous owner spread caulk, along the entirety of the kitchen counters, six inches up the wall. Let me tell you how happy I was when i had to redo it all!
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Aug 12, 2016 02:55
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devicenull posted:Paint it? I can't even tell what you're trying to show in that picture. Basically, the black spots in the 2nd picture is what I'm concerned with.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:12
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Irritated Goat posted:Basically, the black spots in the 2nd picture is what I'm concerned with. I'd be more concerned with whatever that yellow crap is covering the non gfi electrical outlets that are inexplicably placed below the sink(?) supply lines.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:29
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I have some non-GFI outlets in a couple bathrooms (though there are GFI ones in some other places). How concerned should I be about this? Also: I got some of these on a lark, and I'm really liking them in hallways: https://www.snappower.com/select-guidelight/ They just replace the faceplate on an outlet and work as a nightlight. I put one between my daughter's room and the bathroom, and at the bottom of the basement stairs.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:34
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LogisticEarth posted:I'd be more concerned with whatever that yellow crap is covering the non gfi electrical outlets that are inexplicably placed below the sink(?) supply lines. Far as I can tell, that's paint. Why they painted that yellow and didn't finish I can't tell but there's some occasional weird stuff like that in the house.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:37
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Subjunctive posted:I have some non-GFI outlets in a couple bathrooms (though there are GFI ones in some other places). How concerned should I be about this? If the outlets are downstream of the GFCI you are fine. Trip the GFCI and see if the outlets still work to find out.
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Aug 12, 2016 13:49
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Hashtag Banterzone posted:If the outlets are downstream of the GFCI you are fine. Trip the GFCI and see if the outlets still work to find out. OK, cool. I will look for the GFCI (I presume on the panel). Thanks!
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Aug 12, 2016 13:52
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Subjunctive posted:OK, cool. I will look for the GFCI (I presume on the panel). Thanks! You don't want to go to the panel unless you have GFCI breakers (which it doesn't sound like you are talking about) You want to push in the test button on your GFCI outlet. That will cut the power to any downstream outlets. The below image shows how your setup should be. GFCIs are expensive so lots of budget builders will put 1 in say a laundry room and then just put a normal outlet downstream in a bathroom. 
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Aug 12, 2016 15:22
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