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Posting this here to get some more opinions. Originally posted in the AI chat thread because there's Engineer Goons in there. Any more engineers or experienced builders here are welcome to chime in..... Are there any engineers that can give me their opinions on whether or not I should remove some "decorative" pillars that i thought were holding up, but are apparently not holding up my carport? A respected contractor told me they are not load bearing, but he won't be responsible if my carport comes crashing down on my head. You can see the two pillars holding the beam, and then the three on the outside apparently holding up the two feet of roof sticking out. The contractor said the two holding the beam are plenty enough to hold everything up.    ......................................... So anyone remember when I asked for an engineer's advice on some "fake" pillars "holding up" my carport outside the main beams? And everyone said wtf get rid of them? Well I started removing them, and the edge of the roof definitely dropped at least an inch maybe more once I removed all the mounting screws and hit the bottom out with a sledge hammer.......Do I need to be worried  Oh and this is what it was mounted to btw, no trusses just the old "soffit" which is plywood....Unless there are trusses under the plywood? idk.   My house was built in the 1957, and you can see the barcode on the mounts so it's obviously recent, I'm just wondering if they were replaced or added on for some dumb reason other than structural.
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Jul 1, 2018 22:26
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I am not a structural engineer but.. People probably looked at your photos and thought what I did, which is that it looks like the roof is a series of long horizontal boards and as such there'd be no chance that the outside posts would do anything useful based on the amount of the boards overhanging the beam vs the amount on the other side. THAT SAID, if the visible boards of the underside of the roof are just decorative themselves and actually the structural pieces underneath don't follow the same pattern then all bets are off. Could be that when you removed the posts the roof just settled a bit onto the beam but iunno. I guess it could also be that the edge is made of a flexible enough material that it sags? Honestly you'd have to get a good look under that surface to know for sure. Jaded Burnout fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jul 1, 2018 |
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Jul 1, 2018 22:47
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Next week I'm going to start removing the woodchip insulation in the attic. Anyone have any tips/tricks? Ordered a leaf vacuum after some googling, my original idea was just elbow grease and a snow shovel but everyone online says "no, that's stupid".
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Jul 1, 2018 22:59
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Jaded Burnout posted:THAT SAID, if the visible boards of the underside of the roof are just decorative themselves and actually the structural pieces underneath don't follow the same pattern then all bets are off. Yeah I'm thinking I should take out some soffit and then the plywood to figure out wtf is going on under there. Also, I was just thinking that it was odd that water never ran off that part of the roof even tho it's facing the slope of pitch, the water runs down the pitch and instead of running straight off the end it takes a hard left and water falls over the front of the carport. Maybe the roof edge was pushed up further than it was supposed to be to begin with? And then when i took out the posts it just settled back down to where it was supposed to be? Lol this is driving me nuts, never expected to see it drop like that and it spooked me big time.
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Jul 1, 2018 23:53
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Really looks like whoever built your thing added the extra 1' or whatever and supported that independently.
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Jul 2, 2018 00:22
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Took the soffit off, looks pretty standard to me, joists supporting the roof   And the posts weren't even directly under the joists, they were attached to the old plywood soffit. [edit] oops not so fast stuck the camera up in there to the right and found this:  That's in between the joists where the post was, so apparently this was done when the house was originally built. Breakfast Feud posted:Really looks like whoever built your thing added the extra 1' or whatever and supported that independently. It's all original under there, no one added anything but the posts as far as i can tell. [e] apparently the posts were original as well. Applebees Appetizer fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 01:55
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Breakfast Feud posted:Next week I'm going to start removing the woodchip insulation in the attic. Anyone have any tips/tricks? Ordered a leaf vacuum after some googling, my original idea was just elbow grease and a snow shovel but everyone online says "no, that's stupid". I have no experience with woochip insultation; is it literally woodchips like you would put down in a garden bed? There is no way a leaf vac is going to work. Get a shopvac. Heck, get two, because you're going to spend a lot of time emptying them.
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Jul 2, 2018 03:47
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Breakfast Feud posted:Next week I'm going to start removing the woodchip insulation in the attic. Anyone have any tips/tricks? Ordered a leaf vacuum after some googling, my original idea was just elbow grease and a snow shovel but everyone online says "no, that's stupid". I looked into removing all the ancient blown-in insulation in my house, and came to the conclusion this is one case where it's worth just paying someone to come in. The pros use a big truck mounted vacuum with a long flexible hose to just suck it straight out of the roof and into bags or a covered trailer. Using a shopvac/leaf vac up in the roof meant stirring up huge amounts of dust since the motor in inside the roof while you work and the exhaust blows everything around, plus stopping every minute to empty bags, and gotta pay a bunch to dispose of it afterwards. If you really want to do it yourself, everything I read said that the shovel+garbage bag method is better to get the majority, since it's not as dusty. Shopvac for the rest. If you youtube, you'll see some people rigging up their own insulation vacuums, maybe something like that can be rented from somewhere?
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Jul 2, 2018 09:37
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~Coxy posted:I have no experience with woochip insultation; is it literally woodchips like you would put down in a garden bed? More like wood shavings, kind of like what comes off a planer mixed in with just sawdust. I've read shop vacs are for poo poo in this case because the inlet pipe is too small. A leaf vac has a 4" inlet pipe. JBark posted:I looked into removing all the ancient blown-in insulation in my house, and came to the conclusion this is one case where it's worth just paying someone to come in. The pros use a big truck mounted vacuum with a long flexible hose to just suck it straight out of the roof and into bags or a covered trailer. Using a shopvac/leaf vac up in the roof meant stirring up huge amounts of dust since the motor in inside the roof while you work and the exhaust blows everything around, plus stopping every minute to empty bags, and gotta pay a bunch to dispose of it afterwards. Not a bad idea, get the bulk of it with a shovel then suck out the rest. There's literally no one in my town here that would do just the removal aspect. I'd have to pay for removal and immediately re-insulate, which I don't want cos I'm rewiring this whole place and want the attic empty. The last time I tried to hire an insulation contractor to do only part of a job I got told to go gently caress myself and that what I was doing would never work. I might experiment with venting the exhaust from the vac out of the attic. I'm not too fussed about filling up the bags really quick, I'm probably going to bring a poo poo ton of contractor bags, empty the vac into the bags and stack them all in the attic until I'm done. I'll be renting a dumpster and I'm going to use it as an excuse to get rid of my ancient, rotting lean-to shed. The vac, dumpster and a new shed is still under $800 so it beats the gently caress out of hiring someone.
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Jul 2, 2018 12:25
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Don't know about removing it, but are you saying your house is insulated with sawdust and wood shavings? I wonder what a fire would do
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Jul 2, 2018 12:36
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baquerd posted:Don't know about removing it, but are you saying your house is insulated with sawdust and wood shavings? I wonder what a fire would do Same thing it does to any other house? If you attic sawdust catches fire the house was a write off anyway. I've got sawdust/woodchips in the walls too! That's probably staying forever because the only way to get it out is to remove the weatherboards completely. The real risk is that it catches fire a whole lot easier, but honestly, the wooden laths behind the plaster are pretty much kindling too. The best part is wooden insulation always go hand in hand with knob & tub wiring. edit: actually another big risk is that it's a great home for rodents
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Jul 2, 2018 13:01
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Breakfast Feud posted:More like wood shavings, kind of like what comes off a planer mixed in with just sawdust. I've read shop vacs are for poo poo in this case because the inlet pipe is too small. A leaf vac has a 4" inlet pipe. Get a big compressor and a venturi nozzle and pipe it straight into the dumpster
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Jul 2, 2018 14:42
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Breakfast Feud posted:Same thing it does to any other house? If you attic sawdust catches fire the house was a write off anyway. I've got sawdust/woodchips in the walls too! That's probably staying forever because the only way to get it out is to remove the weatherboards completely. The real risk is that it catches fire a whole lot easier, but honestly, the wooden laths behind the plaster are pretty much kindling too. The best part is wooden insulation always go hand in hand with knob & tub wiring. Holy poo poo you live in a literal tinderbox. I think that may actually be worse than asbestos everywhere, but not sure.
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Jul 2, 2018 14:52
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Pretty sure there's asbestos in the plaster to some degree. Still mostly horse hair, but I've got my suspicions. Something like 1/3rd of the city is built like this. It was pretty much the standard in a large part of the US and Canada like 100 years ago. Honestly though what can you do without stripping everything down to the studs and starting over? At least with new electrical in place I'll stop having so much anxiety over attic fires.BigFactory posted:Get a big compressor and a venturi nozzle and pipe it straight into the dumpster If routing the hose to the dumpster (and running the air lines to the attic) wasn't such a huge time sink then I would seriously consider this. autism ZX spectrum fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 15:20
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Breakfast Feud posted:Pretty sure there's asbestos in the plaster to some degree. Still mostly horse hair, but I've got my suspicions. Something like 1/3rd of the city is built like this. It was pretty much the standard in a large part of the US and Canada like 100 years ago. Honestly though what can you do without stripping everything down to the studs and starting over? At least with new electrical in place I'll stop having so much anxiety over attic fires. The asbestos/kindling sandwich cancels out, you see... E: this I'd the kind of thing that might be worth cutting a hole in the roof/soffit for.
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Jul 2, 2018 16:23
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That's not insulation, that's one great lifehack builders discovered to not pay to dispose of their waste.
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Jul 2, 2018 16:28
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Hubis posted:The asbestos/kindling sandwich cancels out, you see... I spent a full year trying to figure out a good way to cut a hole to run hoses/make an access hatch. It's a two story house with a small gabled addition in the front and a larger hipped roof addition in the back. The hipped roof portion is pretty mellow, but the front gable has a pretty steep angle. The best point of access would have been from the back. I was thinking a platform supported by roof jacks to hold a ladder. Of course, the chimney is run right down the middle of the rear wall so that's a no go. The amount of extra work/cost it would take to build a platform that would accommodate the front gable makes it unrealistic. So I'm cutting an attic hatch in the 2nd floor stair landing ceiling. cakesmith handyman posted:That's not insulation, that's one great lifehack builders discovered to not pay to dispose of their waste. They charged extra for it. It's still better than the literal crumpled up newspaper insulation of the 30s - 60s. This house must have been cutting edge when it was built. Electricity, insulation and indoor plumbing! autism ZX spectrum fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Jul 2, 2018 |
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Jul 2, 2018 17:17
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What is the best way to secure wainscot/wall moulding to the wall? We took it down to paint our wood paneling, and it seems I could staple it back up just as the previous installer had done, but I feel like it would be a huge bitch to fill all the holes and whatnot after the fact. Could I just use wood glue and expect the wainscot to hold up indefinitely, or would the glue give after a few months or years without any nails or staples?
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Jul 3, 2018 04:28
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Gin_Rummy posted:What is the best way to secure wainscot/wall moulding to the wall? We took it down to paint our wood paneling, and it seems I could staple it back up just as the previous installer had done, but I feel like it would be a huge bitch to fill all the holes and whatnot after the fact. Could I just use wood glue and expect the wainscot to hold up indefinitely, or would the glue give after a few months or years without any nails or staples? Construction adhesive tacked down with finishing nails
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Jul 3, 2018 12:20
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So, concrete. I've come into a bit of money and I'm looking to add a patio onto my house; right now all we have is a halfassed job the previous owner did that's literally just slates laid on the lawn, and it's too small for a table or much of anything else. I invited a contractor over to talk about the possibility of a stamped concrete patio and he said that they don't usually do that stuff now -- they prefer using resin-topped concrete. He sent me an album of his past work and it did look pretty good. Has anyone had experience with these materials before? How do they wear, are they easy to keep clean, etc?
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Jul 6, 2018 19:51
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I looked into resin when I was investigating polished concrete finishes for my house. Best as I could tell they were as good as concrete but still very expensive. Sorry I don't have more info.
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Jul 6, 2018 20:04
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There's a company here that makes stamped concrete pavers, so that could be an option. Some of the patterns I've seen are super intricate and before I learned they were just concrete I had no idea.
autism ZX spectrum fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Jul 7, 2018 |
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Jul 7, 2018 03:05
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Yeah, I'm also looking into the possibility of bricks/pavers.
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Jul 7, 2018 17:44
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Holy gently caress buds I spent four hours in the attic today and I decided to call in the pros come monday morning. The insulation situation is a nightmare. 2-3 inches of woodchips, about a foot of blown in fiberglass on top and blown in styrofoam on top of that. Also I have no idea how this house is framed. I was expecting it to be balloon framed like my rental, since the top floor has pony walls which is a pretty good indicator usually. What I was expecting was the attic to extend down into the pony wall cavity, ending at the soffits. Instead it seems the part where the pony wall begins to curve in is just a cavity or decorative since the attic is very decidedly an A-frame. No idea how these floors were built now either. Given the time period, typical construction would have been framing the entire exterior walls then raising them, afterwards hanging the second floor off the frame. A dead giveaway for this kind of framing is in the attic, as the front/back portions will not have a stringer since they end at the roof joists, creating the A-shape. Again, not the case here. I think I also found what appears to be framing for a block and tackle in the attic, right about where the tub sits so it might answer my question of "how the gently caress did they get the cast iron tub upstairs"
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Jul 7, 2018 18:12
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Is this the new Gooncave and gardens thread? Anyway, I've been putting up with a ridiculous amount of noise that slams into my face through these nothing windows that my landlords think are good simply because they installed them within the last year and they claim they're double paned but I can't see any evidence of that, and in any case they don't do poo poo. So I went to home Depot and bought a big roll of pink insulation stuff and some wooden boards that the staff said were good against sound, and a staple gun and a saw so I'm going to staple the insulation onto the boards and hope I can keep them against the windows well enough. The problem is they're sliding windows that have these fat handles that unlock the slidiness so there will be about a 1-2 inch gap where the boards can't cover the inner windows. I think the whole thing is 96 inches across and I keep forgetting to measure the height but it can't be more than 3 feet so I have enough 2'x2' boards if I cut some in half. The last missing piece is some fabric to wrap over the insulation on the board so I'm not just stapling a bunch of open pink fuzz and hoping it works out. I'll post some pictures later today if this is the right thread for it. This is just a temporary measure as I'm looking to and planning to break the lease early with 30 days' notice the minute I'm sure I have something lined up, and I can afford 2-4 weeks' overlap and security deposit with my savings. I'm going to see a promising duplex tomorrow. The boards won't save me from the hideous grinding rumble of the rolling closet downstairs that I hear every morning by 7am and every night after 9:30pm on top of people shouting outside my window when I'm trying to sleep, and last night in particular someone outside was trying and failing to start this very loud car for minutes at a time, then they would stop for a minute, and eventually it managed to start, but the people kept alternating between talking loudly and talking normally to each other outside, both volumes being audible enough to keep my brain alerted and unable to sleep. I'm just hoping they're all out of fireworks at this point. I guess I'm wondering if there's a good removable way to hold these boards against the windows without them eventually falling backwards because I'm going to need to stack a 1 ft one on top of a 2 ft one.
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Jul 9, 2018 18:18
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Stinky_Pete posted:I guess I'm wondering if there's a good removable way to hold these boards against the windows without them eventually falling backwards because I'm going to need to stack a 1 ft one on top of a 2 ft one. Removable like "30 seconds with a screwdriver" removable? Or "3 seconds with no tools" removable? Or "isn't going to leave a mark because I'm renting" removable? If the first one, screw them to the frame, if the second one, put screws in the frame and put holes in the boards to hang them from, if the third one it's trickier, probably lean something heavy against it. Based on my experience of insulation and other foams though, I'm sorry to say it's probably not going to help much.
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Jul 9, 2018 19:18
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When does ear plugs become an option?
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Jul 9, 2018 23:13
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peanut posted:When does ear plugs become an option? I might try them as a supplement but I just don't expect them to do anything substantial without blocking the source first. Muffled bullshit is still going to make my.brain say "hey you can't sleep.you have to pay attention to these people who are asking for your attention because I can't tell the difference" But none of it will stop the extrasonic rumbling from a bus driving by like I'm at a Stomp show, or the aforementioned diseased-sounding sliding door so I texted my.landlord my.30 days' notice
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Jul 10, 2018 00:39
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Substantially reducing noise is literally what they are for. Have you ever used earplugs and did you insert them properly?
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Jul 10, 2018 01:36
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Stinky_Pete posted:Is this the new Gooncave and gardens thread? Instead of buying rolled insulation and wood, why not buy some of the rigid foam sandwich type insulation - like this stuff (which is available in various thicknesses). I assume this is available in the US.  You can easily cut it with a hand saw or even a knife with a bit of effort. If you cut it really carefully you can just wedge it in between joists - So I imagine that you could just wedge it exactly into the window opening thus negating the need to use any fixings!. Its also really light so If you cant wedge it you could probably fit it using velcro tape at the top and sides. Also - earplugs work well too!
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Jul 10, 2018 12:00
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lwoodio posted:Substantially reducing noise is literally what they are for. Have you ever used earplugs and did you insert them properly? Yeah, properly inserting ear plugs makes a huge difference. Here's a very industrial instructional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S6dthcSVIM
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Jul 10, 2018 13:34
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Ridgid foam won't do anything to stop noise, but then fiberglass insulation will barely make a difference either. You need rockwool, which people mistake for fiberglass because it looks similar and is also used as insulation.
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Jul 10, 2018 17:24
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lwoodio posted:Substantially reducing noise is literally what they are for. Have you ever used earplugs and did you insert them properly? Are you legit suggesting that sleeping every night with earplugs in is a good solution to anything?
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Jul 11, 2018 15:40
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Hughlander posted:Are you legit suggesting that sleeping every night with earplugs in is a good solution to anything? For 30 days in an apparently intolerably noisy situation it is. My mom, who is extremely sensitive to noise, used wax earplugs for decades (the wax ones can be more comfortable if you side-sleep). It's a much cheaper, easier, and more likely effective solution that trying to construct new soundproofing for an existing structure.
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Jul 11, 2018 16:00
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Oh contractors. Have someone bashing up the tile in our laundry area right now to unfuck the cannot-ever-be-levelness of it all. He's got a deathwheel going sans gaurd and sans safety glasses.  (well, more like safety squint but what can you do.)
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Jul 11, 2018 16:57
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Hughlander posted:Are you legit suggesting that sleeping every night with earplugs in is a good solution to anything? When you're working the night shift and construction is next door, it's a pretty good solution.
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Jul 11, 2018 17:05
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And he found surprise linoleum! And whatever this is below it? (He left for lunch before I could ask.) Includes mystery portal to the crawl space next to the gas line! 
H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Jul 11, 2018 |
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Jul 11, 2018 18:40
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Been in my house for 6 years an all the sudden my garage fridge started tripping the GFI outlet in my garage. I ran an extension cord to my laundry room and it does the same thing to that circuit. Anyone know what might cause this?
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Jul 11, 2018 22:20
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Vacuum out the motor bits of your fridge and see if it runs more efficiently.
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Jul 11, 2018 22:28
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wandler20 posted:Been in my house for 6 years an all the sudden my garage fridge started tripping the GFI outlet in my garage. I ran an extension cord to my laundry room and it does the same thing to that circuit. Anyone know what might cause this? Compressor is hosed. I mean, sure....try to clean the coils and stuff. But the compressor is hosed.
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Jul 12, 2018 02:17
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