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What's the right way to fix my front porch steps, if at all: So it's kinda hard to tell, but the issue is that the railing kind of toes out. It does this on both sides. I haven't measured the treads, but I believe them all to be the same width, so if you follow the bottom rail, you can see that at the top it's mostly over the treads, but at the bottom it's almost completely clear to the right. You can also see that either the builder or the PO cut notches out. I guess I'm not sure what the problem is? Seems like this is just wrong. I would expect the steps to be narrower, or the concrete pad to be wider, or something. I feel like the rails should be straight, right? The concrete pad has sunk since the place was built (and taken the steps with it, had to jack them up with a board because it felt like they were going to pitch you while walking down them), so it probably needs to get redone at some point. fake edit: I know I need to repaint... everything. That's not the question! real edit: I've been contemplating re-skinning the entire porch in trex, but I'd have to gut the steps completely, and on the porch itself add a bunch of joists. Not impossible, it's only like 8' x 12', just not exactly a weekend project, and doesn't answer the "what's wrong" question regardless. DaveSauce fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 10, 2022 13:03
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Either the upper post was sited inboard too far, or the steps/treads are uneven. Frankly, if it's structurally sound, and an aesthetic issue only, I wouldn't touch it. If it's really triggering you, consider replacing the treads, artfully cut so that the ends are parallel and completely under the run of the baluster (except for the bottom front tread half); but do that for you, because I guarantee that no one else will ever notice. I'm wondering what the weird cutout on the risers does besides catch bare or sandaled feet.
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Oct 10, 2022 14:22
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So the main thing is that despite jacking up the stairs a bit, they're still not level. Better than when we moved in, but still noticeably off. I don't know if we can jack them up any further without affecting anything else. We had a handyman do it when we first moved in, and he said this was the best he could do without having to fix how they attached at the top. Dunno, we had him doing a bunch of minor "fix the PO's bullshit" tasks, so we didn't really dig in to it any further, just wanted it good enough at the time. Also all the decking is nailed in for whatever reason. That's mostly a non-issue except for the top board (overhanging the fascia above the stairs) has been slowly working the nails loose, so it torques a bit when you step on it. The original back deck and the balcony is all screwed in, so I have reason to believe that whoever did the porch just didn't know, or didn't care, what they were doing (or, more likely, both). So this all kind of spiraled in to a, "well what else is wrong and should we just rip/replace the stairs and do it right." This isn't on the horizon, just something on the to-do list that we think about every once in a while. I like your suggestion of just trimming the treads to be parallel to the rail, though. Seems to be the least invasive (whether we replace the stairs or not), but one of the other issues here is that the angle of the rails doesn't match the pitch of the stairs. It of course bypasses that issue, but kind of makes it obvious that things aren't where they're supposed to be. And that brings up the question: can we move the lower posts in closer to the concrete pad to reduce the toe? Or is it better that there's some gap? And here's a picture of the whole thing:  Not sure if that helps at all, but if nothing else you can see that the top posts are fixed due to the way the rest of the porch is built, so there's not much that can be changed there. So that's what's got me wondering why the bottom posts were placed the way they were... I'm guessing it amounts to measure once cut twice mixed with with "not my job to fix it." PainterofCrap posted:I'm wondering what the weird cutout on the risers does besides catch bare or sandaled feet. It looks pretty, obviously. Probably about half the houses in the subdivision have brick steps on the front porch. Of those that are wood, it's about 50/50 for plain vs. fancy risers... creeping on some of my neighbors' houses in google street view, my risers are actually pretty tame compared to... others: 
DaveSauce fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 10, 2022 16:37
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That actually does look pretty! Any work involving changing the angle of the rails/balusters will involve tearing them off and re-attaching to the existing posts. The angle of each baluster and the bottom rail may have to be re-cut for proper facing of the balusters to the top & bottom rails & the rail itself re-cut so the new angle likewise mates to the posts securely. Moving the lower posts may not be possible without removing the stair set entirely; if there is concrete down at the bottom of the post holes, it might turn into a major project as they abut walkway panel. I have built one staircase from scratch. It is a difficult and exacting job to get right and one you cannot afford to get wrong. PainterofCrap fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 10, 2022 16:42
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So we just got our closing disclosure for our closing date next week Everything checks out except that for our loan, I am paying down 1 point, and the lender is paying a point as well. My point is priced out as a debit, but the lenders point not recorded The actually interest rate matches what we signed the contract for, so not sure there is any impact here but I'm wondering if this is something I need to get corrected?
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Oct 10, 2022 16:47
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Epiphyte posted:Is this something I need to get corrected?
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Oct 11, 2022 04:20
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One of my least favorite things about working with contractors is when you have to get them to redo something. In this case some trim that was installed by them had to be pried up by team B because team A didn’t do the whole job. Team B ‘did their best’ to straighten it out and patch it up but uh I’m not going to pay for already lightly janky trim when it’s street facing and in a spot that would look untouched for a decade. Even if I’m in the right it just feels like pulling teeth and I hate it.
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Oct 11, 2022 13:20
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If you had already paid them - and then they came back out - count that as a Christmas miracle come early.
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Oct 11, 2022 15:00
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PainterofCrap posted:If you had already paid them - and then they came back out - count that as a Christmas miracle come early. Nope, still have 1/4 of the total cost to hand over. Learned this the hard way last year (though the guys did come out after about a year of stringing me along and fixed it after I started popping up in local FB conversations asking if they were having trouble contacting me).
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Oct 11, 2022 16:05
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BadSamaritan posted:One of my least favorite things about working with contractors is when you have to get them to redo something. In this case some trim that was installed by them had to be pried up by team B because team A didn’t do the whole job. Team B ‘did their best’ to straighten it out and patch it up but uh I’m not going to pay for already lightly janky trim when it’s street facing and in a spot that would look untouched for a decade. Friend, I hear that. I drop in on my project at random for a variety of reasons, and I came across this shining example of "framing"  I love when they try to talk you out of it by saying it'll cause 'delays'. Oh are you sure you want me to redo it, Mister Homeowner? It'll cause a delaaaaay if I have to redo framing Like bro, it's already delayed. Because you didn't do it right the first time.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:23
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The email can be as simple as: Hi Contractor, Looks like sub B removed and reinstalled some stuff that sub A had already completed. Unfortunately it does not look great now. Can you please send sub A to remedy this? <picture> Hugs and kisses, Me
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Oct 11, 2022 16:25
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:I love when they try to talk you out of it by saying it'll cause 'delays'. "not as much as the delay that's gonna be caused when we have to go to the hospital to remove my boot from your rear end"
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Oct 11, 2022 16:32
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I personally don’t hug and kiss contractors but you do you
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Oct 11, 2022 16:54
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Upgrade posted:I personally don’t hug and kiss contractors but you do you well maybe now you understand why they don't return your calls!
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Oct 11, 2022 17:28
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H110Hawk posted:The email can be as simple as: Communicating with a contractor through email, hilarious joke!
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Oct 11, 2022 19:02
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The fan on the exterior of my new ac unit broke already. Apparently the bracket golding it was defective and bent. Its not just within the warranty period, its probably even within the amazon return window.
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Oct 11, 2022 19:07
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The Dave posted:Communicating with a contractor through email, hilarious joke! I didn't include the To: line, this is obviously to:contractorphonenumber@efax.com.
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Oct 11, 2022 19:51
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I think I asked once but I can’t remember. I had some tress cut down in my front yard and had them use a stump grinder which was great. My backyard is a literal forest with some dead trees that were also cut down, and a few more I plan on cutting to make room for a shed. There’s a ton of stumps and I tried digging some out to no avail. The shed likely won’t happen until next year at the earliest, but I’d like to get to clearing the space and making some progress. Options for the stumps: Rent a grinder myself Drill and salt the stumps Drill and kerosene the stumps Drill and use some chemical on stumps Mushroom the stumps I don’t think the grinder would be great because Connecticut dirt is full of rocks and I really don’t what the chips dispersed everywhere. Salt would be fine but I hear you’re supposed to cover them with a tarp and I don’t have enough tarps to go around. Kerosene seems promising but seems like a bit of risk involved Chemical -not sure of the potential drawbacks. We have a well but it’s so deep down I can’t imagine the chemicals seeping into the water. Mushroom-too long. Any suggestions?
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Oct 11, 2022 21:46
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A guy with a miniex. They'll all be gone in a couple of hours.
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Oct 11, 2022 22:07
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I feel like I know what to do (get someone to blow my sprinklers out for $50 to save potentially $2000 or however much a new sprinkler system is, next year) but ugh: Last year I got my sprinklers blown out around this time, and it was fine. When I turned them back on I had to screw in some 'cutoff' (PO's term) in a pipe that was raised above the ground (like an 'air can go into the pipes now' valve.) I also had had to turn on the water supply to the sprinkler system inside the house (PO calls it the water valve, I'm sure he's correct). After I turned on the water supply this spring, I saw that the outside pipe was leaking water out of the cutoff, so I closed it. No problems. I asked the PO about it this year and he said: "The sprinkler valve is in the basement, in the northeast corner of the finished bedroom. The only cutoff is outside on the northeast corner of the house. In the fall, I would just close the valve and open the connection, and gravity would clear the lines." Our house IS on a hill. I feel tempted to do his method but it's probably a stupid idea.
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Oct 11, 2022 22:40
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What's your budget? I wouldn't use kerosene just because dumping fuel on the ground is gross. Seconding mini-ex or just hiring out a person to grind them. Once ground you can always bag or whatever the chips to be hauled off over time, either in your regular refuse, green bin, or driving them somewhere that takes green waste. The ground being rocks does not matter really unless you are trying to grind the rocks. I guess hitting a rock with the grinder is a risk? Our ground is around 50% potato sized granite rocks by volume. No problem with grinding stumps. Terrifying to be within 50' of a hydraulic auger.
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Oct 11, 2022 22:44
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redreader posted:Our house IS on a hill. I feel tempted to do his method but it's probably a stupid idea. If the system is set up to gravity drain and you're confident you can do that I don't see why it's a stupid idea. Maybe pay someone to show you how to do it and the double check it worked by blowing the lines out later?
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Oct 11, 2022 22:46
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nwin posted:Any suggestions? Do you have bears in your area? If so, use an extra long boring bit to drill a bunch of large deep holes in the stump(s). Then cook many pounds of bacon and pour the resulting bacon grease down the holes. Bears will come in the night and tear the stumps apart trying to get to the bacon grease. Enjoy delicious bacon and no more stumps. That is actually how my grandpa got rid of stumps at his place in the country and it worked quite well. There are definitely caveats though, like needing to be in an area where it's not irresponsible to deliberately attract bears onto your property, and it's more effective with older stumps, which are easier for the bears to destroy. The other methods I am familiar with are digging the stump out enough to put a chain around it and pulling it out with a truck/tractor or partially digging it out, building a burn pile around it and setting it on fire. To do the former, you need a lot of space and a sufficiently powerful truck or tractor, and it will do a lot of collateral damage to the surrounding area depending on root spread. For the latter, you need to wait a year or two for the wood to dry out enough to burn and most developed areas have rules and poo poo about burn piles. Also when you tried digging the stumps out did you use a mattock? If not definitely pick one up. I had to buy one to plant some dogwoods and perennials because shovels can't do jackshit in my root-matted backyard.
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Oct 12, 2022 03:37
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Please do not try to remove trees by setting things around them on fire
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Oct 12, 2022 03:50
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Queen Victorian posted:
Please have a friend show you how to do this properly. There are some subtle nuances to this which result in hilarious injury or property damage when done just wrong enough. Bro truck + chain + hilarity is how we cleared palmetto bush in Florida but boy was it fun to watch overconfident macho men get completely stumped by it. 
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Oct 12, 2022 03:56
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Anza Borrego posted:Please do not try to remove trees by setting things around them on fire I thought we were talking about stumps. Anyhow, my grandpa (same one who used bears as stump grinders) once removed a very large dead tree by way of homemade fertilizer bomb. The tree he hid behind while it detonated got broken off like a foot above his head and it's miraculous he didn't get killed. Do not blow up dead trees with homemade fertilizer bombs you guys. Or at least set it up with a remote detonator and not a too-short fuse. H110Hawk posted:Please have a friend show you how to do this properly. There are some subtle nuances to this which result in hilarious injury or property damage when done just wrong enough. Yeah for sure. Having a farmgirl background, I sometimes take for granted either knowing how this kind of stuff works or knowing that I don't know how it works and who to ask who does. So definitely ask and do research.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:07
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I am here to tell you about a home ownership thing that did NOT go horribly wrong. Our water pressure has been getting worse and worse for the last two weeks. We're on a well. I called the company that had put the new well in, fearing the worst. So many expensive things can go wrong with a well. It turned out the well had a filter. Which was supposed to be changed every six months. We have lived in this house fifteen months. All we had to do was have the filter replaced and the water ran free. Why yes, I am a city girl. "You want us to add you to our every-six-months service?" You betcha.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:08
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Queen Victorian posted:Yeah for sure. Having a farmgirl background, I sometimes take for granted either knowing how this kind of stuff works or knowing that I don't know how it works and who to ask who does. So definitely ask and do research. Once you get that "oh yeah ask so-and-so up the street he does this all the time" knowledge passed down it's really easy. But without that it can quickly become a hold-my-Busch-Light which leads to some hilarious "so there is a tree stump in my rear window" youtube videos.  I never got the farmer knowledge, but there was a decent amount of redneck engineering I learned in boy scouts.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:51
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Hadlock posted:Finance at what rate I talked to one of the local credit unions today, got quoted for 7% APR for 36 months. The only other major house cost that comes to mind is maybe replacing the roof, but since my house has a clay or concrete tile style roof, I am hoping to get another 10-20 years out of it. The home is roughly 20 years old.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:52
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Senor P. posted:I talked to one of the local credit unions today, got quoted for 7% APR for 36 months. I would jump on that and lock it in That's basically -1% APR in the first year, 2-3% APR in year 2, 3-4% APR in year 3
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Oct 12, 2022 07:14
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We just got epoxy installed on our garage floor, and they offered to do the 2 steps leading from the garage into the house, which we went ahead and had them do since we figured that would make the steps look nicer. One thing we didn't think of though is that with the flakes applied the steps and floor now form an optical illusion where it's difficult to visually see the edge of the floor from the edge of the stair treads. I'm trying to think of solutions to this problem, and so far the best I've come up with is either just taping off the edge of the stairs like in a commercial property or buying a vinyl or carpet stair tread and sticking that to the top of the tread. I'm leaning towards getting a carpeted stair tread, which I assume I need to glue down in some fashion, but I have no idea what I would use to glue it down to an epoxy coated stair case. Is it just any old construction adhesive? Does anyone have a better idea?
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Oct 13, 2022 12:50
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https://www.amazon.com/Stair-Strips-Pre-cut-strips-safety/dp/B0776Z2PSY
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Oct 13, 2022 15:04
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https://www.tactics.com/dgk/gooms-graphic-skateboard-grip-tape
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Oct 13, 2022 17:43
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I have a mason/roofer team coming to work on the house I bought in September. I posted some about the job here. They're going to be taking an idle chimney down to the roof line and capping it. They're then rebuilding the in-use chimney. Afterward, they're going to rebuild my parapet and tuckpoint beneath it, as well as install missing flashing and patch the membrane to it. I got six estimates and this was middle of the road ($16k). I had very cheap roofers offer to patch the membrane, and more specialized masons offer to do pretty much the same job for $20-30k, but I'd need to hire a roofer to finish off what would be a very small job afterward. This was in the other thread, but: Motronic posted:Leaks in particular that could have been managed cheaply at first end up at tear down levels of damage over time. If people don't even know when they need to call someone in - and a lot of people clearly do not or just will not because they are bad at dealing with life - houses are gonna get destroyed. ...A lot of people don't even know what you look for or how to evaluate work they are paying for so you end up with damaged homes. Sometimes very damaged when you have people cutting into structural members. So I did call someone in. My guess is, I can always call in the more expensive masons if this ends up a nightmare. The contracting company has five-star ratings on Angi and elsewhere, and the lead seems trustworthy to me. But I won't know what to look for in the workmanship. Any tips on how masons gently caress up, or how to evaluate good work?
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Oct 15, 2022 00:29
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I did all the sprinkler shut off stuff for the winter that the previous owner said would drain the sprinklers using gravity, on Wednesday. Today the blow-out guy came and blew out the sprinklers. There was a TON of water in them still, so that's one question answered. Gravity does not in fact drain our sprinklers. redreader fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Oct 15, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 01:34
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bort posted:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3131399&pagenumber=1198&perpage=40&userid=0#post525563513 There's a bunch of discussion about this one
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Oct 15, 2022 02:32
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twerking on the railroad posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3131399&pagenumber=1198&perpage=40&userid=0#post525563513 Please understand that I'm not a mason and all the poo poo I'm talking about there is only the tip of the "your house is gonna fall down" iceburg. I don't know how to properly evaluate masonry drains and that kind of thing in general that leads to moldy walls years in the future so just lol if an idiot like me could find that many obvious issues the rest must be a train wreck.
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Oct 15, 2022 02:41
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Motronic posted:Please understand that I'm not a mason and all the poo poo I'm talking about there is only the tip of the "your house is gonna fall down" iceburg. I don't know how to properly evaluate masonry drains and that kind of thing in general that leads to moldy walls years in the future so just lol if an idiot like me could find that many obvious issues the rest must be a train wreck. I suppose I should have pointed out that discussion was only quick hits on how masons can gently caress up, and not at all any ways to evaluate good work.
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Oct 15, 2022 04:53
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That's helpful. edit:  that was new construction? We're putting in extra weeps in the parapet where there haven't been any, so we're thinking about how it's draining, for sure.The really interesting thing is that this is a two-course wall (e.g. two rows of brick). The inner course, common brick, is pretty roached. The crack in the roof membrane and it being just gummed up on the wall and not properly attached to flashing meant the bricks got far more moisture than they should have. But all of the high priced masons were impressed that the decorative brick on the outside is plumb, not a brick out of place and the tuck pointing job looks good. I'm scared what we'll find and how much extra it'll cost me, especially as we pull off rows and get down to the roof line. Once they're halfway through the job, I think my checkbook is open for whatever they come up with. But I want to stop the bleeding now. The roof doesn't leak, but it will if I don't fix it. bort fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Oct 15, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 05:12
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Motronic posted:Please understand that I'm not a mason Exactly something a mason would say. 
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Oct 15, 2022 05:15
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