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Well we're back, and will be staying put until Christmas or so. Lots of uninterrupted time to putter away on the house (serious unpacking, then we'll have enough room to move around and actually get poo poo done). The honeymoon was lovely, but only half as long as it needed to be (not nearly enough PTO....). It was at the old family summer house up on a lake*. For most of the time it was just us and my mom and my aunt, who happens to be my mom's identical twin. Jokes were had:  : Hi Albert! Welcome to your honeymoon with your mothers-in-law!!But really, we had a fantastic time - we were over in the guest cottage and could engage with the moms as little or as much as we wanted (we engaged a lot - they kept making us drinks). And we all like each other, so it wasn't some exercise in familial misery. Then the rest of the family got in a few days later, and then I learned that before the wedding my dad and SFIL totally bonded over talking poo poo about our shitshow of a house and how hosed we are. Thanks guys  Guess we have no choice but to prove them wrong about the poo poo-level of our house.So once we got back, we realized we had tons of dirty laundry and still no washer and dryer, so we went out and purchased a set this evening as the first order of business. We went to the nearby showroom for the big local appliance dealer, more or less told the saleslady that we wanted the dumbest, least efficient, and best washing machine, and ended up with the beastly Maytag commercial-grade clothesfucker model (and its equally beastly dryer friend). They were by far the boxiest and ugliest units on the showroom floor, which, as a designer who hates the streamlined look on immobile objects and especially washers that have curved/rounded/not-flat tops (wtf why is this a thing??), pleased me greatly. Also had plenty of deep water wash settings (aka override the government-mandated water usage restrictions). Wrar posted:I bought a Speedqueen and it's a tank. Didn't bother to look at water usage or anything. Works great. They had SpeedQueens, but only the 2018 models. Saleslady basically told us what I'd already learned here via tidbits appliance chat, that the 2018 models adhere to the new standards and have poo poo performance in comparison to older models (but are still exquisitely built). And no, they didn't have any 2017 or earlier models lying around. She said people have been desperate to get older models - trying to get refurbs and floor/demo units and poo poo, but they just don't have them anymore and won't be getting more. She was really bummed about it too, because they'd previously been so fantastic and made people so happy, so now they were steering people like us away because other customers have been so dissatisfied. That's when she brought us over to the aforementioned Maytag beast line, which Maytag introduced essentially to compete with SpeedQueen. Customers who hated and returned their 2018 SpeedQueens ended up being quite happy with the Maytags. Also we were treated to some bonus poo poo talking about Samsung machines. Our saleslady and everyone else there hated them because they were super finicky, overly complicated with too many bells and whistles (points of failure), and frequently needed repair (which sucks even more with all the parts being in Korea). Yet they sold them because they are in stupidly high demand among millennials for some reason, who'd then still buy them even when the sales team is like, "uh maybe consider these not-Samsung models over here..) Anyway, our glorious machines will be here next week, so we'll have to run to the laundromat between now and then, but soon. I'm so excited. * So if our Victorian is homeownership on hard difficulty, then this summer house (actually series of houses) is homeownership on death march difficulty, especially when you can't undo cheap lovely work done by the other side of the family without causing butthurt and long-term rifts. Some of their recent landscaping is so bad we might just deal with them being mad at us and rip it all out and put it back the way it was. And in general, the house is in the middle of nowhere, sits boarded up through harsh winters, is being constantly infiltrated by various critters, is over a hundred years old, and is far away from where my side of the family lives (we are the closest by far, and we're a 12-hour drive away). I'll try to post a story or two in the crappy construction thread.
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Aug 17, 2018 05:37
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Some small accomplishments today: - Swapped out the lovely handheld nozzle shower head (that was weak, kept rotating in its bracket, had the tubing in the way) with the huge adjustable rain forest shower head I'd retrieved from my previous previous apartment - it had been installed by an old tenant, and when I found the tiny original shower head when moving out, I swapped them. Then I didn't need it in our next apartment so it stayed in a box for six years, but now I'm glad I kept it. - Got an auger and related tools to work on the loving sawdust clog in the shower (yeah that's still there). We improved it a little bit by riling up the blockage with a plunger - now tub drains in a few minutes instead of half an hour, but it's still slow enough to leave ugly rings. - Set up my clothesline!  I even made it all fancy with a pulley so I can hang the whole line from one spot. We're waiting another week for delivery of our washer and dryer and I don't trust the laundromat dryers not to ruin my clothes, but even once we have our own dryer, I'll still be line drying a bunch of my stuff because it's all fragile line dry only lady clothes. I'll try to get some pics when I have clothes on it and it's not dark.
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Aug 19, 2018 05:17
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Queen Victorian posted:- Got an auger and related tools to work on the loving sawdust clog in the shower (yeah that's still there). Have you just married a scarecrow?
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Aug 21, 2018 08:39
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spog posted:Have you just married a scarecrow? I talked about it more in the homeownership thread or somewhere, but when we had my husband's mom and stepdad out to help us with refinishing the attic floors, stepdad mopped the floor between sandings and then emptied the entire mop bucket full of ultra-fine sawdust into the tub (he has since profusely apologized and doesn't know what possessed him to do that). That was back in June before we moved in. Tub was stopped dead initially (I had to bail it), then we tried various things and loosened it up enough to drain very slowly so we could use it, as it's the only tub in the house. Finally got the auger as the last step before calling a plumber. Augered it the other night and it was successful - tub is now back to normal. Got the auger WAY down, too - must have just pushed the blockage down to where the pipe opened up more and it could dissipate and be on its way to the sewer system (sorry sewer engineers  - normally we are super careful and never dump grease or oil down the drain and such, and the sawdust debacle wasn't our fault directly).The auger was about $50 or so, but a fraction of what it would have cost to call a plumber. Goes to show that investing in tools and know-how and taking care of things yourself is more cost effective than calling experts for every little thing that goes wrong or needs to be fixed in this house (all the things because it's a huge old fixer upper). And then we'll have a huge collection of tools for when we have to fix all this poo poo again.
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Aug 21, 2018 13:07
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Queen Victorian posted:The auger was about $50 or so, but a fraction of what it would have cost to call a plumber. Goes to show that investing in tools and know-how and taking care of things yourself is more cost effective than calling experts for every little thing that goes wrong or needs to be fixed in this house (all the things because it's a huge old fixer upper). And then we'll have a huge collection of tools for when we have to fix all this poo poo again. I'm a big believer in investing the money in a new tool or 2 and fixing something myself, even if I don't save any money over paying a professional. I'm stuck spending that money either way, might as well expand my tool collection and skillset. I'll still pay a professional occasionally, mainly either for highly skilled work, or things that would take me 10x as long, but in general I'd rather DIY and fill up my toolbox.
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Aug 25, 2018 22:13
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I am a big believer in hiring people to work with poop water.
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Aug 26, 2018 01:26
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Washer and dryer came on Friday. Huge milestone for us - our first major appliance purchase together.   Hooked up down in our creepy basement, probably roughly in the same spots the PO had her machines. Unfortunately, we have the older three-prong 220V and the dryer came with the newer four-prong plug, so they'll have to come back and swap the cords (luckily they are interchangeable, apparently).  The super high-tech hookups for the washing machine. I guess our triple basin laundry sink is now just a double basin laundry sink. I'm amused that this hundred year old laundry sink is the interface for the washer. Anyhow, if the machines look kinda tossed in there, it's because this is supposed to be a temporary spot for them. We plan to plumb the awkward little upstairs room and make that our laundry room:  This room is like 6 x 8 and has two windows in it, so useless for most purposes. We've since ripped out the carpet in it, only to find past evidence of a tile floor (tar paper with imprints of tile work on it) and then the badly beat up pine subfloor. We'll put in new tile, a drain, and the water and electrical hookups. After living so long in a second-floor apartment where you had to go outside and down a bunch of stairs to access the washer and dryer in the basement, having a second-floor laundry room is going to be amazing. The machines we got are kinda loud, but the walls are all plaster and the doors are all solid wood, and the house just absorbs all the sound. We've spent a lot of time shouting to each other from different parts of the house and not being able to hear each other. I kinda want to install an old-school intercom system. So yeah, not worried about the machines being loud. On living in the house for real now, we are noticing some really annoying things about it that I can't believe the previous owner never dealt with. There is no light in the pantry, for example (thank gently caress there is a window so it is at least usable during daylight hours). We've been here for two weeks and are like, we gotta fix this, and the PO was here for fifteen years and never did anything about it (unless she used a flashlight or had a lamp on an extension cord or some poo poo). Also, one of the neighbors we've befriended said that right before the PO moved out (multiple people on the block have referred to her as "the lady"), she had a bunch of people in doing work on the house, to get it ready to put on the market. I said that I wish she hadn't bothered, because most of our initial projects involving undoing/redoing all the recent work. The lady seemed to have been cheap as gently caress about everything. The painters she hired were garbage, so even if the paint colors didn't suck, it's still tons of sloppy work that we have to remedy (like drips and splatters of paint on the woodwork and stone facade, sloppy borders between walls and trim, etc). The work on the walkout basement steps looks very recent but is sloppy and horrible work - there is no drainage so rain water gushes into the basement, and what we thought was mortar between the new door jamb and the wall was just dirty fiberglass insulation that the rain water eventually dislodged. I would have taken whatever was there before. Also, she never bothered to clean up the yard, despite hiring people to fix/improve other stuff. Looked like poo poo, but took me five minutes to pick everything up. Anyways, check out this workmanship:   Looking forward to stripping all this loving paint. Also, it turns out the whole house is subtly filthy - everything LOOKS clean, but as soon as you touch or look too closely, you see how dirty it is. She definitely cleaned to the point it looked clean, not until it WAS clean. I mean, some of it was just the house being vacant for so long, but that wouldn't explain the grimy shelving in the pantry or absolutely disgusting stove (you'd need to wash your hands after touching the knobs) - the white part of the stove was clean-looking, but holy gently caress the knobs. I was glad when we found and unpacked the box of cleaning supplies. JoshGuitar posted:I'm a big believer in investing the money in a new tool or 2 and fixing something myself, even if I don't save any money over paying a professional. I'm stuck spending that money either way, might as well expand my tool collection and skillset. I'll still pay a professional occasionally, mainly either for highly skilled work, or things that would take me 10x as long, but in general I'd rather DIY and fill up my toolbox. Yeah for sure. We just bought a huge new toolbox to contain our growing collection of tools. Upcoming purchases include a heat gun (to aid in stripping paint -gently caress paying the stripping/refinishing outfit $250 per door for over a dozen doors) and a floor nailer. Elephanthead posted:I am a big believer in hiring people to work with poop water. Agreed in most cases.
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Aug 26, 2018 17:46
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Queen Victorian posted:Upcoming purchases include a heat gun (to aid in stripping paint -gently caress paying the stripping/refinishing outfit $250 per door for over a dozen doors) and a floor nailer. As someone else who just bought an 1860s house, how are you approaching the issue of lead paint?
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Aug 28, 2018 12:00
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mcgreenvegtables posted:As someone else who just bought an 1860s house, how are you approaching the issue of lead paint? Basically by not sanding off the paint. Lead paint is dangerous when it's ingested or ground to dust and inhaled. Inside on built in woodwork, I can slather on chemical paint stripper, and then the paint can be scraped/scrubbed off without creating airborne hazards. I can take removable items like doors and such outside and use the heat gun with a respirator (it's possible to release some lead-containing smoke) and then finish up with chemical stripper. Then again, my dad has recommended that I just pay the money to the stripping/refinishing outfit to do the doors because it's much more worth our time to just pay them. He said to send one over and see what kind of job they do and if it's good and the door itself is good quality (don't know on the attic doors because they're 100% painted, so don't know if they're quartersawn oak like the lower level doors or ugly cheap pine).
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Aug 28, 2018 12:20
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I would still be worried about dust from scraping, but sounds like you have at least looked into proper precautions. Even so, with all that effort $250 a door doesn't seem bad at all. I think about this every time I walk past a painted door in my house but would drop that in a heartbeat if I could find someone in the Boston area charging that. (To be fair I haven't actually checked, but I'm pretty skeptical it will be that cheap here. I did get quotes from $500-$1000 to replace two tiny cracked pieces of stained glass, though.) Also unpainted doors at salvage yards can be way less than that depending on the quality you need to replace, and I'd rather waste time hanging doors than stripping lead paint. Also, I dove into stripping the varnish off our banister, which is not even that ornate, and it gets old really, really quickly. Definitely one of the things I'm happy to pay someone to do while I'm at work. Plenty of other actually fun stuff to do on the house. mcgreenvegtables fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Aug 28, 2018 |
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Aug 28, 2018 23:41
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mcgreenvegtables posted:I would still be worried about dust from scraping, but sounds like you have at least looked into proper precautions. Even so, with all that effort $250 a door doesn't seem bad at all. I think about this every time I walk past a painted door in my house but would drop that in a heartbeat if I could find someone in the Boston area charging that. (To be fair I haven't actually checked, but I'm pretty skeptical it will be that cheap here. I did get quotes from $500-$1000 to replace two tiny cracked pieces of stained glass, though.) Also unpainted doors at salvage yards can be way less than that depending on the quality you need to replace, and I'd rather waste time hanging doors than stripping lead paint. Yeah I'll be getting the appropriate filters for my respirator (really glad I bought it - I don't know how everyone else didn't up and faint when we were polyurethaning the floors) so I can always be safe working with this stuff. I'm also overly sensitive to any sort of fumes. I'm definitely leaning more towards listening to my dad and just taking the doors to the place and paying them the money. Thinking about the hours and tools and chemicals involved, seems like a pretty good price. I can take care of the hardware myself. As for all the woodwork in the foyer, I have my work cut out for me. Everything is intricately detailed (beading/millgrain and tiny dentil molding everywhere). They managed to paint the trim, paneling, and balusters, but thankfully didn't paint the newel posts (which are all carved) or the rails. Still need work though, due to the rough shape of the original finish and drips and splatters from the aforementioned lovely painters. I think I'm just going to get new balusters because gently caress stripping them all. I'm worried about stripping all that paneling and finding crappy pine instead of oak - my flipper friend across the street stripped and refinished the banister and all the foyer woodwork (they are doing a high-end flip), and found that the paneling was all low quality pine that didn't take the new stain well. These are all such bourgeoisie houses - a veneer of super nice stuff, underlaid with the Victorian equivalent of builder grade crap (still, builder grade back then was vastly superior to what builder grade is now - like, oh no your exquisite wood paneling is pine instead of oak/maple/walnut, and nowadays people spend lots just to get anything in pine (or any type of wood)). It's like keeping up with the Joneses in the Gilded Age. Reference pic of what we're dealing with:  You can't see all the flaws in the paint job from this pic, but that newel post is highly detailed and is flecked with tiny dots of white paint. Same issue with rails and risers. Even if those panels are all blotchy pine and I have to do extra work to even it out, this foyer is going to be so much grander and more awesome when it's all shiny refinished wood and not cruddy white paint.
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Aug 29, 2018 01:31
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For stripping anything more than a few pieces a steam box starts to become attractive. They are pretty easy to DIY for little more than the cost of some plywood, foam, and a garment steamer. Helps keep dust down too. A door-sized box might be awkward but the steamer can also be used directly. I find heat guns get tedious (and I don’t like the idea of vaporizing lead or burning the workpiece) and chemical strippers are so messy (and not exactly easy on the user). I made the mistake of stripping a spool bed with chemicals. Wayyy too many crevasses. Lately I’ve been using an infrared heater for flat surfaces which is quicker and and a bit safer than the gun.
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Aug 29, 2018 02:00
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overboard posted:For stripping anything more than a few pieces a steam box starts to become attractive. They are pretty easy to DIY for little more than the cost of some plywood, foam, and a garment steamer. Helps keep dust down too. A door-sized box might be awkward but the steamer can also be used directly. I've actually heard about the infrared heaters for paint stripping and was very intrigued, but I get the sense that they are expensive. I do want to look into that. Also some water-based stripper that breaks the bond between the wood and the paint rather than trying to eat the paint, which might make dealing with the paint in the nooks and crannies a bit easier. I'm up for trying things and seeing what works best.
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Aug 29, 2018 03:03
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Queen Victorian posted:I've actually heard about the infrared heaters for paint stripping and was very intrigued, but I get the sense that they are expensive. I do want to look into that. Also some water-based stripper that breaks the bond between the wood and the paint rather than trying to eat the paint, which might make dealing with the paint in the nooks and crannies a bit easier. I'm up for trying things and seeing what works best. I've used phasers, set to stun!
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Aug 29, 2018 12:23
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So it's been raining for the last three days due to all the backwash from Tropical Storm Gordon, and then we can expect even more rain after Hurricane Florence makes its way inland. So that means that our basement, which has been uncomfortably damp all summer, is now wet in places. Ground has saturated and water table has come up and now it's seeping in through the walls as well as the floor and puddling in some of the corners. Most worrisome is the puddle underneath the breaker board. There's a bad downspout drain at this corner, so that needs fixing. I think once we get the right drain hose for our new and more powerful dehumidifier, we can run that nonstop/as needed and not go have to empty the bucket several times a day. It's already produced good results - reducing humidity before puddles form. I'd rather take a hit to the electric bill for the time being than let the foundation disintegrate and have all our stuff rot (already lost my beer pong table top because it was in contact with the ground for a month - surface buckled, rot was setting in, and it was sprouting mold growths). We'll be gathering some more quotes for basement moisture mitigation. Looks like the best option is the interior perimeter French drain system, coupled with fixing the downspout drainage and the walkout basement steps and door. It's gonna be so expensive  I guess the one thing is that this has been an issue for over a hundred years and the foundation is still good and the house is still straight and solid. And in the Victorian era, it was expected that basements were damp, permeable pits in the ground where the furnace went and nothing more.
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Sep 10, 2018 18:36
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Hey so we did some things this weekend! Saturday was largely running around town doing errands (including the at least weekly pilgrimage to Home Depot), but today we stuck around and accomplished some things. One of the things we bought at Home Depot yesterday was a fancy multimeter with extra add-on tools. Husband sat down and learned how to use it so we could test and map all the circuits in this house. There is a mix of original knob and tube and added conduit circuits, all attached to a modern breaker box in the basement (I found the old fuse box upstairs, but that's long since been decommissioned - though the labels (for four original circuits) are still there). So it took us well over an hour this morning to figure out which things were on which circuit, because the way the circuits are configured makes NO loving SENSE. Had to keep flipping all the breakers and testing poo poo again and again and again. Here's a summary of the 12 circuits on the breaker box: - Three of the circuits do nothing, as far as we were able to discern. - There are a couple circuits that power half the outlets in one room and half the outlets in an adjacent room. - The sole outlet in the dining room is on the same circuit as the washing machine, for some reason. - About half the stuff in the house, including the entirety of the kitchen (minus the pantry, which is its own circuit), most of the first floor, and also the mirror lamps and outlet in the bathroom upstairs, is on a single 15 amp circuit. This is why the microwave hasn't been working so well, it seems. - There is a circuit that controls a single outlet box in one of the bedrooms (the other two are on a different circuit). This circuit is 20 amps. Yeah, it's insane. My dad recommends a full rewire, but we're still thinking rewiring as we remodel and have walls ripped out, because I don't want to rip up and then patch plaster walls unnecessarily (expensive). But then again, circuits are lopsided and not good. I've proposed moving our entertainment setup to a room where there are modern grounded circuits for the time being. In other news, my project for this afternoon was doing something about the goddamned brick pile next to the back porch. So the spot next to the back porch has been a sore spot, because it was useless and until recently and then more recently, filled with garbage and also bricks. Here's a pic of the back of the house from a few months ago where you can see the pile of crap I'd gathered up from the yard to the right of the porch:  This stuff, including plastic planters, jerrycans, hundreds of feet of garden hose, and plain garbage, was strewn across the yard originally, and then I gathered it up and finally took it to the curb for garbage day to make it go away. (Side story: husband wanted to put the planters in a garbage bag, but I figured I'd just stack them up and put them on the curb not in a bag in case someone wanted them (they were in good working order, just... we didn't want or need them). Later that evening, doorbell rings, and it's a neighbor asking if the planters are ours and if it's cool if she takes them for her garden Glad I didn't bag them up).Here's the corner in question after all the crap went away:  Still sucked, because nowhere good to put the garbage cans because of the spider-filled brick pile. So I started moving bricks and found broken glass:  This was a theme for the afternoon. Move a couple bricks or shovel some soil, find another shard of broken glass. There was so much loving broken glass in the ground! I can only think a window got broken at some point - past break-in or replacement window installers dropped and broke an old window sash and did jackshit to clean it up. This sucks because we want a family eventually and I want our eventual children to freely and safely run around outside (and not be fat gamers), and more immediately, we want to be able to babysit our friends' kid - the wife's art studio (she is a professional artist) is about four blocks from our house, so it would be super convenient. Need to make the yard safe if we want him to be able to play outside. At least there's a sweet playground a few blocks away. Moved and stacked all the bricks:  Why yes, stacking bricks was one of my childhood chores, how could you tell? And yeah, we had a handful of red bricks for some reason. Plus a lot of broken ones of both colors.  The area cleared out. I then did a bunch of digging, root cutting, and tamping to make it at least sort of flat.  Laying a brick pattern by the seat of my pants. Needed something that used only whole bricks and looked sort of interesting.  Finished! Ended up lining up pretty well with the porch.  Now time to bury it! Just kidding, just raking dirt over it to fill in the cracks. If I intended this thing to be more permanent, I would have done this with sand (after laying all the bricks on a gravel and sand base that was perfectly level and all that jazz). After all this, I've decided that there's a bit too much of a ledge, so I decided to make a kind of extra "step" so it would be easier to wheel things on and off it.  Digging out these little trenches for the inset edge bricks was awful and tedious. I only did it on one edge before I gave up and went in to have more beer.  All done and swept off! All the bricks look kinda grody after sitting in that pile outdoors for so long, but I don't have a power washer and was too lazy to otherwise clean them.  And now our garage cans have a nice little home. Also, I'd never laid out bricks for patios before (just watched my grandpa and dad fixing grandpa's brick-on-sand patio when I was a small child), so this was nice practice. The end. PS: Almost done with the long-promised post about windows - we talked to the wood window guy last weekend, lots of interesting stuff. i"ll try to have that posted with pics in the next few days. Queen Victorian fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Sep 24, 2018 |
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Sep 24, 2018 05:36
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Those electrics are insane you're not wrong there. Sounds like your priority is the kitchen getting it's own circuit? But I've got to ask, was stacking bricks a makework core, or did you really have enough loose bricks around for it to regularly need doing?
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Sep 24, 2018 06:17
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cakesmith handyman posted:Those electrics are insane you're not wrong there. Sounds like your priority is the kitchen getting it's own circuit? Perfect practice for the coal mines!
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Sep 24, 2018 06:38
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cakesmith handyman posted:Those electrics are insane you're not wrong there. Sounds like your priority is the kitchen getting it's own circuit? Yeah, kitchen on its own circuit with way more amps so the lights don't dim when the microwave is running and poo poo. We are going to be remodeling the kitchen in the near future and that will be our opportunity to completely redo the wiring while we have ceiling and most of the walls opened up. Another circuit I want to fix/add is one for all our electronics in the bedroom we've designated as the TV den (north-facing 11x11 room with no closet, which would make for a crappy bedroom). We'll have to consult an electrician for that one to see how we can implement that with minimal ripping poo poo open. The old circuit I'm least worried about is the one that handles ceiling lights on the second and third floors. Nothing but some light bulbs, which is basically all it was intended to do. It's where we're running tons of modern appliances and electronics that is most concerning. quote:But I've got to ask, was stacking bricks a makework core, or did you really have enough loose bricks around for it to regularly need doing? The house I grew up in had huge brick chimneys and a buttload of brick pathways and steps in the yard. My dad has all these super long term project goals, so he kept a huge pile of bricks around for some eventual pathway and other reasons. Until the final pathways were installed and they were all used up, the bricks would be somewhere and then deemed to be in the way, so we had to move them somewhere else, where they would stay until they were in the way again. Happened a few times. Also used bricks from the brick pile to build fortresses and cities for my toy dinosaurs and then would have to put them away again.
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Sep 24, 2018 13:18
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Visible power conduits are very common and (in my monstrous opinion) it doesn't look that bad. They just remind me of well-maintained vintage buildings  Are you totally against it, or was it just not suggested? https://www.familyhandyman.com/electrical/wiring/how-to-install-surface-mounted-wiring-and-conduit/view-all/
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Sep 24, 2018 23:44
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quote:- About half the stuff in the house, including the entirety of the kitchen (minus the pantry, which is its own circuit), most of the first floor, and also the mirror lamps and outlet in the bathroom upstairs, is on a single 15 amp circuit. This is why the microwave hasn't been working so well, it seems. quote:- There is a circuit that controls a single outlet box in one of the bedrooms (the other two are on a different circuit). This circuit is 20 amps.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:22
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peanut posted:Visible power conduits are very common and (in my monstrous opinion) it doesn't look that bad. They just remind me of well-maintained vintage buildings Already got them:  The one side of the house (that no one really sees) is riddled with them - that's how we have most of the additional circuits. They are relatively unobtrusive (but still not terribly attractive) white conduits low down on the inside walls for the extra outlets in most of the upstairs rooms. Would have been nice if they'd run it along the top of the baseboard instead of a foot above the baseboard, but maybe that was a code thing. Here they are in one of the attic rooms:  Anyhow, if we can swing updating the wiring without having to add more conduits, that'd be ideal. I'm fine with the ones we have, but definitely don't want to add more of them. Except we'd tolerate them for outdoor outlets for the porches (but I'd want to find a nicer looking piping for anything on the front or back of the house - maybe something black/iron colored (not galvanized steel colored) that plays into the old timey vibe) because I don't know how else to get outlets (and back porch light) out there - exterior is brick and the front is natural stone, so no cutting holes in that. Still, gotta have those outdoor globe string lights for the porches and yard (neighbors have tons of them and I'm so jealous - nowhere to plug any in without an extension cord from inside). What makes updating wiring throughout the house tough is that we'd have to cut holes in and then patch lath and plaster, which is more involved and expensive than doing the same with regular drywall. For any room that we renovate and have walls and ceilings out already, we'll take care of replacing wiring for that room. Otherwise, we're not interested in replacing walls - plaster is in very excellent condition so we have no reason to replace it in rooms we don't plan to heavily remodel (most of them). devicenull posted:Is it on a GFCI? They apparently used to be expensive, so people would do poo poo like this to only have to buy one. Yeah, both kitchen outlets are both GFCI, and so is the outlet in the bathroom. So at least there's that. quote:That one's easy, there used to be a window air conditioner there and they were tired of blowing the breaker (or they had an air conditioner that did more then 15a?) Ahhh that makes sense. I guess I didn't consider it because the window that one outlet is next to is a lovely side slider that'd be rather unsuitable for a window unit, but then again, this particular circuit, which is NOT one of the circuits on the exterior conduit, probably predated the side slider window - the original window would have had a huge sash that moved up/down, making it easier to pop in a window unit. Additionally, on the other side of the wall from this outlet is the awkward little dressing room that will eventually be our second floor laundry room, where there is a cover plate that's been painted over many times, so maybe that was on that circuit also.
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Sep 25, 2018 01:25
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As far as the glass goes, I have a similar problem in the front yard by the porch. I've tilled the area several times in abortive attempts to put grass seed in, finally put sod in this year but left a couple of feet open as a flowerbed. The glass will work its way out if the soil has been broken up - I've lived here 15 years and the broken poo poo ain't mine but I still find pieces from time to time  My advice would be just keep turning/raking those areas until you stop finding glass, anything buried under grass or in soil that hasn't been disturbed in a long time probably isn't going to be an issue.
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Sep 26, 2018 21:37
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SubponticatePoster posted:As far as the glass goes, I have a similar problem in the front yard by the porch. I've tilled the area several times in abortive attempts to put grass seed in, finally put sod in this year but left a couple of feet open as a flowerbed. The glass will work its way out if the soil has been broken up - I've lived here 15 years and the broken poo poo ain't mine but I still find pieces from time to time I think I'm going to to buy some sieves and use them whenever I move dirt around. I need them before I integrate the extra displaced dirt (from the area with the broken glass) into the flowerbeds. With a house this old, I can't tell if the glass has been there for a couple years or a couple decades - probably on longer side since I found some pieces pretty deep down and above ground shards were on top of bricks in the brick pile. Sod is a good idea, too. Backyard lawn is 95% not grass anyways.
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Sep 26, 2018 22:22
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Refilling the radiators today. Not going so well. I think the problem is that we've seen a ton of conflicting instructions. The boiler manual itself said nothing about what to do about the air in the system that you'll be replacing with water (I was under the impression from previous readings that you loosen the valves and THEN turn the water on, which only makes sense). Turning the water on at high pressure (there is really high water pressure in the basement) and THEN opening the valve was a loving terrible idea - high pressure stream of gross air and water sprays out all over our floors, walls, and furniture. Because what else is the trapped air going to do other than get super compressed? We are aiming to coordinate our future flooring projects so we have to do this as few times as possible in the future. Edit: So eventually we figured it out - the way to do it was to open the valves first and then just let it fill up very slowly and be patient, and then close radiators as they each filled up with water. That's how I imagined we would do it, so honestly I was blindsided when Hubs went on in and turned on the water full blast without opening any valves first. Still a bit irritated about that because... how do you forget that the air in the system needs a place to go before you can fill the system with water? We'd read about this. And now we've turned the heat on (sounded really ominous and creepy when the water started moving inside the radiators). House got up to temp surprisingly quickly. The two radiators we were not able to get the valves off on are cold (aka don't have water in them) and some didn't get all the way full, so we'll have to force more water into the system (needs to be higher PSI than it is now with three stories of radiators) and bleed the not-full radiators. We picked up a radiator valve key so we can open the valves, including on the radiators that we couldn't get open previously with a wrench. Queen Victorian fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Sep 30, 2018 |
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Sep 29, 2018 17:23
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How are your radiators piped? I just read this funny book about old hot water heating systems and learned a lot. Definitely worth the $10 if you are curious how a single pipe gravity hot water heating system works and how to get hot water evenly to different floors. Hint: cold radiator does not necessarily mean its full of air, but rather that the hot water from the boiler found a more direct path through the system that didn't include that radiator. Are you thinking about having whatever old boiler you have replaced? We have a 35 year old oil burner and I've had a few people out for quotes for a high efficiency modulating condensing natural gas boiler. Only guy to get back to me so far came in at $16.5k, ouch!
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Sep 30, 2018 23:38
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mcgreenvegtables posted:How are your radiators piped? I just read this funny book about old hot water heating systems and learned a lot. Definitely worth the $10 if you are curious how a single pipe gravity hot water heating system works and how to get hot water evenly to different floors. Hint: cold radiator does not necessarily mean its full of air, but rather that the hot water from the boiler found a more direct path through the system that didn't include that radiator. Ooo thanks for the book recommendation! Looks useful and definitely interesting, so might have to pick it up. I believe what we have is the two-pipe setup, or whatever it's called where each radiator has an inflow and outflow pipe. I would LOVE to see the schematics of this system... Anyhow, we were able to successfully bleed the empty radiators and get them topped off. I think it was mostly a factor of the system not being full enough and having weird air pockets concentrating in radiators we couldn't initially get open. Opening valves in empty radiators made it straightforward for the water to fill in the remaining empty pockets (no trapped pressurized air fighting against it). Got the PSI up to 18 and stabilized, which is where it needs to be for a system of this size to be optimally effective. As for the boiler, it's a conventional natural gas thing that's about 15 years old, so halfway through its intended lifespan. We'll replace it if it breaks or we get some insanely good subsidy or something for getting a more efficient one, but it's in good working order and chugging along just fine for the time being. The original boiler in this house was definitely coal fired (evidenced by the coal delivery hatch and the weird wood partitions in the basement). Would have been awesome to see that. Same radiators though, those haven't changed (why I love radiators - they give no fucks about what kind of boiler they're hooked up to, so in the future when we have cold fusion and poo poo, I can still have my old dumb radiators silently radiating pleasant warmth throughout the house). PS: I came upon a NextDoor post in my neighborhood in which a resident asked for recommendations for someone to install a new boiler for her radiator system. Most people gave names and numbers, but then this one guy suggested that she consider installing a "modern forced air system". I was gearing up to go poo poo on him for his bad and wrong advice, but refrained when I remembered that I'd have to post under my real name. I will NEVER go back to a forced air system here - those were such miserable winters... and the increased electric bill from the space heater just added insult to injury.
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Oct 1, 2018 01:06
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Makes sense where you're at. Across the pond, we almost always use forced air because the ductwork's getting run for central air conditioning for the summers anyway, so doubling up to run radiators and boilers as well is expensive.
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Oct 2, 2018 11:08
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My favourite thing about radiators is throwing your towel on the bathroom radiator when you shower and having a nice warm towel when you're done.
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Oct 3, 2018 02:55
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Liquid Cannibalism posted:Makes sense where you're at. Across the pond, we almost always use forced air because the ductwork's getting run for central air conditioning for the summers anyway, so doubling up to run radiators and boilers as well is expensive. Yeah, most new/newer construction around here is forced air everything, because it's less expensive to install than a hot water boiler system AND you kill two birds with one stone by using the duct work for the AC also. As it turns out, the hot water heating is more efficient than a forced air system because water and cast iron are way better and more efficient at transporting and retaining heat than air and thin sheet metal. More expensive to install (because good boilers are expensive, and I guess the piping is more involved than the ducting and radiators/hydronic baseboard heaters are more expensive than register grilles), but better heating efficiency and heating quality (consistent temps and smooth temp changes, silence, no blowing/windchill*, no dried out air). If I were building new in a colder northern climate like this, I'd throw down the extra cash up front to put in a hot water heat system AND a forced air cooling system so that I can have the best of both worlds. I grew up in northern California where there were no radiators because because they were total overkill. My grandma's 1905 house had forced air heat from the get go. Forced air was totally fine there because it just never got that cold in the winter. A handful of the older houses we looked at over here had old Victorian-era forced air (the upside was that they had been updated to have central AC) with the really sweet wooden and/or brass grilles on the return and the registers, but I didn't really trust them after freezing my rear end off for three winters with a forced air system. *So my room was on the end of the (leaky and probably not/poorly insulated) duct line, so the air that came into my freezing cold room was NOT warm. It was around ambient temp, but was un-warm enough to feel cold when it was blowing on me, essentially creating a windchill effect. Hated when the heat came on and I was in the room but not under my covers. Meow Meow Meow posted:My favourite thing about radiators is throwing your towel on the bathroom radiator when you shower and having a nice warm towel when you're done. Agreed. Also great for drying hang-dry-only clothes quickly. And just sitting on after being outside for a time on a cold winter's day. We will be remodeling the bathroom and I actually looked into those radiator/towel warmer combos, but they don't seem to make them in cast iron and they weren't as cool looking as the current bathroom radiator.
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Oct 3, 2018 05:13
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Change of plans this weekend, due to discovery of bedbugs. Carpet removal, extermination, mattress disposal, and new mattress shopping instead of having friends up for the weekend.  At least there's an excellent burger joint near the mattress store...
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Oct 5, 2018 03:37
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omg rip
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Oct 5, 2018 07:06
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Queen Victorian posted:Change of plans this weekend, due to discovery of bedbugs. Were the bedbugs already in the house, or did they come in with someone / something?
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Oct 5, 2018 14:35
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Were the bedbugs already in the house, or did they come in with someone / something? I'm thinking they were already here (learned they can be dormant for a long time, and house was vacant for a while, and despite it being empty, it was evident the PO wasn't much of a housekeeper and wouldn't have been vigilant about this sort of stuff), or they could have been in the moving truck on the moving blankets. Not sure how well they travel from house to house, but one of the houses next to ours is owned by a hoarder landlady and there's a collection of junky upholstered furniture on the porch and some out back. Houses are like four feet apart. Hell, we could have brought them from our travels, though the places we stayed don't have known problems. All I know is that we didn't have them in our apartment. And we didn't suspect anything amiss beforehand because it was warm and we'd hang out on the porch and backyard and be accosted by mosquitoes constantly, so a few extra bites went unnoticed until it started getting cold and we stopped going outside in the evenings - I stopped getting bites but husband didn't. Then we started investigating a possibility other than mosquitoes and ended up finding that bedbug after we started looking for signs.
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Oct 5, 2018 15:06
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Exterminator is coming on Monday for initial consultation/inspection. Oldest and most highly regarded one in the area that deals with bedbugs. They even have bedbug-sniffing dogs. Hopefully they can get the job done quickly. They have a few treatment options at a few different prices, but we are at the point of being happy just throwing money at them until all the bedbugs are dead.
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Oct 5, 2018 17:42
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Queen Victorian posted:They have a few treatment options at a few different prices, but we are at the point of being happy just throwing money at them until all the bedbugs are dead. I have a mental image of you two in exterminator uniforms swinging bags of quarters at the bedbugs. Hope it gets sorted quickly, sounds unpleasant.
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Oct 5, 2018 22:28
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cakesmith handyman posted:I have a mental image of you two in exterminator uniforms swinging bags of quarters at the bedbugs. My mind has added to this visage - imagine that we are doing that, but now we are Borat and Azamat, like in the Jewish cockroach scene. quote:Hope it gets sorted quickly, sounds unpleasant. Thanks, I hope so too. Exterminators seem super good - only negative reviews were from people who dealt with lovely phone reps from the contracted after hours answering service (which they ditched and replaced with a better one).
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Oct 5, 2018 23:43
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Hope that your team of detectors is this cool! https://bell-environmental.com/bed-bugs/detection/
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Oct 6, 2018 01:59
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Hope that your team of detectors is this cool! Oh hey! Our guys also have adorable beagles on their page about bedbug detection. They better use actual beagles or else I'll be disappointed. Actually I'm wondering if they'll bring a dog since we've already confirmed the presence of bedbugs. Then again, the dogs are good at pinpointing afflicted areas. From the guy's reaction during the phone call, I don't think it's typical for the homeowner to have preemptively captured a bedbug - he started asking the standard diagnostic questions about why we suspected bedbugs and if we'd seen any evidence, and my husband cut to the chase and said we'd captured a bedbug and had it contained in a ziplock bag, so yeah, definitely bedbugs. I guess that means we can skip the part of the process for determining if the problem is actually bedbugs. I still want them to bring the dogger though
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Oct 6, 2018 03:40
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So we consulted with the exterminator last week (they did not bring the dog  ) and they'll be coming for the first of three sessions on Wednesday. Before then, we'll be working on washing/dry cleaning all the clothes and linens in our possession and then once cleaned, storing in bins away from the infested area. We will also be disposing of one of our spare mattresses and its box spring (where we initially discovered the bedbugs) after we seal it with plastic and duct tape and take it to the curb under cover of darkness so no one tries to scavenge it before garbage pickup (but if they do, they are idiots that deserve bedbugs).Overall, it's a fairly mild infestation and should be pretty straightforward to eliminate. Also, we jumped the gun and bought new mattresses last weekend, as we will be trashing our spare guest mattress set and eventually the one we are using now (aside from bedbugs it is a lovely mattress that I've always hated). Luckily, Original Mattress Factory (which is overall awesome) has a thing where you can buy the mattresses and they'll hold onto them until you're ready to take delivery. We told them it would be a few weeks and they said it was cool. Also, after testing all the luscious mattresses there, we went to bed that night and I became acutely aware of how incredibly lovely our current mattress actually is. Can't wait until we can take delivery of the new ones. And we want to use this as an excuse to tear up all the gross carpet. Removes habitat for bedbugs (and carpet beetles) and it's old and shoddily installed and I hate carpeting. There's no hardwood underneath in these rooms, only the pine plank subfloor, but I find that to be an improvement. We won't be doing flooring in those rooms until spring or summer (so we can save up some and have the heat off so we can move radiators). Perfectly happy with just not having carpet until then.
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Oct 13, 2018 15:19
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