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Stew Man Chew posted:Is there a good way to dehumidify a room with the following stipulations: I have a dehumidifier I got from Sears a few years ago. It does make some noise, but it's white noise that is easy to tune out--it's hard to hear from the other side of a closed door even. Mine has a timer of sorts where it will run in three hour on-off cycles. It was around $100 if memory serves.
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May 1, 2011 19:40
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taqueso posted:e: I'd still love to hear some goon paint recommendations, though Consumer Reports just did paints a month or two ago. They rated the following as best buys for interior paints: Kilz Casual Colors Satin Glidden Premium Satin Behr Premium Plus Satin Enamel Behr Premium Plus Flat Enamel Glidden Premium Flat
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May 3, 2011 20:07
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Elijya posted:Two, I'd like to put some shelves in a nook, just boards on the wall cut to the right dimensions, preferably painted and beveled. I assume there's an area in HD/Lowes where they'll cut wood for you over by the lumber, but I've never even been to that side of the store. Do they do things like beveled edges? Or do they just deal with larger pieces of lumber? The Lowe's where I live will cut full sheets to size for you, but that's about it. I don't know what their policy is exactly, but I don't think they're going to make more than a few cuts in a 4x8' sheet of plywood for you. No way will they do any finishing like bevels.
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May 6, 2011 22:08
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Seventyfour posted:We're buying a 1959 slab home in Texas. The owners took out most of the carpet, so the floor is just concrete slab. Slab is in good shape, appears flat, no cracking. I hate concrete floors and want to add wood floors. I've learned that installing solid hardwood flooring over concrete slab is a really really bad idea, thus I'm looking an engineered wood floors. These can either be floated on the slab or plywood can be laid over the slab. Any downsides to floating the floors? I actually just saw something about this on This Old House this weekend. They were using some sort of flooring with a synthetic surface, but with a real wood substrate. They put down a vapor barrier first to prevent the flooring from warping. I would imagine that real hardwood would be fine if you put a vapor barrier down first, but I'm not an expert.
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May 9, 2011 20:56
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I'd like to build a new crawlspace hatch cover for my house. I think I have enough scrap wood to make it, so I'm hoping to avoid a trip to the store. I'd like to use exterior grade plywood, which I have some of, but I have some interior grade as well. How can I tell them apart?
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May 13, 2011 16:43
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heyou posted:Just bought an old house, it gets VERY warm on the upper level on hot days. Put up a window unit in the master bedroom, which will now stay cool, but the rest of the upper floor is feels MUCH warmer than downstairs.(Feels like 10-15 degrees) The ceilings are slightly warm to the touch, especially around the fold-down attic stairs. Besides putting more insulation in the attic, would increasing attic ventilation help? This house originally had 4 12x24" in the attic, two of which were covered up when an addition was put on the rear of the house. The two remaining on the front of the house are nailed shut, and a single gable vent was put on the rear of the house. Should I replace the two windows with vents? I can feel a little bit of air moving at the gable vent, but the attic is extremely hot. The attic is not usable space, we just store a few things up there. House has what looks to be a tin roof, with the original wood shingles visible under it in the attic. Attic floor is insulated with crumbly-looking dust of some kind. It's at least 6 inches thick. What's up, vermiculite buddy. You're going to want at least two vents in your attic to get a cross-breeze through there. If there's no way to get another vent in the wall, maybe consider a turbine through the roof. An attic fan would probably help too, they make solar powered ones so you don't have to muck around with your house's undoubtedly ancient wiring. e: Oh FYI there's a decent chance that vermiculite has asbestos in it, so you probably want to limit your exposure to that as well.
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Jun 2, 2011 18:54
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heyou posted:Oh sweet, asbestos! Googled vermiculite, yep that's what it looks like. No ancient wiring here, the previous owners did a bunch of renovation, including new wiring throughout, and drywall with lots of insulation. I could easily take out the nailed-shut windows, I'll see what Lowe's or HD has in the way of a vent. Any way to tell if there is asbestos in the vermiculite? Should I just not disturb it and not worry about it or will I need to get rid of it? You can get it tested I think. If I understand it correctly, most of the vermiculite in the US was mined in Libby, Montana, where there was quite a bit of asbestos as well. The two don't have to go hand in hand, but it is a strong possibility. I'm not an expert or anything, but you should be ok as long as you're not stirring it up, making sand castles out of it, etc. Some local government agency can probably give you more information, department of health maybe?
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Jun 3, 2011 02:01
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General_Failure posted:Our kitchen was carpeted. Well, half of it still is. There are nice floorboards underneath. Unfortunately the carpet had this awful blue foam underlay which was glued to the floor, and has generally fused with it everywhere else as it decayed with age. how the hell do I get it off? I had a degree of success with orange oil and a paint scraper, but a lot of it just won't budge where it has fused. What do I do? I know exactly what you are talking about, we have the same thing underneath our carpet. It's black instead of blue, but otherwise identical. I can't speak to yours, but I don't think mine is glued down, it has just adhered to the floor after decades of people walking across it and what not. What works for me is going over the sections with a scraper and getting up what I can, vacuuming whatever dust remains. Then I go over the stubborn areas with Murphy's oil soap, diluted per the label. I've been doing maybe .5 sqft sections at a time, and the oil soap really makes a huge difference in how easily the crud comes up. Good luck.
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Jun 4, 2011 21:18
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Splizwarf posted:Tell me where I can find a standard-sized wall plate with two electrical outlets and an ethernet jack. There's certainly enough room inside a standard box, and on the face; why can't I find anyone making them? There really isn't, though. A good bit of the face plate covers wall rather than junction box, and there really is not room in a single gang junction box for a dual receptacle and an ethernet connector. If you want them next to one another you're going to have to settle for double gang, unless you can find a single power receptacle/ethernet combo (I couldn't find anything like that with a cursory search).
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Jun 18, 2011 23:22
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wormil posted:It's probably cheaper just to buy new bolts the correct length and replace them all. Well yeah, but what's the fun in that?
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Jul 10, 2011 08:03
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Seventyfour posted:How can we cool it down? I know that just adding powered fans will do next to nothing as there's nowhere to draw the air from (b/c no soffit vents). Any experience with any new fangled systems? You could put a fan in one of the gable vents, and it will draw air in from the opposite one.
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Jul 11, 2011 20:05
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grover posted:Per building code, you need to have soffit vents- there's a mandated soffit vent area based on the size of the roof. If someone sealed them up, it needs to be fixed. My house has no soffit vents either. More to the point, it has no soffits. It doesn't appear any of the houses in my neighborhood have them either.
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Jul 12, 2011 03:34
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While we're talking about attic vents, I've been wanting to put a solar powered fan in one end of my attic. I was up there the other day, and noticed that there's a framing member of some sort going right up the middle of the vents, all the way from the ridge of the roof down below the floor of the attic. I'm assuming that is a load bearing member and cutting it would be a Bad Thing. I'm not going to be able to get a fan in there with that beam in the way, am I?
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Jul 12, 2011 16:00
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Club soda does work; not sure if it's up to the task of getting out blood though. Try Resolve. It's spray-can stuff, and works pretty well. One of my dogs took an enormous poo poo on the rug a few weeks back, and this stuff cleaned it right up with no trouble at all.
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Jul 16, 2011 21:48
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I didn't see an HVAC thread, so I will ask here. If there's a better venue for this, let me know. Last winter my wife and I decided we weren't going through another winter without upgrading our heat away from electric baseboards, and here it is October already. We have a small house, about 750 sqft, and we live in Tacoma. Typical temperatures in the winter are around 40 or so, but below freezing is not uncommon. We don't have a gas hookup at our house, though it is in the neighborhood. What sort of options do we have for something better than baseboard heaters? I was thinking a heat pump would be good with the added benefit of AC when it actually gets hot enough in the summer, but I wonder if it gets too cold too often for that to really be efficient? We don't have a lot of extra room inside the house for a furnace or things like that, but we do have an attic we could put that in; would that be a good route to go? There's room outside if things need to be installed outdoors as well.
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Oct 3, 2011 19:10
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My property slopes upward going back from the street, rising about six feet or so fairly rapidly. The end result is a sort of terrace, where the front yard and house itself are on the lower level and most of the back is on the upper level. When my garage was built many years ago, they dug out part of the slope and put in a retaining wall, which makes up the bottom 3-4' of the garage's back wall. This wall is not in good shape at all. A lot of the mortar has cracked and the weight of the hillside is gradually pushing it inwards. Additionally, when we get a lot of rain, water will seep in through the wall. That back wall really should be completely replaced, but I'm not sure how we could do it without completely rebuilding the whole structure. We also plan to move in the next year or so, so I'm happy to let the next owners inherit the problem. I would like to try to do something about the water, though. Would a french drain be a good solution for this? I'll try to take some pictures later today, because I feel like I'm not being very clear.
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Oct 15, 2011 20:05
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dinozaur posted:A french drain would probably not be the right solution. French drains work by having water take the path of least resistance for slow drainage, while it sounds like that would be through your cracked garage wall. Take some pictures which show the lay of the land and how the grade meets the house. If you're not looking at rebuilding the structure, the best thing might be to try to divert water from going toward the garage. Regrade the yard, parge the garage wall and sell it. Here's a view from the back of the garage:  You can just see the top of the cinder block wall. Straight ahead is the neighbor's garage.  This is a view from the bottom of the wall; the fence above is the same short section of fence from the first pic. My thinking was that rainwater is coming down that slope, and contributing to the amount of water that accumulates in my garage. If I had a french drain running parallel to the garage wall, would it not intercept some of that water and allow it to flow out of the way?
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Oct 16, 2011 19:39
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I need help trimming out a window. I'm in the middle of having a couple of doors and windows replaced, and I just fired my contractor (for being unreliable, not for poor craftsmanship). So I have this window installed, but there's no interior trim. There are kitchen cabinets more or less flush with the rough opening, so I'm not sure where I would attach the trim to. The face of the sash is also about 2.5" in from the face of the wall, so I guess I'll need to cover that space with something too? Here are some pictures, I hope they are helpful. 
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Oct 23, 2011 22:16
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gross posted:The house is like an archaeological dig since the previous owners liked to layer over everything one room at a time instead of replacing it. My house is exactly the same way. When my wife bought it before she and I got together, there were 4-5 layers of flooring in the bathroom, including at least one of astroturf. We have cedar shake siding, like many of the houses in our neighborhood... underneath which is clapboard siding that's in great shape. They didn't take it off, just put the cedar on top. The kitchen has goddamn carpeting in it, with at least one or two layers of asbestos tiling underneath, with beautiful hardwood floors on the bottom. Each layer is firmly affixed to the layer below, so we've just left this hideous red carpeting in the kitchen. There's a small amusement park a couple hundred miles from here, and they have the same carpeting in their haunted house. Let that sink in for a minute.
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Nov 15, 2011 18:07
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Cakefool posted:Unlike the carpet under the washing machine, dishwasher & in front of the sink... poo poo dude, I wish I had a dishwasher. The same carpet does go into the utility room, but it was cut back underneath the washer and dryer, so those are just on bare tile.
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Nov 19, 2011 04:06
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Mercury Ballistic posted:I just pulled up carpet in my spare bedroom to reveal this: Rent a floor sander from somewhere. Doing that with a handheld belt sander will take a very very long time.
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Nov 22, 2011 01:01
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some_admin posted:"support block"  Its that thing just toenailed into the cabinet carcass?
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Dec 1, 2011 18:33
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ExileStrife posted:I have a bunch of horizontal rods, about a centimeter in diameter, that I want to roughly mount between two tall, fixed vertical rods, about a half centimeter in diameter. It will basically look like a ladder. Get some monofilament line and attach them with square lashings. If you don't know how, ask a boy scout next time one comes around selling popcorn our wrapping paper.
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Dec 8, 2011 04:03
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ExileStrife posted:Unfortunately I can really only glue onto the horizontal rods since they contain electronics. The verticals are free reign..I can easily get wire through those. It's just a matter of attaching that wire to the horizontal part. There's no gluing involved at all in a lashing, it's all knots. Here, check this: http://www.ropeworks.biz/reader/squarlas.pdf e: If you wanted I suppose you could put a dot of hot glue on the ends of the line to keep it secure, but it wouldn't really be necessary I don't think.
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Dec 8, 2011 09:30
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Crazedscot posted:Okay, I have a device that requires 12v 1.25A. Without going into to much detail why, i'm wondering if I could power this off an Firewire/IEEE 1394 port, which if I understand it correctly supplies 12v 1.5A. Would it be a simple matter of cutting open a Firewire cable and soldering the correct size adaptor plug to the correct cables or is there more to it than that? You'd want to cut that current down also. You might think pounds no big deal, omit a quarter amp. But that's also a 20% jump from what it was designed for. Maybe it'll just run a little warmer than normal, maybe you'll fry stuff. Hard to say.
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Dec 10, 2011 08:49
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I have a home networking question that I think is better suited for here than in SH/SC. My cable modem is in one room, and my computer is in another. I have a wireless adapter on it, but I would really like to use a wired connection for a variety of reasons. Due to the layout of the rooms though, I would need a very long ethernet cable to get from point A to point B. See my awesome architectural rendering below: I'd like to just run the cable through that wall instead of along the floor and through both doors. What's the best way of doing this in a relatively neat fashion?
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Dec 19, 2011 19:16
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Dragyn posted:The simplest option is exactly what you think. drill a hole just large enough to pass some CAT6 through it between the two rooms' shared wall. Naturally, be mindful of if there are any electrical lines in that wall when drilling through. That doesn't qualify as relatively neat for me. I'd rather not have unfinished holes in my drywall. I'd like to avoid recrimping too, but I realize that may not be possible.
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Dec 19, 2011 20:40
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Dragyn posted:If you don't wish to cut holes for the line, you only have the option of wireless or using existing media. Oh, I don't mind cutting holes in the wall at all. I just don't want to drill a hole, stick wire through, and call it a day. Corla Plankun posted:If that is not relatively neat enough you could call in a trim carpenter to put gold-plated flute and rosette molding around them. Now you're talking.  In seriousness though, I think the wall plates you posted would probably work. I'm guessing I'd plug the cable into the connector on either side of the wall, and have a short length of cable between them with each individual wire soldered to the back side of the connectors?
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Dec 19, 2011 21:34
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Splizwarf posted:Why wouldn't you just have a F-F connector on the inside of the plate? Sure, that would work too. Know where I can get one that will fit into that plate and is exactly as long as my wall is thick?
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Dec 19, 2011 22:47
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Splizwarf posted:I don't know where to get them in the first place, Lowes? Nobody makes what I want so I gave up a while back. Oh, I think I see what you're saying now. I thought you were suggesting that I use a coupler such that one end was the jack on one side of the wall and the other side was the jack on the other side of the wall. I think Cpt.Wacky and I are on the same page though. Cpt.Wacky, your links for the keystone jacks and the wall plates are the same. Is this what I need for the keystone jacks?
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Dec 19, 2011 23:57
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Dragyn posted:Also a good idea. Don't know why I didn't think of that. I guess when I think wall plate, I think of something somewhat more sophisticated. (I have wall plates in nearly every room, and drops into the basement where the router/switch rack is). Yeah if I had a bigger house and more money I'd do something like this too, but it's just not necessary where I'm living now. Next house! 
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Dec 20, 2011 19:52
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nesbit37 posted:I need to build a bounding box so Ic an make some sculpted backgrounds out of greatstuff foam. Only problem is I am not certain what materials I can use that the foam will not bond to. The GreatStuff website makes the following mention but is not too specific: I'm just making a guess here, but wax paper might work.
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Dec 21, 2011 17:23
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That70sHeidi, how the heck did you burn yourself while painting?  King Nothing posted:Aren't the two exposed pipes the cold water line and gas line? There's a pipe with a red knob that's already wrapped in foam. I think the copper pipe on the right might be the overflow line. The one at the bottom is definitely the gas though.
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Dec 24, 2011 21:24
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I vote cymbal stand.
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Dec 27, 2011 09:16
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kid sinister posted:Now to pop the breaker out of the panel! Put a dot or small piece of tape on the bad breaker since they all look the same once the cover is off. Turn off the main breaker and remove the panel cover Bear in mind that the service lugs will stay hot even if you turn off the main breaker, so don't touch them if you want to continue living.
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Jan 4, 2012 22:07
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That is pretty neat, I may get one of those myself. We have a light on the side of the house that we pretty much leave on 24/7. We like to have it on at night, but we generally forget to shut it off in the morning.
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Jan 11, 2012 20:21
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Cakefool posted:Assuming a concrete base, mud to the base, put the floor over it. That requires some extremely accurate cuts on your flooring.
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Jan 23, 2012 22:59
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So my wife calls me at work today to tell me that she knocked a jar of nails (1" or so for picture hanging and the like) into the open washing machine. She was able to get some of them out, but at least some got under the agitator or through the holes in the drum. I haven't gotten home yet, and I'm not shy about taking the whole thing apart to try to get them out; I guess I'm just wondering is how likely is this to end well? Is there any chance they'll be able to get into the gearcase or anything like that? It wasn't running when it happened, and my wife is of course smart enough to not try doing a load until we get it taken care of.
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Jan 28, 2012 01:21
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kid sinister posted:If it wasn't running, then everything should be fine. They can't get into the gearbox since that's on the outside tub. All the gearbox connects is the motor and agitator. Yeah, I found some parts lists and exploded diagrams, but nothing with step by step instructions on how to take things apart properly. Am I likely to find anything like that, or will the diagrams have to suffice? Some additional info too. The agitator wasn't going at the time, but it was filling with water. The water has since drained out on its own. I haven't started anything yet, figured it would be better to have a full day ahead of me.
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Jan 28, 2012 08:53
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kid sinister posted:What's the make and model? I found this link that was pretty good... Actually, you might just want to try googling your washer's make along with "washer service manual". Washer models among manufacturers actually don't vary that much except for features on the instrument panels, and there is a ton of rebadging that goes on with washer makers. Yeah, googling for the service manual is what got me to the parts list. Everything I found was either that or the owner's manual. There's only been a few small frustrations in getting things apart. The back panel was held on by some brass clips I had to pop out from the inside, and I have a feeling they're going to be a bitch to get back in. Then I had a hard time finding a spanner wrench to get the nut off the basket drive. I finally got the basket out of the tub, but only found two nails down there. None in the pump and none in the drain tubing. Based on my wife's description of what happened, I feel like there should have been a lot more. e: There also looks like we've got a decent leak going on somewhere too, there was a fair amount of water underneath, and looks like there has been for a while (i.e. not because of the nails). There are no drips from the inlet or drain tubing. I wonder if maybe the drain pipe the drain tube feeds into is backing up? I also noticed that the bottom of the gearcase is pretty rusty on the bottom, though the washer is only five years old or so. Is that normal given the humid environment or should I be concerned? stubblyhead fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 00:23
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