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Smoked beef ribs, actually. The bark was amazing. Also nice, rare, prime rib.  I do smoked turkeys and chickens too.
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Mar 29, 2010 04:09
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Thanks, and everything in the house is maple. Cabinets, floor, baseboard, stairs, door casings. All of it. I like maple 
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Mar 29, 2010 06:12
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Oh hey, I found one of my smoked turkey pictures. 
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Mar 29, 2010 07:22
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The risers are just floorboards on their sides, and the risers are just wider floorboards with a different router bit used on one side. They're pretty common here, what do you usually see?
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Mar 29, 2010 19:03
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Thanks everybody  xpander posted:A friend and I were looking at a piece of land just outside of Longview(that we couldn't afford). It's awesome to see you living the dream! How far are you outside of Calgary? Also, I have to ask....what are your Internet options there, and further out? Not super far, but with this town being so long north to south it really depends on where you're trying to go. Here's a google map showing roughly where my hamlet is relative to Calgary. http://tinyurl.com/ylq43lr As for the internet, there are several high speed wireless internet providers operating in our area these days. Efirehose ( http://home.efirehose.net/ )is the one my parents use, and I'll probably stick with them. They're pretty reliable and it's fast enough. It's not as fast as cable can be, but it keeps up reasonably well to DSL. I can play online games with it without difficulty. They have quite the coverage area.  There are other companies, but I can't remember their names at the moment.
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Apr 1, 2010 17:22
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It's a textured "knockdown" ceiling, which, honestly, I'm not really sure how they apply it. My parents have had the same thing, and it's been great for 10 years. Easy to keep clean, looks good. If all goes well, I'll be moving in on the 16th of april.
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Apr 3, 2010 03:25
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You can kind of see it here. I'll take a proper picture next time I'm out there.
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Apr 3, 2010 17:04
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The Bramble posted:Can you talk a little about the pre-construction phase? Did the general contracting companies have different housing plans for you to choose from that you can make minor changes to, or did the plan get made from scratch? Oh hey Jingoist, what's up man? Some companies have their own stable full of plans. I could have hired one of those, there's a suburb development just a little ways down the road from me, and I did go talk to them. It made more sense to hire a custom home builder for me, they're used to the septic tank systems, well pumping systems, and will build whatever plan I give them. In this case, I just talked to her and brought that one plan that I posted earlier, told her the modifications I wanted, and she took it to the architect. So it wasn't quite from scratch, but it is a unique house. Big changes this week. Bathroom sinks and fixtures have been installed.  And the vanity lighting.  The wall sconces going down the stairs are the same style.   My garage now has a set of stairs to get to the door. I might have this changed to be a straight in staircase later.  Kitchen faucet's in.  Dishwasher was installed. Sorry, this is a terrible picture, I was talking with family and didn't check to make sure it was visible. I'll get another some other time.  Dome light fixture over the kitchen table.  Above the sink.  Hood fan installed.  My closet has two lights now. There's one hidden by the wall above the door.  Master ensuite fixtures.  Shower fixtures. I wanted these ones because they have temperature and pressure settings.  Bathtub fixtures.  Basement has fluorescents now. Nice small ones, but quite bright. Some new type, I seem to recall the electrician saying.   Steps leading to the basement have a sconce too.  Eaves trough and downspouts installed.   New steps leading to the deck.  New steps to the front porch. Plus plywood and lattice covering under the deck there.  Exterior light fixtures.  This trench leads away from the house. I'm not exactly sure what the plumbers were doing, but the remains of the water that comes from my well is pretty worrying. That is an awful lot of salt and minerals. My dream of a giant lush garden may not be feasible.  I think I will have to either get a trailer with a big tank on it to haul water from the city, or build a big sand filter for myself. Sand filters are easy to build and maintain, but I don't know how they are at filtering out minerals. Anyone know? Here's a closeup of the knockdown for those interested: 
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Apr 4, 2010 04:01
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grover posted:Builders too often fail to consider things like "how will I carry furniture up this staircase?" Yes, exactly.
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Apr 4, 2010 04:09
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It's probably just reflex for the builders. The garage door opens into the side of the garage bay, so they were probably thinking, "poo poo, we can't have the stairs go straight down, the owner will be walking into his car's front fender." Without remembering that the garage is thirty loving feet deep and that wouldn't matter because nothing will come that far into the bay.
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Apr 4, 2010 17:47
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Of course I remember man My dad and I are going to split the cost of a good utility trailer, there's a town nearby that sells bulk water for 2 bucks per cubic meter, so I can use that. They sell 1250 gallon poly tanks at UFA, so I'll collect all my rain water too. I'll be making some kind of solar distiller in the green house too. Not sure how much I'll be able to get out of that though.
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Apr 4, 2010 20:37
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The salt on the ground is just on the clay, it's going to be buried by dirt or gravel soon so I can safely ignore it. I don't need to wash it away or anything. The water shouldn't be salty enough to stain clothes, and it's safe (according to the well report done just after it was drilled) to drink and shower in. I won't drink it unfiltered though, it probably tastes really mineral-y. My dad has used a small RO system and a distiller to make drinking water for years and has offered to continue making it for me. The thing I'm worried about the most is the garden. I want to plant vegetables that won't take too much watering to grow, but all gardens need a little irrigation, especially here. I'd only be driving in water for the garden, not for my own consumption. Splizwarf, could you please ask your friend about his filter setup? Cost, will it get rid of enough salt to make it usable, and what kinds of things it needs for upkeep? I'm curious to know.
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Apr 5, 2010 04:44
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No no, there's no hurry. I can cut the waterline and splice in a filter system anytime. Don't worry about it, just whenever you next see him.
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Apr 5, 2010 07:00
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True, but it will build up in the soil over time.
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Apr 5, 2010 21:16
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Possession is fast approaching. Driveway skirt is in. Also, you get to see how windy it gets here, what with the turned over porta potty   Those tubes in the garage were in fact for the vacuum system.   Garage door openers are in, and working.    Baseboard is in. Protective plastic is off the stairway spindles.  Toe kicks for the vacuum. Also, a better picture of the dishwasher.  Doors are all hung, handles in place. I really like these doorknobs, but it does leave the place open to raptor attack.  Closet organizers, this is the linen closet in the little toilet room off the master bath.  Master walk in closet looking from left to right from the door.    Miscellaneous hardware.   Shower door  Giant mirror in the master bath. Looks pretty good, still needs the vanity lights.  Air conditioner in place. Caked in salt again, gonna have to wash that once the water's done clearing out or whatever the gently caress they're doing.  
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Apr 12, 2010 05:13
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It's mostly a new house thing. Though, my parents had one in their house built in 1980. (may have been added after construction by my dad, but I'm not 100% sure of that) With the size of the piping, they're a pain in the rear end to add after the fact, so if you don't already have one, chances are it's not worth the aggravation to put them into an existing house. The bags don't generally have to be replaced, we used the one at the old house for 20 years, and the new house for 10. You just pull the bottom off the canister as it's just a big bin, empty it out, and try to knock as much poo poo off the bag as you can into the garbage can. Very tough material, whatever they're made of. I'll try to get a picture of it before it gets too filthy to recognize. Canister vacs are very common here though, we live in a dusty area of the world, and it makes vacuuming pretty easy. I don't know if they're much more powerful, but they're very convenient.
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Apr 12, 2010 17:24
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Ehn, it works for me v v
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Apr 12, 2010 17:37
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I have three of the toe-kick vacuum ports, kitchen, laundry room, and master bathroom. My family never uses the one we have in our kitchen now, but I do. I like being able to quickly grab a broom and push some lint/dust to the base of the cabinet and let it go.
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Apr 12, 2010 23:19
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Hungry Gerbil posted:
Hell yeah, here's one, the little black plastic thing under the cabinet doors. It's a little port and a big switch that you can flip with your toe. Hence the name.
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Apr 13, 2010 00:16
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toe kick vacuum ports
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The move went pretty smoothly. I have way too much poo poo in the garage already.   My appliances are great. I love em.   I loving love cooking with gas. I can finally use all the cast iron that I have.  I was worried that my living room was going to be too small. I like it though with all the furniture in, it feels cozy.   It is really nice sitting in there and watching the sun set out that picture window.  Washer/dryer. Washer works well, but the guys who delivered them broke the knob that controls the dryer. Hopefully they can come and replace the stem.  So many boxes   Gotta get a bunch of bookshelves, a new desk, and finish unpacking everything, but things are coming together. The railings are in, but I forgot to get a picture of that, I'll try to remember next time.
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Apr 18, 2010 18:27
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I need bookcases. Lots of bookcases.  Also chairs.  I wanted solid wood furniture, I'm loving sick of buying sawdust based products. The bookcases are plywood with veneer, but that's ok, they're nice and strong. I only have the one case now, but the other two are coming soon. The chairs are totally solid wood. They're all unpainted, because I don't feel like paying 500 bucks per chair/bookcase. That is, thankfully, easily fixed.     Still needs the 3 coats of clear, but they're not bad. I didn't do a great job around where the back supports join the upper supports, but it's good enough. Three bookcases and 4 chairs for 1200 canadian? Sign me the gently caress up.
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Apr 22, 2010 01:15
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It's true, these chairs and bookcases are pre-made, and I'm just staining them. But I do make furniture. The stuff I make just tends to be a little more.... durable.   Iron and granite.  e: drat, the tabletop is uneven, the stone and the iron aren't attached except by anti-slip padding, and it must have shifted when I moved. No matter, easy to fix.
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Apr 22, 2010 06:14
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Man I wish I knew women in real life that felt the way you pregnant ladies do Here's that shot with the railing in place that I keep promising but keep forgetting.  My chairs are done.  Looks pretty good with the table my friends gave me.   Don't look too close though, there are some runs and some bad spots. I have a lousy paintbrush hand, I'm better with spray painting.
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Apr 24, 2010 01:04
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Wandering Knitter posted:Hey! Oh, sorry. Wandering Knitter posted:Those chairs turned out lovely. Thank you
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Apr 24, 2010 04:35
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The veneer was unstained, so yeah, you can stain it. It's just wood same as everything else. And yes, same stain on the bookcase as the chairs. Thanks everyone, that's awful nice of you to say. I worked in the garage all day on sunday. Rebuilt my old credenza as a staging area.  Built my tractor cart / wheel barrow.  Put the desk back together.  That's three bags of styrofoam in the foreground.   Stuff up on the shelves. I also changed to my summer tires and fixed a broken headlight.  So much cardboard. At least I can recycle this.  Put together a little storage bench for the deck.   Saturday, I bought and put together a new home theatre. This is the source of a lot of that styrofoam.  Who doesn't like pictures of horses? 
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Apr 28, 2010 04:39
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ab0z posted:1. thank you for recycling I used to be a courier (that's why I have the rack) so it's almost second nature to me. Though I used to do that before I drove for a living too. Third Murderer posted:Look at that sky They never really come across in the pictures, but you can see the mountains on the horizon in person. The commute is nice too, especially on a sunny day after it's snowed in the mountains, they're so pretty.
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Apr 30, 2010 16:36
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Only problem I have with your property is how flat it is around there; having grown up around mountains, the terrain looks really boring to me. I envy your isolation and your awesome house, though!
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Hey thanks. I'm really happy with the colours and the wood tones and everything, I'm always glad to spend time surrounded by all of it. So this week I started organizing the den and the master bedroom. PC games, magazines, old nintendo stuff.  Some of my books.  DVDs, music.  Cleared out 80% of the boxes in my room. I can't get rid of the rest until my other bookcases arrive. I also set up my old TV upstairs. My reception is way better on the second floor.  I'm going to put the antenna up here, route it into a signal booster, and send it to the basement where I can distribute it throughout the rest of the house. Also, built an ikea drawer thing to put my stereo on.  And today I baked bread.  Mmm, whole wheat. 
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May 2, 2010 23:48
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Ninadene posted:that looks yummy, is this the wrong thread to ask for your recipe? It's not my recipe, I took it from (I think) the GWS bread thread, or maybe the king arthur website: * 1-1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons water * 2 tablespoons vegetable oil * 2 teaspoons salt * 1/3 cup packed brown sugar * 4-1/4 cups whole wheat flour * 3 tablespoons nonfat dry milk * 2 teaspoons active dry yeast I like it a little less dense than using just whole wheat flour, so I substitute half the WW flour for just regular all purpose flour. Wandering Knitter posted:Let's be best friends D'aww
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May 3, 2010 02:11
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Slung Blade
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It was all handled by my builder, and while I do have some of the specifics, I can't find the drat spec sheet right now, I think it got buried in with all the rest of my papers in the move. Regardless, when I was pricing out a modular home myself, I contacted a couple of cement contractors to get some estimates, and the results were alarming. To dig a full basement for a (I think) 1300 sqft bungalow, and make a 4 car garage pad was going to cost me 70 grand. House would have been ~130k or ~150k, plus another 30k for all the utility trenching, septic tank, and extra stuff. Then probably another 20-50k to get the garage built. Then at least 10k to hire a crane to drop the modular onto the foundation. (this is why I went with a custom home build, for a little more money, I get a vastly nicer house and I get it built exactly the way I want it. Hopefully the concrete folks in your area are cheaper. Make sure you call around to different places. Also, check with the local home moving companies in your area, they usually have stock on their storage lot of houses they've moved off their old foundations for very reasonable prices. You'll have to do repairs once it's on the new foundation on your land, but it's a good way to save some money if you don't mind having a used house.
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May 6, 2010 17:23
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So things have been crazy around here lately. The 30 day mark came and in its wake left a trail of tears and pain in my rear end. In the kitchen, I got the granite spacer for behind the stove, and the tile folks came back to fix the edge tiles. The guy who did it to start with used the wrong saw (ceramic instead of glass) and cut the tile wrong side up, so it chipped pretty bad on the painted side. Also one was cracked. So that's all good, looks way better. I didn't take any pictures because it's more something you would notice when you look at it in real life, not in a picture. In the garage, I noticed a small leak.   It turns out that one of the fittings buried in the spray foam insulation somehow managed to break all laws of plumbing.  This little loving tee, or more accurately, the one that this one replaced, only leaked when the faucet in the master bath was running. I can't explain it, and my builder's plumber can't explain it, it defies all logic. If there's a leak, it should leak harder when it's not running, what with there being more pressure. It wasn't running back from further up the pipe either, we checked.  So that's ok, no major damage done. Except for the hole in the ceiling of the garage, but that's alright. The spray foam guys are coming back tomorrow to re-fill the hole; it's been a week, I've not seen any more of a leak, and it seems to have dried out properly. Maybe next week the drywallers and painters can come back and patch it all up.  I got my other two bookcases. Hopefully I can get them stained and sealed this weekend.  Put up a queen sized bed in the southwest bedroom so I can have guests sleep over.  Truly a Frankenstein's monster of a bed. The mattress and box spring are from my aunt and uncle, the support frame is from my grandparents, the headboard is from my best friend's parents, and the new sheets and comforter were a gift from my mother and father.  Hung my first picture next to the bar area.  I think it looks pretty good there.  Personally, things haven't been going so poo poo hot either. I don't want to turn this into an e/n thread, but my dad (just turned 55) was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer by a general practitioner last week after getting a c/t scan after having a small kidney stone. My uncle, a well respected surgeon and all around highly intelligent person, took at look at the info at hand and thinks he was misdiagnosed as just having pancreatitis (which, honestly, makes a lot of sense, given that dad has zero symptoms of having advanced holy-poo poo-you'll-be-dead-in-a-month cancer and still feels perfectly healthy). So yeah, been a bit of a rollercoaster lately. Hopefully my uncle is right, and I'll be able to enjoy my dad's company for many years, but until the cancer specialists in town have a look, we won't know for sure. I'm not going to dwell on it in here any further until I hear one way or the other, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Also, to explain my absence if I vanish for a couple of weeks.
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May 21, 2010 05:28
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Hmm, might be possible. The plumber did re-crimp the band around the pipe a couple of times though, and that didn't fix it. Also, thanks.
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May 21, 2010 21:30
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Yeah they just cut the whole thing out, added a spacer, and put in a new tee fitting.
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May 21, 2010 23:42
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Yeah, conduit and piping is always buried. Fortunately, drywall is nice and easy to patch and paint over. True to their word, the sprayfoam guys were here this morning.  Now just to get it patched.
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May 22, 2010 03:09
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I asked my builder to have the garage painted. It was already drywalled and taped/mudded, so why not have the professional painters do it. Way less headache than me doing it myself (also I am a lousy painter). And they just kind of threw in the ceiling texturing. It was pretty cheap, all things considered. Tomorrow: get those loving bookcases stained. e: oh, also, basement is unfinished and will remain so for eternity (I hope)
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May 22, 2010 04:59
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So I can fill it with shelves full of food and water for the apocalypse. No really, I just want to have it as storage and general use. Maybe the odd LAN party. You can't have a LAN party in a nice room, it has to be a dark cement hole, it's part of the atmosphere.
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May 22, 2010 05:27
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Yeah, I'm still considering my options for a greenhouse. Not sure I'll get to it this year. I have so much to do and I've spent a lot of time this month just having people over who want to see my place. It's fun and all, and I like entertaining (and cooking) but I hardly have any time to actually, you know, accomplish stuff like I'm used to. No matter, the earthmoving guys finally came back and moved the dirt around.    This is going to be a 40x20' gravel pad. I'll be putting my blacksmith shop here, and parking my tent trailer beside it. The line in the middle is for the sump water. I'm still planning on digging a little pond in the middle so I can capture and store that water for use in the garden (experimentally, to make sure it's not too salty).   Sorry it's so dark, it's raining like a bastard here, and it was fairly late when I got home.
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May 28, 2010 04:26
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Hooray I can earn money charging goth chicks to hang out near the mosquito swamp at night.
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May 28, 2010 19:15
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ab0z posted:hot goth chicks only   Also: Welcome to sunny Alberta!  gently caress.
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May 29, 2010 18:11
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This much snow this late is pretty unusual. The moisture is sure nice to have though, this place turns into a loving desert around july.
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May 29, 2010 19:39
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 23:59 |
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madlilnerd posted:Am I right in thinking you have a huge water ditch/giant puddle at the end of your garden? Yeah, that big ditch at the back is actually a protected wetland, so I'm not supposed to disturb it or drain it. Releasing fish (especially invasive things like carp) would be a huge no-no. It gets pretty dry towards the end of the season, so they wouldn't get very big before dying out anyway, though they might keep the mosquito population down and would bring in lots of herons (which might go after the fish fry instead of the frogs). It's really not very deep, less than half a metre or so. I've joked with my friends about throwing an inner tube in there in the summer and getting drunk. Usually I'm met with "what the gently caress is wrong with you" looks on their faces, but I'm used to that. Things will get nice in a couple of days, then I can bring the tractor in and get to planting. The mosquitoes are already out, I had like 20 of them follow me into the garage when I brought my tent trailer home. Fuckers. Hopefully this cold snap kills them off for a couple weeks.
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May 29, 2010 20:09
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