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I'm so glad this thread is back now that I'm looking at buying my first house. From just visiting the basement of open houses, I've seen:
Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Feb 13, 2012 |
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Feb 13, 2012 21:42
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Speaking of vents. . . this happened a few days ago. My uncle is just about finished renovating his kitchen in his new (to him) house and replaced the range hood with something that sounds less like a Republic XF-84H. Any way he removes it and the venting pipe falls down through the ceiling onto the ceramic stove top. Luckily there was a hammer with a rubber grip laying on top of a newspaper on top of the range, and it absorbed the impact without scratching or cracking the ceramic top. Now he has to crawl into the attic and reattach it to the vent that vents the exhaust outside. He crawls into the crawlspace, through the insulation, and finds the pipe. . . that was apparently just venting everything into the attic. It literally just ended about three feet from the roof. A trip to the hardware store, an exterior vent, another length of pipe, and some heating and cutting of the shingles and plywood and he had a properly vented exhaust fan. Blistex fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Feb 14, 2012 |
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Feb 13, 2012 23:50
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My loungeroom. Dominated by this bullshit thing.    C shape at the front with the heater, double brick wall leading from it to brick wall on the inside of the room, inside the wall studs.  They loving concreted it into the floor.  Put gas and power into he concrete, both at angles.  I assumed the gas line would exit on the closest edge or at least follow a straight line, it went diagonal, so I hammer drilled through it, a live gas line with sparks coming off the bricks. I was very lucky. Floor patches.  Today.  I have other stories. Going to go collapse now. Though.
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Apr 4, 2012 09:42
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Blistex posted:He crawls into the crawlspace, through the insulation, and finds the pipe. . . that was apparently just venting everything into the attic. It literally just ended about three feet from the roof. A trip to the hardware store, an exterior vent, another length of pipe, and some heating and cutting of the shingles and plywood and he had a properly vented exhaust fan. There's a hole in the roof with an exterior vent, but no pipe connecting the two. Also, combustion air intake vents an inch off the ground inside a fenced-in dog run. 
Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Apr 4, 2012 |
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Apr 4, 2012 18:55
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Blistex posted:I agree with you that people should be able to do what they want on their property, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about it. I don't know how many stupid rants I have had to bear witness to by my mom about buildings in her neighborhood that 100% didn't affect their property. If anything the new buildings increased the value of their house. Your diagram about the houses is also terrible because I couldn't tell through 90% of the story which of the two identical brown houses you were talking about and I figured you were trolling. Ugly things exist. Hell, ugly people exist. You don't go around complaining your neighbor is ugly, but you can complain about their ugly garage. Yes, ugly things happen. They're not ideal, but beauty is subjective and a gently caress-off huge garage is pretty awesome once you're inside it. We moved around a bit when I was growing up and the second to last house my parents lived in, the backyard neighbor wanted to build a huge garage. Obviously my mom was irate. The garage was built and I hung out in it- and it was awesome, and his hobby racing/mechanic thing took off. Never bothered us and we were sleeping like 30 feet from it. Didn't ruin any views because its the suburbs and all the terrible houses looked the same.
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Apr 6, 2012 16:10
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Not an Anthem posted:Your diagram about the houses is also terrible because I couldn't tell through 90% of the story which of the two identical brown houses you were talking about and I figured you were trolling. Yah I should have changed the colour of the one, but I figured the description of the brown house on the large lot and the brown house on in the bottom right was sufficient. As for trolling? What? The guy with the big yard was pissed because the new guy with the little lot (bottom right) found where the property line was and cut down 4-6 trees so he could see the lake. Due to retiree-rage, the guy with the big lot uses a transit and math to calculate the exact position and angle to put his garage so that it would completely block the view of the lake for the new guy. Not an Anthem posted:Ugly things exist. Hell, ugly people exist. You don't go around complaining your neighbor is ugly, but you can complain about their ugly garage. Yes, ugly things happen. They're not ideal, but beauty is subjective and a gently caress-off huge garage is pretty awesome once you're inside it. We moved around a bit when I was growing up and the second to last house my parents lived in, the backyard neighbor wanted to build a huge garage. Obviously my mom was irate. The garage was built and I hung out in it- and it was awesome, and his hobby racing/mechanic thing took off. Never bothered us and we were sleeping like 30 feet from it. Didn't ruin any views because its the suburbs and all the terrible houses looked the same. As for complaining, it's the Something Awful forums! That's what we do. We complain here instead of telling everyone who walks past our houses. I don't think anyone is complaining about someone's front door being the wrong shade of white, or a garage being 2' too high, but more along the lines of things that seem to be done out of dickishness or plain old  .
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Apr 7, 2012 01:19
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I haven't been in the fire alarm trade (or any trade) very long, but I've seen some pretty shoddy stuff already. Like today. It was a routine inspection at a rooming house. We pull up, and my buddy (who's been in the trade for years) drops his usual comment "this place is a shithole. This guy sucks." Whatever, I shrug it off. We get inside and the panel is in trouble. It's a one-zone, so he disconnects the detection side and...the panel clears for a split second. Okay, no big. These things fail, we figure it's the panel. We start the inspection and the smoke detector at the top of the staircase gets stuck in alarm. The fucker just didn't want to un-latch. So I go to take it down ...and find the cause of most (if not all) of the problems. First off the junction box was absent (no surprise)...but instead of mounting the baseplate to the drop ceiling like any reasonable man would have done the electrician did something special. Baseplate? gently caress that poo poo. Sheet metal screws through the detector and into the metal 'joints' of the ceiling. Every time we bent the detector out about 45 degrees it would fix the trouble. Go figure. tl;dr: genius mounts smoke detector to ceiling by running sheet metal screws through it. autism ZX spectrum fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Apr 11, 2012 |
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Apr 11, 2012 03:24
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I can't stop laughing at this. This is in one of my wife's K-8 schools. Go California public education:
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Apr 12, 2012 05:51
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How can you complain about that? Everything has labels!
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Apr 12, 2012 06:29
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Papercut posted:I can't stop laughing at this. This is in one of my wife's K-8 schools. Go California public education: Ancient Audio setup?
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May 7, 2012 15:35
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Blistex posted:Ancient Audio setup? Yeah it looks like the main telephone terminal board for the school, some of that equipment has probably been there for 40 years. This is another good one from work. They must have convinced the architect that floods were really common in the area: 
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May 7, 2012 23:49
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Papercut posted:This is another good one from work. They must have convinced the architect that floods were really common in the area:
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May 8, 2012 05:40
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Blistex posted:Ancient Audio setup? Master/slave clock system for a public building. There's some ancient phone stuff too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_clock MullardEL34 fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jun 19, 2012 |
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Jun 19, 2012 04:21
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Several years ago, my parents had a couple of outlets installed in the back yard - one on a switch for a fountain (no longer there), one for low voltage lighting. Cue today, I'm trying to figure out why the low voltage lighting isn't working. First thing I notice is someone had cut a hole in the in-use cover so that an indoor timer would fit - apparently the timer built into the transformer died. When I lifted the in-use cover, my hand brushed the box and ZAP  [img]http://i.imgur.com/m42Ial.jpg][/img] I never liked the way it was setup - 2 single gang boxes, bolted back to back. Turns out one of the screws had rusted away, leaving the second box rubbing the wires. No, there was no bushing, just 3 wires passing through. The hot had been rubbed bare in one spot and was touching the box. The ground wasn't connected to either box, only to the outlets.  You'd think that would trip the breaker, but no - the ground was connected only to the outlet, with stranded wire - which had corroded and broken off (though the breaker would trip now and then). The second box had water sitting in it, as well. I wound up pulling the whole mess apart and replacing it with a double gang box and a new in-use cover. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a bit higher off the ground, but raising it would require pulling new wire - there's just barely enough to get the whole mess together. At least now it has a non-holey cover, and it's actually weathertight (with the cover on, obviously.. it's not on yet in the below pic).  Wish I'd thought to take pictures before I ripped it all out. But the piece of the plastic conduit still attached to the old box is about 3 ft long and served no purpose except to keep the whole mess from being twisted. I was able to re-use one of the GFCIs, the terminals on the other were corroded to hell (and it has obvious water damage). There's 2 GFCIs due to one being switched, and this circuit was added on to the kitchen lighting/garage lighting/garage door opener circuit instead of the circuit for the other outside outlets (which has a GFCI breaker). I have a feeling I'll find a flying splice in the attic next time I'm up there. Oh, the reason the lighting wasn't working - their indoor-turned-outdoor timer had gotten soaked and seized up. I'm tempted to rip the conduit out and re-run it, except instead of leaving the box sitting unsupported on the end of the conduit I would mount it to the fence instead. About 2 feet of it have pushed its way out of the ground by the switch anyway. For now, the lighting is on the switched outlet until I can figure out something a bit more elegant - they don't want to spend the money on a new transformer/timer combination, so I'll probably add a photocell to the transformer. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 01:44
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There's a conduit coming up out of the ground to support the box right? I would get more conduit, dig the trench the rest of the way to the fence, and have a box with dual ports on the bottom as a splice box between the old cable and the new cable, both conduits coming out of the ground parallel and into the bottom of the splice box. Then continue the cable and conduit to the fence, mount it at a proper height, and do whatever you want. Not sure I'm explaining this well, I can mspaint if I'm not.
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Jul 16, 2012 02:21
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Right, it's attached to PVC conduit. What I actually want to do is dig the whole mess up, then re-run it so that the box is actually mounted on the fence.. instead of 2 feet away from the fence. The transformer for the lighting is on the fence already.  It's only about 30 feet of conduit, and it was buried shallow enough that about 2 feet have popped out of the ground at the other end. Makes mowing the yard fun. Besides, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the way the whole clusterfuck is wired anyway - I don't even know where it's tapped in to the kitchen/garage lighting circuit. At least the stuff in the buried conduit is THWN, but I need to figure out how/why it got tapped into the kitchen/garage lighting circuit instead of the existing outdoor circuit, and see if there's a way I can remedy that. Plus the whole conduit rising from the grave bit, that would get fun in a hurry if the conduit got nicked while mowing. I need to tackle the original outdoor outlets next - they're both crumbling and have bare prongs now instead of a plastic face. One always has something plugged in, but has the old style metal cover instead of the newer in-use covers, which concerns me more than a bit. Every time it rains that outlet gets soaked and we get a GFCI trip. Gotta love years of lowest bidder "side job" fixes.. the outlets installed for the lighting in front of the house are just scary. Why not just use the existing outlet instead of paying some handyman to add 2 more outlets?! 
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 04:15
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Any Alaskan goons around? I got to see some of the fantastic construction in our lovely 49th state when I visited. Unfortunately, most of the horror stories weren't open to the public. Tyvek siding ought to be on the state flag. Also, I've never before seen 3 derelict trailers and some polytarp used to build a single family home until going to Alaska.
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Jul 16, 2012 19:05
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sixide posted:Any Alaskan goons around? I got to see some of the fantastic construction in our lovely 49th state when I visited. Unfortunately, most of the horror stories weren't open to the public. Hey buddy, them aren't no derelict trailers! They're someone's home. I've done a bit of construction here and there in AK, and my favorite is the general dislike of getting building permits. I have no doubt the professionals get them, but I've worked on a couple houses helping people out and the general consensus is always 'I don't give a gently caress what the [city/borough/etc] thinks, they don't have to live here!' That said, the construction always seems pretty well done and solid. My favorite is when people get as far as the Tyvek and then it gets cold so they say screw it til meltdown and you have a tyvek-decorated house for 4 or 5 months.
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Jul 16, 2012 21:24
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Ugh. Our last house was built in the '70s and had these lights. Aside from being an eye-sore, they were GREAT for attracting and retaining bugs. Also our newborn son would constantly stare up at them, completely engrossed. He was breastfeeding at the time, so we hypothesized that in his mind it looked like a giant golden nipple in the sky.
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Jul 16, 2012 22:25
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Boosted_C5 posted:Ugh. Our last house was built in the '70s and had these lights. I have 5 of these in my 2005 house...except in fugly brown. Still great at holding dust and bugs. Bad ideas still exist 20 years later...I'll switch em out to something I like eventually(and hopefully I won't wire em to look like something in this thread).
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Jul 19, 2012 00:36
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Boosted_C5 posted:He was breastfeeding at the time, so we hypothesized that in his mind it looked like a giant golden nipple in the sky. These kind of lights are affectionately known as 'boob-lights' around my family.
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Jul 19, 2012 13:18
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I spent a few months working for a mason. He was full of disaster tales from when he was a young guy working for somebody else. My favorite is this block wall garage they were building, and the boss wanted to save money so he stuffed empty mortar bags in the cells, then "core-filled" the tops. This was an 8-foot wall on top of a 4-foot frost wall. He was shocked when the customer called back and said that one of the walls fell over. The sad part is that he didn't get sued, and the customer even paid for him to fix it. For the record, my former boss was an excellent mason and did everything right. Probably because he saw so much poo poo like that.
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Aug 17, 2012 15:57
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micnato posted:I spent a few months working for a mason. He was full of disaster tales from when he was a young guy working for somebody else. My favorite is this block wall garage they were building, and the boss wanted to save money so he stuffed empty mortar bags in the cells, then "core-filled" the tops. This was an 8-foot wall on top of a 4-foot frost wall. He was shocked when the customer called back and said that one of the walls fell over. I was doing a remodel in a school and we had to core-drill through a couple of solid-poured block walls. Second layer of blocks from the top, we hit mortar bags. Third layer of blocks we made the holes with a hammer. The school was built in the late 50s, and everyone was amazed that wall hadn't fallen.
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Aug 17, 2012 17:58
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:These kind of lights are affectionately known as 'boob-lights' around my family. Seconding this. We have one of these in the entry way to our family room from the garage. In the evening, the light from the two sconces on the opposite wall projects two perfect perky nipple shaped shadows on the wall behind the teet-light. Edit: Here's a photo.  MullardEL34 fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Aug 29, 2012 |
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Aug 29, 2012 07:49
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kastein posted:The plumbing was horrible when I bought it, I didn't take any pictures but here is some of what I found: Found these (apparently I'd actually cut them out and set them aside... forgot about that)   At least I was wrong and they used FOUR hose clamps to fix the cold water line!  A few more gems I've found since then:  coffee cans and some spackling compound make great woodstove-to-chimney ducting. This was hidden behind wood paneling with the end wide open, i.e. a piece of 1/8" wood paneling was acting as the side of my chimney. I'm so glad I never got the furnace working and tore that chimney down...  by our powers combined... we are captain ELECTRICAL FIRE! knob and tube to romex to unrated speaker wire. No junction boxes (except coffee cans I've previously posted), just wire nuts and e-tape. kastein fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 03:40
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/\ Images not showing up for anyone else?
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Oct 18, 2012 14:59
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They are hosted on facebook, which I've been told is kosher, so I am betting something in your network is blocking facebook or facebook's CDN is down... again...
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Oct 18, 2012 15:21
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Ah! Facebook is blocked at work (school) so that makes sense.
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Oct 19, 2012 16:11
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A friend of mine from AI just sent me this link. It's pretty horrifying. http://imgur.com/a/K7Xef
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Nov 13, 2012 18:44
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kastein posted:A friend of mine from AI just sent me this link. It's pretty horrifying.  If I mis-cut a 2x4 (and I mis-cut quite a few 2x4's working on my house), I'd just junk that piece (or use it somewhere smaller) and start over.
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Nov 13, 2012 19:30
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kastein posted:A friend of mine from AI just sent me this link. It's pretty horrifying. I'd be contacting a lawyer if I saw that going on in my new construction home.
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Nov 13, 2012 19:30
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daggerdragon posted:
yeah, if I miscut something, it goes on the stack to be used for fireblocking and/or anywhere I need a smaller piece. At $2 each it really isn't worth doing things wrong.
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Nov 13, 2012 19:38
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kastein posted:A friend of mine from AI just sent me this link. It's pretty horrifying. The album has 1,666 views in 17 hours up, he needs to name and shame the builder/contractor that is responsible for that and get the word out. Besides all the things mentioned, any doorways you can see don't look double-studded. You just know they're going to do a lovely job with that tub too, and the floor beneath it is going to rot away in a couple years.
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Nov 13, 2012 21:29
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What in the poo poo is that. I'm with the lawyer contact or whatever it takes to back out because wow. And the strapping on the trusses, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm relatively certain more than a quarter of it should be on the ceiling joist.
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Nov 14, 2012 04:46
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It's terrible and lovely, but none of those look like supporting walls. Also I like the pictures highlighting the ugly wood which is completely normal for wood construction.
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Nov 14, 2012 06:11
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If I wanted walls to be flexible and bouncy I would specify grade-z lumber and ask the builder to haphazardly chop slots in studs and not cut fireblocks and stuff to the right length. There is no excuse for that kind of crap in construction IMO.
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Nov 14, 2012 06:23
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Friends of mine moved into a new apartment a few months ago. In the first week they notice a sagging spot in their ceiling. Landlord claims it is old water damage and not a problem. They keep pressing him and he agrees to fix it. When the repair guy cuts open the sheetrock 50 pounds of bricks fall out onto the floor. Turns out the apartment used to have a fireplace that was removed at some point in the past. Apparently they pulled out the firebox and knocked the chimney off the roof, but just left the flue in the attic and covered up the hole in the ceiling with a piece of sheetrock.
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Nov 14, 2012 08:37
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Did the magic spell that supported the piece in between finally run out? I can't imagine how they pulled out the bottom bricks without the rest of it falling immediately. Brick ties aren't that strong, and most people don't use enough/any in the first place. I hope I never become a landlord, because I'd hate to have to become that cheap.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:10
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Messadiah posted:It's terrible and lovely, but none of those look like supporting walls. Also I like the pictures highlighting the ugly wood which is completely normal for wood construction. It's not just ugly, it's got pretty deep flaws that affect the stability of the wood. A knot or two in a 2x4 isn't the end of the world, but an inch-deep cavity or crack running along the length means it needs to be set aside. Maybe I'm paranoid because I live on the Pacific Rim and all, but drat.
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Nov 15, 2012 19:24
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One Legged Ninja posted:Did the magic spell that supported the piece in between finally run out? I can't imagine how they pulled out the bottom bricks without the rest of it falling immediately. Brick ties aren't that strong, and most people don't use enough/any in the first place. I hope I never become a landlord, because I'd hate to have to become that cheap. I didn't actually get to see it, but I'm sticking with what my friends told me about it, because the alternative is that when they removed the fireplace they just demoed the flue and left all the bricks scattered around the attic instead of removing them. I can't imagine anyone being that lazy.
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Nov 16, 2012 03:46
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