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Liquid Communism posted:Yeah, there's no excuse at all for cracked lumber like that in new construction. If it is splitting now, how bad is it going to fail once it has sheetrock on it a few years? I'm going to bet the contractor got screwed on a load of lumber and instead of sending it back or not using the "reject" pieces, they just slapped them in there. I've had terrible experiences trying to buy lumber locally that doesn't look exactly like that chewed up stuff, only has three corners, or looks like either a ski or a hockey stick. In my imagination the bundles of lumber that a contractor would buy are the same way so that they lumber store can pass off all that junk on someone. Unfortunately in this case it looks like it was passed off on an unsuspecting home owner. (this is completely disregarding the studs that were cut too short, at the wrong angle, or halfway sawed through then the dude changed his mind and just nailed it up somewhere else) The local lumber yard guys hate me now because their lumber is all junk and I'll pick through it for 45 minutes if that is what it takes to find 10 straight 2"x4"x10' boards in a giant stack. You can even tell that they restack them with the junk sides and defects to the back or arranged so that they are harder to see.
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Jan 17, 2013 20:43
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kastein posted:My local yard is a good deal better than that. I went there for like 40 2x4s at one point and was expecting to pick through forever, but only found like 5-6 that were even sketchy at all while picking my lumber. And even those 5-6 were worlds better than the average 2x4 off the stack at Home Depot. For the most part it seems that I am way better off going to Lowes than any local lumber yards. They have lumber stacked up to the roof and if the pile on the bottom is all picked through junk, the dude will pop down a new stack with a forklift and they are all fresh and good to go. I'll gladly pay a little bit more to actually be able to build something that is plumb/square. Lowes also actually has different grades of lumber, some is worse than others. When I offered to pay the people at the local lumber yard more money for better lumber, they looked at me like I was dumb 
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Jan 17, 2013 20:52
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How old is the house? Might be leftover from before it had municipal water. A lot of folks had gravity fed water from cisterns/tanks, often filled via rainwater.
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Jan 8, 2014 18:39
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DNova posted:One of my friends has a house with a gigantic cistern made of concrete and masonry in her basement. It's the size of a small pool. What exactly the gently caress is that about? Would it have somehow been filled with rainwater and then pumped to the rest of the house or what? Seems like a great way to get cholera and mold to me. Hers is deprecated by modern water supply and it just sits there taking up 60% of the space in her basement. I'd probably knock the walls down and recover the space if it was my place. It is exactly the gently caress like you think  Generally it would not have been pumped to the rest of the house, just a hand-pump like on a well at the kitchen sink. I don't think there was much concern with bacteria, mostly because they generally had an overflow, so when it was full and it rained some of the water was displaced. The water wasn't really used for drinking in most cases. Here is a neat link: http://www.oldhouseweb.com/blog/cisterns-historic-water-convservation/
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Jan 8, 2014 19:41
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all that google image search did was make me lust for more knowledge of what happened... Grover? Let's party, man.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:39
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Surely... surely that was an elaborate troll. Pretty please?
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Jan 15, 2014 23:14
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kastein posted:I'd say about the first foot to foot and a half or so, so ~20-25% of the first five feet? Carpenter ants actually don't eat wood (was just reading a random article about this) so they need wet wood which will decay/break down some, whereas the boring beetles actually just chew right through and have a grand old time.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:13
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Elendil004 posted:No idea, mine now though We have some large marble slabs, they came from antique furniture (table, table and desk, respectively). People destroy the furniture over a couple generations and then have the marble kicking around and practically give it away, so maybe that is where yours came from
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Mar 26, 2014 18:38
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Here is a 2nd hand story for you all, since this thread has given me so many laughs. Unfortunately no pics though.. Was over at a friend's house the other day, it was raining and we have a lot of snow on the ground still. It is a "ranch style" house with a full concrete block basement, built sometime in the 1980s. In the basement is a wood stove, hooked into a regular concrete block chimney that goes up from the basement floor to the roof. The woodstove pipe hooks into the chimney a few feet below the "ceiling" which is the floor of the main house level. There is a door for a cleanout in the chimney a couple feet above the basement floor. When we went down in the basement we found that the floor was flooded. It turns out that the cleanout door for the chimney was pouring out water. Like-- a fuckin lot of water. They don't have a rain cap on the chimney which was the major cause of this. In the process of helping her clean up the place though she related a story from last week. They had a similar basement flooding problem (no floor drains, sump, dehumidifier or anything like that) and that one was even better than what I got to see. When they went to the basement to fill the wood stove they found that the floor was flooded. After some investigation, it turns out that the water was coming through the foundation wall, right where the electrical service entrance entered the house to go to the main breaker panel  Anyway, to make a long story short they thawed/chipped/dug/busted the earth up around the foundation wall to dig down to where the conduit penetrates the blocks. What was used as backfill against the foundation wall, you might ask? Well it was approximately 90 kerjillion glass beer bottles with about a foot of dirt on top and nothing else 
apatite fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 21:27
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One time I got put into a handicap accessible room at a hotel because the entire fuckin little league world series or something crazy like that was staying there. The bathroom was one of these "wet room" deals and it was super convenient because the showerhead was too "high flow" for the slope of the floor, meaning that water flowed out of the bathroom under the door and soaked the entire carpet in the room. Also if you want to bring a towel into the bathroom with you for when you get out of the shower, it's already soaked by the time you're done showering... Needless to say I got a room change ASAP
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Aug 21, 2014 16:26
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Aoi-chan posted:Huh, really, all you guys killing hair dryers. I swear that's what my parents used to use to seal storm windows and it worked fine for me. Fortunately the place I'm in now has modern windows so I don't (think I) have to to that this year. Those window sealing kits don't really require nearly as much heat as most things that people use heat guns for
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Sep 19, 2014 18:38
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are they going to rent out the trailer in the corner to some crazy redneck that will also say "hey, 10acres, sweet!" ?
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Jan 14, 2015 01:42
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REAL MUSCLE MILK posted:
haha have you been to a lumber yard lately? that old bowed/knotted piece of poo poo is modern No. 1 grade stuff 
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Feb 19, 2015 21:25
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Outing myself as a bad constructor here, but that is a totally fine  woodshed ! All it has to do is keep the rain/snow off and if he paid the guy in weed he most likely gets his weed at less than retail so he probably got it done pretty fuckin cheap
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Mar 4, 2015 22:46
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Motronic posted:Those are painted landscape timber. Not quite the way they were intended to be used. They are half the price of a #2 PT 4x4, since this guy pays for labor in pot we shouldn't be TOO surprised 
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Mar 5, 2015 22:02
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uwaeve posted:
Nope, won't work. I wouldn't steal this guy's bike and concrete block but would totally ride that zipline and ride off into the sunset lauging maniacally
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Mar 20, 2015 19:21
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Sorry to interrupt vidyagame chat, but has this shown up here yet?
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Mar 27, 2015 20:28
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Bad Munki posted:No, which HL2 map is that from? original Quake Team Fortress mod
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Mar 27, 2015 20:29
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if you can't hear/smell the neighbor fart your houses are too far away from each other
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Mar 28, 2015 00:18
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Motronic posted:Fun fact: shimming plus low ex foam is considered adequately installed/fastened for windows in several European jurisdictions.  That's.......interesting. So you can just pop out people's windows to steal all their stuff??
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Apr 6, 2015 19:03
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thespaceinvader posted:You do know you can just... smash people's windows to steal all their stuff, right? Well I don't go around robbing people so that wasn't my first thought, but surely that would make more noise than just pushing the whole window into the house or pulling it out? Let's do density calculations to figure out how big the window would have to be before it would weigh 400lbs
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Apr 6, 2015 19:12
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:
A funny picture on the internet
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Jun 17, 2015 20:35
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Javid posted:Friends of mine bought some unimproved property and are totally convinced they're gonna build an awesome off-grid commune. The pictures are starting to hit Facebook and it's looking promising. You should at least tell them that those four 2x4s underneath the barrel should be vertically oriented rather than horizontally.. or maybe... ehhhhhhh gently caress it this isn't the "effort post about other people's junk" thread
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Jun 24, 2015 15:51
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Manslaughter posted:I was referring to this for anyone who doesn't get it thanks, I got it but didn't know where to find... never finished reading it before this should provide some entertainment
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Jun 24, 2015 17:50
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Suspect Bucket posted:Could you use pallet wood as like a lath if you slapped on some treat-n-seal and made the actual support structure out of good, not lovely material? In the name of recycling and with the goal of making a small outbuilding structure. sure, why not?
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Jun 25, 2015 16:36
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On the ground source heat pump / solar conversation, I helped install a horizontal ground loop system a number of years back. 4-5 trenches 8 ft deep and 100ft long with loops in them running glycol with a heat pump in the basement. Heats and cools entire 3br house with full basement in a temperate climate that gets both super loving cold and super loving hot. Downside was that it (obviously) uses a lot of electricity. He solved that with a government subsidized 10kw photovoltaic installation. Given his amount of electricity usage the payback period is hilariously short. Zero heating and cooling cost, near zero electricity cost (it is a grid tied PV setup with a net metering contract. This is ok because due to location he will be "buffering" an overage of electricity during the summer and running a little on the negative during winter which is balancing out nicely). What I'm trying to say is that it is both cool and good.
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Jun 7, 2016 13:39
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