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Heat guns can also be useful for lifting linoleum.
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Sep 26, 2014 17:31
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There are concrete blocks that are cast with an indentation for a 4x4 or 2xwhatever to sit in without slipping off. Aside from just spraying it there to use it up, about the only reason I could see for foaming the bottom would be to keep water from getting between the concrete and the cut end of the pressure treated or cedar post sitting on the block. Doesn't really seem necessary, but maybe they're like me and just enjoy spray foaming things?
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Sep 29, 2014 15:36
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I bought a house from a guy who was a bit of a recluse that fancied himself something of an artist. He took out his nice big living room window to put in a slider that most people would have installed in a bedroom.  I don't know where that original window went, but here is the hole it once filled.  Several quotes for replacing that came in at ~$3700 with installation, but I got a new one from the Re Store (a Habitat for Humanity venture that stocks lots of stuff, including windows that were ordered for someone else but they didn't want) for $932.  Now I just have to fill in that hole from shifting the window to the east. A hole that is slightly larger than it needed to be because I mismeasured/had some friends that were overly enthusiastic about knocking out my stucco.  Total time, eight hours. Would have been closer to six had the guy I needed to help me lift the thing not been sleeping off a night of heavy drinking.
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Sep 29, 2014 17:12
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DNova posted:Arc fault interrupt breakers are currently required at least in my home area for any bedroom circuits that are new or re-worked. They are expensive right now but I think that with them becoming more and more widely used they will come down significantly in price. Even at current prices, they are cheap insurance from what is probably one of the most common reasons houses burn down. There are also AFCI plugs that you can get, which are about half the price. And your only option if your panel if you have a panel with discontinued breakers like I do. Or maybe you can find some new-old stock and put in another 100 amp breaker to run a sub panel.
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Oct 3, 2014 14:20
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taiyoko posted:So this thread got me interested in Canada's Worst Handyman back when it was mentioned in here. Unfortunately, the only youtubes of it I've found look like they were recorded and encoded with a potato. Anyone got any better links to it? Season 4 was done in 360p, which is about as good as it gets on YouTube. Discovery seems to have removed it from their web streams, so you're looking at the kinda bad quality on YouTube or maybe :files: Much like watching the show, you might have to grimace and bear through the poor quality. It's a bit poetic, really.
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Oct 8, 2014 14:21
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Cock and balls window, is that what we're looking at here or is there something else that's horribly unsound that I'm not seeing?
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Oct 13, 2014 03:49
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I feel like someone should get a hollow core door and fill it with foam. For science. Or art, because apparently you can pass off a lot of botched projects as "design decisions"
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Oct 22, 2014 17:20
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Minnesota energy efficiency programs http://www.minnesotaenergyresources.com/home/rebates.aspx
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Nov 15, 2014 03:44
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Zhentar posted:I can get 10 free CFL light bulbs Free is free, you may as well.
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Nov 16, 2014 01:13
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I bought a house that was once owned by an "artist" who fancied himself a capable handyman. Here is a "repair" to the stairs heading to the second floor that I discovered yesterday.  Yep, load bearing pencils.
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Nov 19, 2014 14:46
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Flipperwaldt posted:That's exactly the backstory of the jackass that did up my house in the nineties. They're the worst, because you can still smell the pride over the creativity that went into all the half-assed botch jobs. Wood? That's pro. My guy used sprayfoam. 
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Nov 19, 2014 17:45
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I made the shelf straight.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:25
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Crooked shelf? Get yourself a pissed off grizzly with its head stuck in a can. That will make any DIY mixup seem minor in comparison.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:40
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Dillbag posted:How about a driveway and an rear end in a top hat neighbour? Which one is the rear end in a top hat? The guy that poured the driveway all over his neighbours yard or the one who built his fence along what he thought was his properly line but totally wasn't.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:08
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That photo really tells a whole lot more about the story. You can see that the pad was poured on or about the line for quite a distance then all of a sudden they decided, "nope, we're going this way" From the Google view, it doesn't look like the red house would even have the room to fit a proper approach to their property from the road on account of that telephone pole on the boulevard.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:26
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The bit about the bathroom and the basement entrance is reason enough to pass but all this:Serella posted:- Original hardwood floors so badly in need of refinishing you could see crumbs and other detritus in the cracks between the boards. This is all pretty routine. You get a couple yards of soil and slope the ground away from the house, thrown the bird in the trash and plug in new smoke detectors. Anyone who has spent any time at all near a sizeable quantity of old windows can tell you there are lots of them painted shut. If you are ripping them out anyway, who really cares? Knob and Tube isn't great or anything, but antiquated is vastly overstating the fact. The house likely had asbestos in some capacity too, every house that old does unless someone spent a lot of time and probably a lot of money removing it already.
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Feb 24, 2015 16:24
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Also, house boats.
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Feb 25, 2015 21:05
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Delivery McGee posted:At least they did something. My previous landlord took a week to get somebody out when the A/C crapped out in the middle of summer in Texas. Luckily I moved out a couple weeks ago before the place fell on my head. I own my new house (a 16x80 trailer, but it's been taken care of). There's only one small problem with the new place, the back stairs will loving kill you: They're steep because they are upside down. The good news is it won't take more than a couple hours and not more than $20 to fix. You'll need some construction hangers from Home Depot and another length of pressure treated 2x4 or 2x6 to run between the 4x4 supports, but you already have some sort of concrete footings there for the step down to the ground. At least that is what my rough eyeball math tells me. Worse case scenario is you have to buy (or make) some four step stringers and install them the correct way. How did they attach what they have there though - wood screws into the stepping surface on the inside edge of that top stair?
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Mar 26, 2015 15:31
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poopinmymouth posted:Not a crappy construction tale (yet!) but I know this is the audience to ask. How small is small? Here's one for 160 square feet: http://www.smallshelters.com/freedwnload.html That likely has enough information to get you going. I got it from this site: http://www.todaysplans.com/free-home-plans.html#Cabins which is basically just links to other sites with free small cabin plans.
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Jun 8, 2015 04:27
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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. Yeah, nothing wrong with that. Only real problem is they aren't long enough for much; a small shed or an outhouse maybe. The off-cuts from the lumber mill are even better since they are longer.
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Jun 25, 2015 18:16
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Is there any way to tell the difference between surface rust and actual systemic corrosion in nails/screws? Put your family on it and see if it collapses, apparently.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:47
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I feel like I'm not alone! A house I bought last year had sweat pants jammed around a window as weather stripping and the "insulation" under the veranda was nothing more than 80 green garbage bags packed full of crumpled up news papers.
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Jul 24, 2015 06:26
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I suppose I should have mentioned that the veranda was completely enclosed to the ground with stucco around the entire base, so there wasn't any air movement anyway. It was really just a trash pile I had to deal with. The real problem he had was huge air leaks at the top of the foundation wall. When I pulled up the sub floor, and looked between the floor joists, I could see outside. Also, he was missing a basement window and replaced it with a 7/16" sheet of OSB. Not to mention the fact that the sawdust insulation in 80% of the wall space on the first floor had all just disappeared in the 100 years since the house was built. This is in Winnipeg, where temperatures will settle below -30C (-22F) for days at a time.
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Jul 24, 2015 06:33
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Garbage and bees. A hive moved in under the veranda and they stung me repeatedly as I furthered the cause of colony collapse.
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Jul 24, 2015 06:38
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Javid posted:
It is something special, but there's a good chance it was done in the dark in the middle of a field so they guy could get his crops off, so he really prioritized function over form. Then used it as an excuse to buy a new tractor. I spent the better part of my weekend fixing up the roof at the family cottage. It was built by my now dead grandpa who wasn't too concerned about doing anything properly, so the sheeting on the roof is 1/2" plywood mounted the wrong way on 24" rafters. To say it is springy is a bit of an understatement.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:19
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Acid Reflux posted:The outlet on my kitchen island is controlled by a switch. That switch happens to be the one that turns the basement lights on, as in the switch that is located at the top of the basement stairs. Which are not in the kitchen. Psyduck indeed. While Shifty Pony's situation is s little weird, you have a straight up amateurish mistake in the way you house is wired.
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Aug 12, 2015 12:08
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:Well, if you're going to do a crap job building it, might as well make it ugly too. So wait, is that OSB they've dropped down as the floor? Pretty sure it is bags of Post Haste discarded in the first photo too. I don't think that stuff is strong enough for a deck. Home Depot apparently will give anyone that walks in the door a free consult for deck planning that basically includes the entire plan, step by step instructions and shopping list. It is unfortunate that the people that need this sort of thing most don't care to access it. Or maybe they are trying to get on Holmes on Homes?
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Aug 25, 2015 17:54
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There were some hilariously lovely things that happened in that house, like the coax connections just being a faceplate and six inches of wire in the wall. And the shingles dumped into the back yard. There are other things where he is blaming the flipper for stuff that isn't exactly the flipper's fault. Like the bargain basement dishwasher. There are also things where he is taking a really stupid approach to fixing, like the water leak under the stoop. After deciding that he was tired of mixing concrete (after about five bags of the stuff) he used up three cans of spray foam as a bandaid solution when the real solution was to break up a little bit of the driveway to get access then just start shovelling stuff in. Stuff like all the crap from his yard, shingles and all, to fill the hole, THEN patch up above. But no, he decided to just pour concrete without doing any sort of prep work. Now he says he needs $5000 to fix that, which overestimates costs by around $4900 because he can't think his way out of a wet paper sack.
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Sep 28, 2015 15:41
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I also went the Kastein route of purchasing a shitheap and fixing it. Mine was probably in better structural condition but looked like the house that was used for True Detective. EDIT for a look at the craziness I bought. Antifreeze Head posted:My previous owner likes the look of textured plaster, so he covered two floor's worth of walls in drywall mud that he made customs swooshes in. He then painted it pink and nailed towels over top of all that. And that's just the walls, on the ceilings he nailed silk flowers and beer mats. Antifreeze Head fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 17:14
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NancyPants posted:T-towels? Yes! Towels everywhere! The ceiling was covered with silk flowers, just stapled up there like they belong. The guy that had it was (in addition to suffering from dementia, possibly being bipolar and definitely being an alcoholic) an English professor who also fancied himself something of an artist. I like to think the towels were his nod to Medieval tapestries. And while there were no heads below the floor boards, I did find some essays he marked in 1986 then forgot about in the attic, plus several dead cats (natural causes) under an addition.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:54
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I assume it was natural causes anyway, or at they weren't butchered. They could have been victims of bio magnification as there were a lot of Warfarin traps out for mice. One was curled up in a toilet that had been discarded underneath that addition.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:43
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I'm sure that plumber will be laughing when he gets served some papers to pay the few hundred dollars to enact a repair. Could be for a wrap-around deck if someone wanted half their house clad in pressure treated lumber, for some reason. Looks like next door has stairs off a patio door that just go down to the ground, which is also pretty loving weird. Not to mention rather unsafe consider there doesn't seem to be a hand rail there.
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Oct 15, 2015 01:02
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I was in a bar once with tiled everything and floor drains. Tiled floor, tiled walls, tiled ceilings. The clientele gave me the impression it was somewhere that a knife fight breaks out on a regular basis, so the large up front cost probably saved a lot of time.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:31
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:stay tuned for my future research paper "Bad construction decisions: a canary in the coal mine for degenerative brain diseases?" There is probably something to that. My house was previously owned by the father of a prominent local person who has since revealed that her dad had dementia and possibly undiagnosed bipolar disorder. I am constantly finding new and exciting things as I gut and redo this entire house. Here is what I located yesterday:  That's some sort of window that was tucked into a wall. Not a window that was walled up, this is like a window insert for a door or something, just stuck in the wall with OSB sheathing on the exterior for the stucco and the insulation on the inside. It was behind the tub surround. Other highlights have been about 80 garbage bags filled with crumpled newspapers under the front porch, no shortage of broken glass in the back yard (I think he disposed of windows by smashing them up then planting the shards) and instead of paint he had nailed beach towels up to the walls, like a modern version of medieval tapestries. Antifreeze Head fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 13:26
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What's the problem? That's perfectly legal. In Moldova, maybe.
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Nov 17, 2015 20:05
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FrankeeFrankFrank posted:It says they were floor boards but they look like concrete form boards to me. They look mostly like the floorboards in my century-old home. You can see pretty uniform spacing where they were nailed to something else, though it looks like they were maybe on 4xsomethings rather than 2xwhatever joists that I am accustomed to seeing floorboards nailed to. And the guy left the nails in? It looks like they are still sticking up when the cat is inspecting the drat things. A rather shame that such abominations exist in a room that otherwise has a nice floor and beautiful crown moulding, but some people have all their taste in their mouth, so what you gonna do?
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Nov 21, 2015 06:54
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The guy was using a hand saw, it is pretty safe to say he isn't the best equipped to tackle this project and have the end product look like anything other than it does.
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Nov 21, 2015 16:38
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Mercury Ballistic posted:More active neglect here, but my hoarder neighbor who has moved elsewhere but still has the house is also letting it go to poo poo: You can call your local bylaw enforcement people and they'll start dealing with it.
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Nov 23, 2015 03:56
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The Gardenator posted:I drive by this house everyday, the previous block wall was built without interlocking the blocks so each block was right on top of the block below it. Apparently, the wall also had no foundation as over the years portions of the wall would slowly lean and then fall over. My favorite part of the leaning wall would lean right against the tree in the foreground. So wait, the house looks like that, but the owner decided the most pressing concern was the decorative wall that held up the mailbox?
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Nov 23, 2015 17:21
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Warmachine posted:This could mean many things. My read is that it is the dream creation of someone who has died nearing the end of the construction project and now it is set to be a new handy man's dream as the sale price includes (apparently) enough in raw materials to finish the job. I don't have a hot clue about South Carolina property, but the $650 K valuation for a ~2000 sq ft house with that much waterfront didn't seem outrageous. But then I saw that it sold for $60,000 in 2005. I guess installing five front doors justifies a nearly 1000% price increase.
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Jul 22, 2022 14:51
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