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Motronic posted:Wow.....cha-ching. That guy can hardly contain his excitement at the screwup as he's getting interviewed. Underwood said there were items inside the demolished home, like personal items and antiques, that are now gone for good. Yes officer, my Ming vase, Stradivarius cello, boat, and original Escher lithographs were all inside!
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Jul 23, 2013 20:28
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Farmdizzle posted:Speaking along the lines of crappy construction tales, I once went to repair a cable drop to a new-build home and discovered that the drop was a-ok, but the house wiring was hosed. I had to refer her back to the builder. I had that in my last apartment, where I lived for just over a year. It was terrible. Hot water greatly accelerated the wear on the rubber items, and ripped through the slumlord-grade flapper and valves like they were made of paper. The toilet was broken every few months because of this, and was the only toilet in the unit. If it broke on a weekend, you'd spend the weekend fishing around inside the tank to manually actuate the flapper. I'd sometimes get black streaks of rubber inside the toilet bowl too. Maintenance refused to fix the hot water source problem, so I just had to live with it. The toilet was sort of lousy too, and was prone to log jams. Doing two or three flushes to get rid of a turd plus paperwork is annoying no matter what, but when the 2nd flush fills the bowl with hot water and makes poop soup, it's even more unpleasant. Blistex posted:Flush before you sit down. No, flush twice before you sit down.
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Aug 7, 2013 20:34
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Sudden Infant Def Syndrome posted:Poop soup aside, was the toilet warm sitting on it? If it was particularly cold inside, and you had flushed twice beforehand, yes. Like a tiny little sauna for your balloon knot.
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Aug 7, 2013 23:58
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Tasty_Crayon posted:The Etsy blogs are a great place to find wonderful ideas that are actually really terrible. One article had instructions for a home made soda machine that suggested you save money and get your parts from the local hardware store- including all the hoses and fittings that would be in direct contact with the liquids. Reminds me of some post on imgur where someone bought a few dozen decorative bottles with corks from Michaels to look like "health potion" bottles from video games. They then spent an afternoon transferring every liquid in their bathroom and kitchen into their new potion bottles. Fortunately, all the commentors jumped on the OP and begged them to not eat or drink anything that had been in those bottles, as they could leach unwanted chemical and material into the food. OP listened. Spend the extra bucks and get food-safe items, folks.
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Mar 25, 2014 00:44
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Blistex posted:Brought to you by the people who gave us... You should know that's a joke photo, IIRC from some Linux nerd meetup in one of the Nordic countries.
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Mar 25, 2014 19:55
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Blistex posted:That's what I was getting at. Both pictures are jokes. Oh...  Let's turn perfectly serviceable laminate countertops into poorly done, hideous tile countertops.   That sliver cut at the back 
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Mar 26, 2014 05:44
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Partial crosspost from "bad with money" thread in BFC. A family member bought a foreclosure 3 years ago in a major municipal area in a western state that got hit hard by the housing crash. This house is a 1500sq ft 5br/2ba built in the 80's, in a run-down neighborhood about a mile from downtown and two miles from the university. It backs up almost against a major cross-country interstate, and you can hear traffic all day. They bought it for super cheap, about $60k, and got all kinds of great incentives from the state and government for first time homebuyers contingent on living there for 5 years. The plan is to live there for a few years, do some "fixer-upper" activities, and then sell it or rent it to college students. The trouble is, the neighborhood is *really* bad. As in, if you look at one of the crime maps for a quarter mile radius, you get more than 300 police reports for a 14 day period. Including some homicides and sex crimes  Many of the neighbors have 8 foot fences, large dogs, or both. Even their realtor begged them not to buy it. So they bought it, and started renovations. To be completely fair, the renovations they did were very well executed. But almost all were poorly conceived ideas, especially on a house they plan to sell or rent out in a few years. - The carpet and linoleum was torn out of the kitchen, living room, and hallway and the bare concrete was painted gray. If that's what you like, I guess. - One of the bedrooms had its walls demolished to extend the living room. Removing a bedroom almost never adds value to a home for the next occupant, especially if they are thinking of renting to college students. - They also demolished one of the two bathrooms to extend one of the bedrooms. So now they have a four bedroom home with a single 3/4 bathroom. And to get to the only bathroom you have to go through the master bedroom. - They had a lot of tools and building materials including aluminum siding stolen off of their porch by their neighbor's drug addict grandson who just got out of prison. Also ran out of money for materials, and ended up having to postpone a lot of their renovations after having done a lot of demolition. Now they're considering rebuilding the demolished bathroom. Buying a new toilet/tub/sink after throwing away perfectly good ones is not cheap. The biggest problem is that even if you remodeled the home to look like a Dubai luxury hotel, it's still in a really scary neighborhood and you'll never get your money back for it 
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Mar 29, 2014 00:38
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kizudarake posted:No pictures, but I just recalled our tub yesterday. I was in way over my head, and it took me a good 15 loving hours to do it. Here's what I ran into. Please tell me at least you took the opportunity to make a bunch of caulk/cock puns?
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May 16, 2014 22:36
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I thought I was paranoid and being a bother for insisting that the tenants in the house I bought get moved out ASAP with enough time for me to check up and make sure they didn't do something horrible that didn't show up on the inspection. I'm glad I did. I wonder if those renovators actually got paid for their work. The way I see it is that they were probably unlicensed and realized that whether or not they did a decent job had no bearing on whether or not they got paid. So they may have either taken the money and ran or just cut their losses and gave up when they realized the owner wasn't going to pay up. Has anyone ever done demolition on their home and ended up being impressed by or even satisfied with the quality of workmanship and materials? I'm sure if you could ask a Byzantine general contractor from 350 AD Constantinople, they'd complain how the incompetent original Greek builder bought the crappiest materials available at Oikos Depot and half-assed the install.
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May 19, 2014 20:42
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Turnquiet posted:The whole House Hunter series drives me nuts because the premise is always like "Greg and Luanne have a budget of $650,000...." and I am like I should just watch any other show to worships rich fucks for entertainment. Show people how to pick a winner in the sub $300,000 bracket for gently caress's sake. We discussed it in the bad with money thread in BFC. There was one episode where two brothers and a sister buy a $650k house in San Diego, which was wayyyyy at the top of their price range. Oldest brother and sister work at the same place, little brother doesn't work because he's "trying to get into medical school" and was planning to live there rent free. The oldest brother wanted to spend more like $300k, but the sister insists that they need the bigger house. The older brother was worried that the siblings would go their separate ways and he'd be stuck with a house he could't afford. Someone in the thread internet detectived them (because they use their real names on the show), and found their facebook accounts. Since the show has aired, the little brother still isn't in med school, and the sister got married. I bet they aren't living there anymore!
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May 30, 2014 23:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XooWh_1U9Ew What's with the comments on DIY videos? Yeah, I know it's youtube, but every idiot who has ever seen a tile floor feels compelled to share their poorly-written opinion on why everything is done wrong. I imagine 95% of the commentors there are the type of contractors that do the sort of work that Holmes has to tear up.
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May 31, 2014 19:18
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I live in the middle of the desert, and feel a moral duty to conserve water. I can still agree that lots of water really fast feels good, man.
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Jun 11, 2014 01:02
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 Saw that on imgur, with the caption that it was a plastic decorative wall that had melted in the AZ heat
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Jun 12, 2014 05:14
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4lnk_gCvWU You can skip to about 1:40 for the moneyshot. Make sure your shoelaces are tied before you start walking around that thing
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Jun 16, 2014 19:04
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PainterofCrap posted:The entire rear wall fell over in a piece, leaving the very large, 3-story frame house hanging in the air at the rear wall, popping & creaking away. The osha.jpg thread just raised the stakes.  Anther posted:At least the lightswitch knows: I softly giggled myself to tears while at work on this one. Good job 
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Jul 1, 2014 00:33
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The osha.jpg thread in GBS is a goldmine. WHERE'S YOUR PPE, KID? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwfDCdzNnnU I've never built a wall before, but I'm pretty sure that's the wrong way to do it. Maybe that would work if you were an Inca stonemason working with 12 ton precision cut boulders.
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Jul 8, 2014 22:42
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In my last job I worked closely with the guy who did the LEED certification and green building stuff for our company worldwide. I work for a manufacturer who employs over 100k people, and thus has a ton of offices/factories across the globe. He shared with me some of the economics around "green building." Diminishing returns set in very quickly. The only groups that push the green building stuff to the limit are groups that have it as part of their product (a company in the sustainability industry) or groups with unlimited money to burn (the government). The low hanging fruit of swapping out the incandescent bulbs is long gone, and retrofitting projects have a hard time breaking even on a cash basis in most parts of the US because of how cheap commercial electricity rates are. In China, you're paying a rate of less than half per kWh compared to the US. In Japan, it's more like 5x the US rates. Guess which sites are more likely to get an energy conservation project funded? That's where the greenwashing comes in for most companies. Let's lease a few solar panels for the parking lot, we'll add that as a bullet point on our 6 million direct mailers (junk mail) that we're sending out this month! It's all about the appearance of sustainability. I live in the southwestern US, and solar water heating systems work really well in this climate because we don't freeze. They're on every house in Israel. You almost never see them here, but you see people leasing solar panels for piles of money, when they don't make sense for 90+% of homeowners here due to the low cost of electricity. The math behind it is often pretty funny. "You'll break even after 15 years based on this generic and optimistic usage profile, and assuming zero efficiency degradation and zero maintenance costs." "We'll not tell you about the fact that you'll have to pay us a huge pile of money to de-install and re-install the rooftop panels when it's time to replace your roof." Home solar is a lot like leasing a car. It's very situational, and probably isn't a good deal for most people.
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Jul 14, 2014 19:12
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0wuXUMJPdM Totally safe use of forklifts
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Jul 18, 2014 06:53
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Does it count as "crappy construction tale" if it's neighbors being crappy about someone doing construction? http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/07/24/homeowners-association-veteran-cant-build-furniture-for-military-families-in-need/ That guy builds furniture in his garage, and donates most of it to needy Air Force families. At least one HOA busybody in the neighborhood is bothered by it. quote:“I may not paint, sand, cut wood or screw on the property at anytime,” he said.
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Jul 25, 2014 18:21
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GanjamonII posted:What damages could they possibly be awarded for that? Likely zero. I'm guessing that would be a hard suit to win. When I bought my house last year, I was given the huge stack of papers written in the spergiest Howard Hughes-esque detail on what was in-compliance and what was not. If they got that disclosure and didn't check for HOA compliance? Buyer's fault. Baronjutter posted:We don't really do HOA's around here but they scare the poo poo out of me. Their existance enrages me, but of course you only hear the bad stories. It's like neighbourhoods can't be bothered to put in the work to naturally become "nice" so they try to force some insanely heavy-handed artificial ideas of what is "nice" on the community because everyone is so hosed up they can't be trusted to behave. That's the funny part. The big "benefits" people crow about with the HOAs is forcing your neighbors to keep the exterior of their house in good repair, no weeds/tall grass, cars on blocks, whatever. In my city, the city already has ordinances about that and can enforce them with fines! HOAs just add work for busybodies to tattle on their neighbors. "But canyoneer, the city code enforcement are a bunch of lazy bums and never do anything!" "Not true in the boring suburb we live in, where some of the most expensive and restrictive HOAs are! That's probably true for a giant city, but that's not where we live" The "property value" thing is funny too. Spending $150/month to maintain "property value"? How about just $10/month for the community pool and insurance, because there's no way that $1700/yr in incremental HOA dues are adding or preserving that much "value". When I shopped for houses, I ended up buying a house for a larger transaction price with a $38/mo HOA (which is really low for this area) rather than a "cheaper" house with a $95/mo HOA fee. The monthly payments were cheaper (  at preserving value on that one!)My two favorite HOA stories are the zebra stripes and the parking boot. Zebra stripes story is probably apocryphal. Heard this one somewhere on the internet. An old lady repainted her house, and got a nasty letter and huge fine for painting it the wrong color (the shade was slightly off of the officially approved color, or she used an approved trim color for the base coat or whatever). She paid the fine, and corrected the house by repainting her entire house in zebra stripes using all 7 of the "approved colors" on the HOA pallet. Parking boot story definitely did happen. http://forums.vwvortex.com/showthread.php?3880087 The HOA farmed out parking enforcement to a third party, and homeowners had to display a parking permit to park on the street in front of their own houses. This guy parks outside his house every day, and one day forgets to put up his resident parking pass. His car gets booted, and he must pay $140 to the parking enforcement company to remove it. So he calls the cops, makes sure it's legal, and puts the car on dollys and rolls it into his garage. Now it's a standoff: The guy doesn't need to drive that car, and the parking company can't go into his garage to get the boots back without his permission. Legislators in AZ tried to ban HOAs from creating and enforcing parking regulations on public streets, but the compromise ended up being any new HOAs formed after 2014 cannot create/enforce parking bylaws (rather than all existing HOAs)
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Jul 25, 2014 19:28
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Whenever you do any landscaping or permanent structure (like a decorative landscaping wall), you must apply for a permit from the HOA's architecture committee. My HOA's architecture committee is one dude, with no professional experience or certification in anything close to architecture. He's a software developer or something. You must submit detailed plans and sketches of whatever you're doing, and he trolls the neighborhood on Saturday mornings looking for people digging holes without the proper permits. He will nag you about the aesthetics of whatever you're doing, which boils down to "Does this look exactly like something someone else already has in their yard? Y/N" Do you have the minimum of 5 plants in the front yard? Do 3 of your 5 plants meet the minimum size requirements? I have a huge hateboner for HOAs, if you couldn't tell
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Jul 25, 2014 21:15
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My HOA has the same board members on it from when it was formed 12 years ago. 10% of homeowners need to vote for SOMEONE ANYONE in order to establish quorum and have anybody's votes count. It has never happened, so we're stuck with the same pile of turds that started this whole thing because less than 1 in 10 homeowners can actually be arsed to fill in two bubbles on a postage-paid postcard to vote. And of course, they'll never change the bylaws to reduce or eliminate the voting requirement, no sir.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:51
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wolrah posted:I can say from personal experience that its possible to get so used to a smell that you think its only slight, noticing a bit as you walk in the door, yet others can literally smell it from outside the building. Ask me about the time I went into a hoarder's home with over 100 cats. (Actually, no need to ask. That's pretty much the whole story. There were probably 15 litter boxes full of turds, the walls were covered in a honey-like glaze of piss from 4 feet and below, and the floors were a like a sticky low-pile carpet of cat hair)
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Jul 28, 2014 23:27
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I just learned about something weird from the "bad with money" thread in BFC. Japanese home ownership. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2008/09/28/to-be-sorted/a-step-by-step-guide-to-owning-a-home-in-japan quote:Land with an existing old house on it Some of these McMansion builders should be building in Japan instead, where the houses get torn down before they can fall down 
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Jul 29, 2014 02:01
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NancyPants posted:Yeah, cause the Japanese will be so welcoming to foreigners wanting to They just missed their calling in life: building disposable houses somewhere where they are appreciated for what they are 
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Jul 29, 2014 18:18
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Step 1: Be a dick about shared fence and cost splitting with your back neighbor, so much so that you convince him to build his own fence one foot into his property line. Step 2: Repeat step one, but with neighbors on both sides of you. Step 3: Enjoy your newly fenced in yard that has grown 1 foot on all three sides and your neighbors will maintain themselves 
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Aug 1, 2014 02:52
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Tyson Tomko posted:And they have HOA dues on top of everything. I bet their HOA is making GBS threads their pants at the plywood garage door right now. "Welcome to the neighborhood! Here's a map of the community, showing where your mailbox is and where the community pool and gazebo are. At the end of your welcome packet, please see the invoice for the $300/day fine for your plywood garage door and tarp on roof going all the way back to May."
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Aug 1, 2014 21:52
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Don't worry, as you start going through the list you'll discover new things to add to the list (or discover tasks that must be done before you can get to the list items)
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Aug 13, 2014 17:03
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I like that you'd have to step over the toilet. Swing a leg over, like you're getting on a horse.
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Aug 20, 2014 19:52
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Those sitting tubs are a miracle invention for people with mobility issues who would like to remain independent. edit: and the answer to the toggle bolt TV mount is clearly "add more toggle bolts"
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Aug 22, 2014 19:17
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Sep 18, 2014 06:00
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I bought a heat gun a few months ago. Turns out it there are much better ways to take up linoleum.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:17
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http://i.imgur.com/bjbo02f.gifv Linked because maybe dead. For those who don't click through, it's a guy Looney-Tunes'ing himself off a concrete ledge with a jackhammer.
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Oct 12, 2014 08:01
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Oct 13, 2014 03:42
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I was once in a cat hoarder's house. I counted 70 cats, but there were probably at least 100 more (judging from the density of cats in the space that I saw vs. the rest of the house I didn't see.) The walls from about 4 feet and below were covered in a murky glaze of cat piss. The linoleum felt like sticky carpet under your feet (due to the cat hair). It was the grossest thing I've ever witnessed.
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Oct 17, 2014 19:14
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Oct 19, 2014 07:52
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Crosspost from PYF Schadenfreude thread. Woman Arrested After Becoming Trapped in Chimney at Thousand Oaks Home As a homeowner, I can't decide if I would be more disturbed that a stalker tried to break in or that the firefighters jackhammered my chimney.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:08
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AA is for Quitters posted:But they used to live outside of Philly in NJ, in a home on the historic registry. And decided to put in central air. and redo the carpets. and the wiring. And while it was all done well...that was like a six figure fine they had to eat for doing that. Oops. Well, you can't have archaic and heat it too 
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Oct 30, 2014 00:02
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dietcokefiend posted:Wish I could get a thermal photo cause the toilet in hotel I'm staying at in Austin is plumbed incorrectly. Felt oddly warm sitting on the can and when flushed it had the aroma that only poo being cooked can give off. Water feed is actually the hot water tap. I lived in an apartment that had the toilet hooked up like that. Management refused to repair/repipe it, and the hot water dissolved the rubber in the tank seals so quickly. They would start to leak and need replacing on a 6 to 8 month cadence. Then one weekend it broke entirely (only bathroom in the entire apartment) and they said it would be a few days before maintenance could get out there. I went ballistic. Unethical and super illegal.
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Nov 5, 2014 17:25
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, the sink is hot water and hotter water.
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Gunjin posted:Years ago I did finish hardware in new residential apartment/condo construction and you quickly learned to ignore and not kick or disturb boxes laying in closets. People would just poo poo in whatever empty box they found on site and leave it in the closet, because walking down 2 or 3 flights of stairs to the porto-john was too much work. Soda and gatorade bottles full of piss too. Made for a delightful smell in the summer heat. I know a guy who works in manufacturing with a company that does serious cleanroom manufacturing. Like, ET-style bunny suits and such. One of their VPs sent out an email to the company asking people to stop leaving bottles of piss in the room they dress up/dress down in. Lazy bums didn't want to go through the whole process when they needed to piss. He's also seen people barf inside of their bunny suits, which is pretty hilarious.
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Nov 5, 2014 22:48
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