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Thufir posted:I own a house now. Painting cabinets: normal hassle or huge hassle? My wife wants to go from dark brown to off-white. Do you want to touch and use the cabinets after? I've never seen a painted cabinet that doesn't wear away to the color underneath in a few months.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:27
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Okay, I have a garage floor question. Garage is attached-ish one car garage, probably built when the house was (so 1948). It sits on a concrete pad that is very old. The pad is whole and without cracks, but in the garage it's very deeply pitted. Some of the pits are greater than a half inch deep(like half circles). I'd like to repair this - if I can - and if I don't have to replace the whole concrete pad. A: Is that possible B: any recommendations on how if one were to DIY it?
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Oct 13, 2016 19:17
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I've got a weird one. A year ago we bought a house, about 1400sq ft. It's a little post-war cape style that had a second floor added onto back in 2010 or so. I only give the background because of this:  we have two zones to our heat (upstairs and downstairs) but we have what looks like the bits to do....five zones? You can see that only two are hooked up, the others are capped off. I asked the house inspector about it and he shrugged and said "this whole thing *gestures* was way overbuilt. I have no idea why but it's not wrong and it's not bad" Can anyone think why the previous owners would build in 3 more zones of expansion?
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Jan 23, 2017 20:18
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Thanks! That makes sense. That leads to another question: The upstairs thermostat is in our bedroom, meaning when we're in there sleeping the room warms up and the rest of the upstairs gets cold. I want to move the thermostat into the hall, but I'm cheap. Do they make like a basestation that I can leave hooked into our room and get like a wireless t-stat sensor that I can stick somewhere else? Searching for wireless thermostats just gets me wifi ones that let me adjust the temperature from my phone.
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Jan 23, 2017 21:08
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Awesome! Thanks!
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Jan 23, 2017 21:29
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Our house came with....3/4ths of a central vac system, it screams "we installed it ourselves and ran out of money." Hose plugs? 2. One upstairs, one downstairs. It's enough to do the whole house with the long hose, but awkward. External vent? Yes. Relays and switch gear? Yes. Pipes and fittings? Yes. Actual vacuum? no. Instead, they wired a plug that gets power when the hose is connected, and stuck a shop vac into the system. So, I really have a whole house shop vac. It works...mostly.
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Jul 31, 2017 19:01
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Jaded Burnout posted:Not really, no. You'll need to keep an eye on whatever anti-rust filter thing you have (if any) on the boiler, other than that it's just bleed them regularly and, if my lifetime of living with them is any indication, overpaint them with thick globs of white paint taking special case to leave lots of thick gritty paint runs all over them. Yeah, they're thick iron pipes full of water. They will literally outlive you, your kids, and their kids. Also steam heat, best heat.
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Jan 28, 2019 19:30
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Motronic posted:Metal is fine for the most part, but gets ugly (dents). Slate gets destroyed. I see slate a lot up here in New England on old houses. It is for sure a "set it and forget it" roof, unless something breaks a slate tile. We looked at a couple of houses with slate roofs but it turns out there's one guy in our area who does slate and he's old and he's "colorful" according to the Realtor we spoke to. So we passed on slate.
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Apr 19, 2019 16:03
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MUUUULLLLCH 2 yards of undyed twice milled brown for under the swing set (to do with the 2 yards already there) and 3 yards of black for around the bushes, trees and plants in the front yard.
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May 17, 2019 19:57
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Hubis posted:Bingo I've found that quite a few Europeans don't realize what a variation in temperatures the US gets even in the same region over a year. In my area (northeast) the summers can be up in the 90s F (30s C) and the winters can get down to below 0f (-17 C) and that's not counting the highs and lows I've seen in my area. There have been over 100F (38C) for highs and I've seen -20F (-29C) for lows. That doesn't even begin to account for humidity. Summers in the northeast are humid.
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Aug 1, 2019 20:24
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My house has a bell! the "Control panel" under it  (I haven't dared flip the switch there yet) The KeY oPeRaTeD acrtivation  Brand  It's either an ancient burglar alarm or ancient fire alarm, I have no idea which and I have no idea if any of it is still live or active. Wanna flip that on switch though and see what happens.
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Aug 12, 2019 16:21
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That Works posted:It's all fun and games until you can't turn it off and it's wired outside of the house panel somehow... which is why I haven't flipped the switch.
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Aug 12, 2019 17:55
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Cross post from the Landscaping thread since nobody ever posts there: Since we bought our house back in December, we've noticed ponding water in the way back of the yard under the power lines. Our guess is that the power company compacted the lawn when they were trimming the right-of-way. Since ponding water is gross and I have small kids that I'd prefer don't catch a mosquito borne disease, we decided to get rid of the standing water. Cue: 3 yards of screened topsoil, delivered!  So then I had to shovel it and wheel it in the backyard  Spread it around and rake it level(ish)  Tamp it flat and do another bit if it was still too low  And then 4 hours latter, done!  Note: I'm still a little sore from it and I did it on Saturday.
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Aug 14, 2019 20:49
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what did I do wrong?
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Aug 15, 2019 02:07
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My house is a raised ranch from 68 with "good enough to get your FHA or VA loan but that's it" hardwood that was 100% covered by wall-to-wall for most of its life. When we bought the house all the carpet was removed (which is good) but had people who were....less meticulous than us living there, so the wood is tired. The whole upstairs creaks and squeaks when you walk over it which drives me and my wife crazy. We bought custom cut carpets for the bedrooms which cut down on the noise a lot (though not all of it) but the halls and living room are still bare hardwood. As near as I can tell (from replacing the trim in the upstairs) the hardwood floors are just laid over plywood. Can I just screw in a bunch of those squeak elimination screws and be done with it? Has anyone else done this? Do they actually work? Can I just screw them where the floors squeak, or do I need to secure them to the joists underneath? Is this a bad idea?
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Sep 25, 2019 16:07
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Jaded Burnout posted:I dunno about those ones, but I use these on my squeaky floors and they work quite well: Okay Joists. Is there a way to find them when I don't have access from underneath? (downstairs is finished)
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Sep 25, 2019 17:49
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Jaded Burnout posted:Follow the line of the existing fixings. Presumably it's your plywood that's creaking and not the hardwood? No, it's the hardwood. It noticeably moves where the squeaks are. It has most likely shrunk a bit from age and now can move when people walk on it.
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Sep 25, 2019 18:05
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Jaded Burnout posted:OK. How are they fixed down? or is it a floating floor? It's too old to be floating, so I assume they're nailed into the subflooring.
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Sep 25, 2019 18:42
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Jaded Burnout posted:OK, well have a look for the nails, you should see them running in parallel lines, perpendicular to the direction of the boards. That's your line for screws. I'll get down with a flashlight, but it's tongue and groove flooring so I assume it's toenailed into the tongue. I'll check though, maybe I can infer location based on context clues.
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Sep 25, 2019 19:56
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Jaded Burnout posted:It's even possible that it's nailed into your subfloor and your subfloor is screwed into the joists, or that actually it's not nailed down at all. Sorry, I was envisioning more of a classic "length of wood" floorboard when you said it was too old to be floating (which really just means not nailed down). No worries, I'll figure it out.
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Sep 25, 2019 21:13
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