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We had to cut a trench through our stamped and dyed slate-look concrete patio to run utility conduits. We're finally patching the cut on Wednesday. I was bemoaning the fact that it won't match the rest of the patio, and my wife suggested doing something creative with it, like embedding sea glass or something. Is it straightfoward to just sprinkle and smooth some sea glass in after its poured? Will this do terrible things to the lifespan of the concrete? We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it never really freezes here (so no freeze-thaw cycles on any water that may get under a piece of glass).
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Nov 28, 2022 23:44
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That video is very helpful, thanks! I may give this a try.
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Dec 2, 2022 01:24
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Machine/saw out the holes on the striker plate to be taller so that they cover both extremes?
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Dec 8, 2022 00:55
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PainterofCrap posted:I know a couple people that work there. They’re still pretty good - I still have my homeowners with them - but they are gradually going the way of Nationwide. Chubb is heading that way as well. I’ve been with Allstate for a long time (though I guess the homeowners policy is Pacific Specialty as I was told Allstate wasn’t writing new homeowners policies, it’s still managed by my same Allstate agent though). I keep wondering if I should switch to someone else - who do you think is the most trustworthy?
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Jan 27, 2023 03:48
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My Samsung washer and dryer play a cheery rendition of Schubert's The Trout when they finish running. I had no idea it was a real piece of classical music until one day my father in law was playing classical music songs on YouTube for my toddler and The Trout came up and sounded oddly familiar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TpRsLdKVAg
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Feb 22, 2023 19:33
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Speaking of lovely paint jobs, I had my house painted a year or two ago and it's already peeling and flaking in many places. I now suspect this is because the painter didn't prime the bare wood siding. Will it be sufficient for now to scrape the places it is flaking and prime and repaint those places? Even without the primer the paint is holding on most of the house.
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Feb 28, 2023 21:04
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Final Blog Entry posted:Yeah just scrape/sand those spots to a sound surface, spot prime, and repaint as needed. A slow-drying oil based exterior wood primer is generally best for wood siding, but I think the oil might flash worse than latex for spot repairs so you may be better going with a latex wood primer so you don't have shiny spots. Thanks! There was old vinyl siding over the original old growth redwood board siding, so the wood underneath was bare. We had them take the siding off and paint the house.
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Mar 1, 2023 01:41
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Danhenge posted:I know that with Cedar it has oils in that mean that anything without really strong adherence can slough off - I dunno if Redwood is the same way. I don't know either. The siding is presumably original to the house, i.e. from 1920, so I don't know how many of the original oils would be left by now anyway.
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Mar 1, 2023 19:08
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Can you all help me think through everything I should do for a house that won’t be occupied for a bit? My mom is terminal in the hospital and won’t be returning to her house, and then I will inherit it. I’m sure it’s not that complicated but I don’t trust my mental capabilities all the way right now to not forget something dumb. We’re in the Bay Area so no worries about freezing temperatures or severe weather (not in a particularly flood prone spot and she has a sump pump that I know is working). My house is only 20 minutes away so going by the place isn’t too hard, and her neighbor is also looking out. So far I can think of: set the thermostat lower (60? 55?), have the mail stopped or forwarded to me, clear out the fridge.
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Mar 27, 2023 00:08
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Thanks everyone, I appreciate it. If I can't do anything for her directly, taking care of things at the house is at least something tangible I can do. Premium forwarding is a good call, I didn't know about that service. Airing out the fridge and turning it off is a good call. The sump pump is in a small basement (like 8' x 8' if that) that's not finished and basically holds just the furnace and water heater. I think she already has some lights on timers but I'll check that they're set up right. She also has a smart doorbell camera so I should see if I can get that switched over to give alerts to my phone instead of hers.
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Mar 27, 2023 16:47
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Pretty sure you can still get isopropyl alcohol in drug stores here.
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Apr 23, 2023 15:34
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Hed posted:Yes, sorry I was phone posting. What everyone described was a metes and bounds survey. They're kind of cool, and it's all over old deeds in the eastern US. My deed is like this too and I'm in the Bay Area. Might be because my neighborhood is fairly old, my house was built in 1920.
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May 16, 2023 17:17
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Anecdotal evidence and all, but my gas bill dropped by half in the summer when I switched my old gas tanked heater to tankless. I’m a one person household that doesn’t use a ton of hot water so maybe that makes me in the ‘most efficient for a tankless heater’ category. I’m in a fairly warm climate where the heater isn’t having to raise the incoming water temp a ton and I’m in one of the wettest areas of the country so I’m not too worried about the little bit of extra wasted water. As far as waiting for hot water, I don’t think it’s particularly longer than with my tanked heater. They are in about the same location and when the tankless thing fires up the water gets hot real fast. I'll add another anecdote in favor of gas tankless. I have a gas tankless heater, switched from gas tank heater 5 or 6 years ago to make room for some rearranging we did. I have no complaints. It heats up in 5-10 seconds even at the farthest tap. My gas usage did not go up, nor did my water usage.
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Jun 1, 2023 18:01
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Yeah, and it can be easy to slip from “didn’t plan well business-wise” to justifying shadier and shadier behavior to try to get out of the hole you’ve dug.
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Jun 10, 2023 16:46
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Final Blog Entry posted:Stopped at Costco for a few things and saw they have an AC buying service with Lennox and an established local hvac company that does the estimates and installs. 15% back in the form of Costco bucks. Gonna have them out next week to get another quote to add to the pile. Even accounting for the Costco gift card rebates, every home item I've gotten quoted from a Costco-based sales person has been much more expensive than getting it elsewhere (SunRun for solar, Lennox for AC).
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Jun 16, 2023 19:19
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StormDrain posted:Goddamn microwave came with a dent. nice selfie
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Jun 21, 2023 14:53
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I tend toward Delta after getting to visit their headquarters and tour their R&D lab ten years ago, I was impressed by the way they approached things. I've not been let down so far by anything of theirs. They told a great story about how they didn't used to make toilets, but they saw a customer opinion survey that showed them as the number two most trusted toilet brand, so they figured they might as well start. Then they had to figure out how to get videos of lots of different people's usage so they could see all the different ways people interacted with toilets. When they did this for showers, the solution was to hire strippers to come in and allow themselves to be filmed showering. I think for toilets they didn't revisit this method and mostly just had anonymized videos of employees in a work bathroom that was clearly designated for the purpose. Because toilet usage is done in private, there's very little standardization about how each person does things -- we don't adjust our behavior based on what we see others do. But the one pattern that stood out is that, when sitting down, women pulled their pants down just enough to uncover their butt while men dropped their pants all the way to the floor.
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Aug 7, 2023 21:08
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
I have never heard of this. How many bedrooms do you think you have? Four? Also, I would think that regardless of whatever weirdness is going on in the county records, if they've way under-counted your bedrooms you shouldn't just use that as an excuse to under-size your septic system. The septic system will know how many people are using it even if the county doesn't.
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Aug 21, 2023 23:01
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It was super easy, I did it a few months ago. Got a big spool of cable and a bunch of keystone jacks. Make sure you get a line tester and test everything as you go so you can redo the jack on the spot if needed. I was pretty proud that all my jacks worked the first time and I ended up finding a broken 5 wire in one of the jacks my contractor put in. Annoyed too, but proud.
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Aug 26, 2023 02:37
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Cat 6, unshielded. Cutting holes in the wall was fine. If you’re nervous, start small and then enlarge the hole. My only snafu was drilling a hole through the exterior wall with one of those really long drill bits for sliding down through the face plate cut out to drill down through the sill plate into the crawl space. Pulled it out and saw sunlight 😱
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Aug 26, 2023 02:53
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how do we make this the new thread title
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Sep 21, 2023 17:32
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:We're looking at a property where we'd have to do new construction and I'm trying to figure out the cost of a slab foundation for, say, a full house and an ADU vs having a basement ADU. The ADU would be for my mom. The impression I get is that building a basement would cost anywhere up to 3.5x the slab but the outside of windows, I'd have the exterior "for free." The alternative would be, say, an ~1850 square-foot house and a ~750 square foot ADU (restrictions on ADU sizes here). Here are some factors I consider in this: We bought our house with an unfinished basement, which we then finished into an apartment for my in-laws. Later, we built a free-standing ADU at the back of the yard. As Shifty Pony said, stairs definitely become a challenge as they get older. Also, you can put a ton of nice windows in, but a basement is still a basement and you can only do so much for natural light. Also, there are limitations to sound proofing between levels.
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Sep 23, 2023 16:53
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extravadanza posted:Simple hook at D, towel bars at A and/or C. I like this, hook just to keep the towel at hand during the shower, bar at A/C for drying and storage.
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Oct 4, 2023 23:27
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If you think the moisture sensor is why your clothes aren't getting dry enough, make sure you check that your exhaust vent is clear.
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Oct 16, 2023 04:57
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I'm pretty sure a switch with a timer (for auto-off) and/or humidity sensor (for auto-on) is required here (SF Bay Area). It's pretty nice, you don't have to think about turning it on or off.
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Nov 8, 2023 18:37
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kreeningsons posted:Considering my partner also has trouble remembering to turn the fan on while showering, then they will probably have the same trouble remembering that this one switch has to stay on all the time to power the humidity sensor. So I guess I’m going to look into the low voltage switch option. Hopefully that could spare me from having to explain to guests how to power the fan if they want to drown out any bathroom odors or noises, too. If you don't have nwin's problem, i.e. if you do have space for one full sized switch devoted to the fan, then the regular humidity sensor/timer switch should be good for you. Ours (Leviton) is a push-button to turn it on or off, it's not a regular toggle switch.  corgski posted:efb
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Nov 10, 2023 17:22
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PainterofCrap posted:Tradespeople have worked their whole careers without ever having seen, let alone worked with, lath & plaster. SF Bay Area here, plenty of 1920s and 1930s California bungalows in my neighborhood. My house is from 1920, lath and plaster, and old growth redwood siding.
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Nov 13, 2023 17:51
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Nov 28, 2023 05:44
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Opened my back door this afternoon and then it wouldn't close. The bottom of it is now sticking out just enough to catch on the doorframe, just a couple millimeters it seems. Do I sand it down? Drive a screw into it? Some other fix?
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Jan 30, 2024 22:50
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It has been wet here, so that's probably the most proximate cause. But the rubbing is interesting, I hadn't really looked at that until I had a reason to. I suppose the door could be a bit off square -- seems to be some more room at the top of the frame (though not enough for a gap). Edit: actually the door looks to be quite square still, just this bottom piece that's sprung out. I'll try a screw. Muir fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jan 31, 2024 |
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Jan 30, 2024 23:50
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Muir posted:It has been wet here, so that's probably the most proximate cause. But the rubbing is interesting, I hadn't really looked at that until I had a reason to. I suppose the door could be a bit off square -- seems to be some more room at the top of the frame (though not enough for a gap). So, uh, it fixed itself. I think it is a swelling issue, but what triggered it today is my wife left the door open for a while, when we normally never leave that door open. So I think normally it swells and shrinks within the confines of the door frame (likely causing the occasional scraping that's visible), whereas today it swelled outside the door frame and so wasn't confined. I went back to look at it again, and it closed just fine.
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Jan 31, 2024 00:59
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VelociBacon posted:I don't know your situation but that doorframe needs probably some work regardless. If your door doesn't look like that doorframe don't do anything to the door (like sanding it etc). Here's the whole door frame -- it looks even all around to me?  The bottom of the door has some damage (thanks, kids) so that piece that's separating is probably why there's so much play there.  The inside of the door frame doesn't seem to have any damage from that, though.  And the rest of the door itself is in good shape.  The door and frame were done about 6 years ago when we redid the back of the house.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:02
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Verman posted:Likely moisture intrusion caused it to swell and you closed the door and caught it. Was there a recent volume of precipitation or a big temperature/humidity swing? Yeah, I’m in the Bay Area. We had some big rain a week ago and some more coming tomorrow, but nothing in the past few days.
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Jan 31, 2024 02:27
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just throw a run of flex tape down on that bad boy /s
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Feb 3, 2024 00:33
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w00tmonger posted:Crossposting Is that all just regular-rear end Douglas Fir? If so, it's not going to last more than a few years in contact with the ground.
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Apr 7, 2024 04:36
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