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Dik Hz posted:Nah, only Jesus would walk away from that basement. Someone who probates themselves first thing when they get buttons.  Moneball choose well. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 24, 2020 02:12
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Lawyer. Lawyer lawyer lawyer lawyer. Lawyer. Maybe your lawyer (call your lawyer) will tell you to have a heart to heart with the landlord next door, but don't do that until they tell you to.
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Sep 28, 2020 14:30
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Hadlock posted:You still need to solve the rats problem first before fixing the AC. Find their food and water supply(ies), and get rid of those, talk to your neighbors etc Yeah, check your neighbors. My grandmother had a similar issue with rats coming in from outside. Turns out her neighbor loved to feed the squirrels. Know what else likes to eat the nuts etc that she was leaving in literal piles on her lawn?
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Oct 13, 2020 04:43
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Is it age that kills batteries or charge/discharge cycles? I'm sure it's both, but anecdotally with electronics it's always felt like cycles are the bigger issue by far. I've got a 2009 macbook pro that I put a new battery in ca 2015 or 2016 (the old one was so dead it would last about 30 seconds off power). It gets light use these days and most of the time is plugged in when being used. The battery is basically new from what I can tell, and is reporting 99.3% of the factory capacity and only 103 charge/discharge cycles. Meanwhile my 3 year old phone is at 81% of its factory capacity and has 804 cycles under its belt. Now, I also have zero idea of how high quality the batteries in typical computers and phones are vs what is put in a drill or lawnmore, and zero idea how being stored in an unheated garage might affect things. I've got some apartment-dwelling hand tools that are going on five years and show zero signs of the battery packs loving up. Again, light use, stored indoors, and I don't have the hooks to see exactly how much juice they can hold like I do with my phones or computers so maybe they've degraded by 20% and I'm just not noticing. Still, far from useless. edit: I consider batteries to be a consumable fwiw, the same as any part you might need to replace on a non-battery powered version of a similar item. It sucks when the battery is glued in place because it's some wafer thin piece of consumer electronics, but something like a power tool or lawnmower should really have a a battery pack that can be swapped out when it gives up the ghost. Same with cars. I've got a Prius and the battery pack in that is a wear item. You're usually looking at replacing it on about the same timeline as other cars get a transmission rebuild, and for a broadly similar cos (~$2-5k depending on model and whether you're getting a truly new one or a refurbed one pulled off a low milage wreck or something) edit 2: iirc the battery pack on my car is warrantied for 100k miles or 8 years.
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Oct 20, 2020 15:51
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The Dave posted:Please don't doxx me. Pretty much my highest aspiration in life is to someday own a basement or other work space with a polished concrete floor. I probably won't even do work in it for a few days. Just stand there and stare at it, mumbling contentedly, and sipping beer.
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Oct 27, 2020 15:55
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Isn't moving survey markers a kind of big deal and not a thing you should be talking about online?
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Oct 28, 2020 15:01
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 +  +  = 
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Nov 11, 2020 17:31
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Saw this in TFR’s deals thread and thought of you homeowners:Henrik Zetterberg posted:Pretty wild sale going on for tools at Home Depot:
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Nov 11, 2020 19:10
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Honestly the house has appreciated $70k in the 18 months that I've been here. Might be a smarter move to just sell & buy a renovated place, since a commission and closing costs would be less than the cost of renovating one single room in this place. My understanding from talking to family who are in a similar situation to you (just bought want to renovate before move in) is that any kind of construction costs are loving insane right now. It looks like everyone has more work than they can do and are just handing out gently caress you quotes because, hey, if this person is actually willing to drop 75k on a 25k job whatever we’ll make time. Ymmv, this person isn’t in your region, I’m just an idiot on the internet, etc.
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Nov 17, 2020 14:21
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Tezer posted:We haven't changed our pricing at all. We've cut back on our sales outreach and are relying on repeat customers and direct referrals to help cut down the amount of inbound work coming in. I work for a general contractor in the midwest. Some of our customers have worked with us for decades, why would we try and gouge them? It sounds like you’re an ethical person working in a small community where you depend on lots of repeat business. The anecdotal experience I’ve been exposed to from family and friends is all in densely populated areas where they aren’t able to rely on recommendations and likely won’t be using the same contractor any time soon - it’s not like full bathroom remodels are an annual expense. As for why would someone gouge? Because they’re not as ethical as you or as dependent on repeat business. Anecdotes and data etc but everyone I know who is doing remodels /major work has been either paying out the nose or punting until next year because of the costs looking nuts. Again, none of these are small communities where everyone knows each other. They’re major cities, suburbs in large metro areas, etc.
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Nov 19, 2020 15:25
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Sirotan posted:I had my heart set on a Kivik with chaise a couple years prior to moving and needing to buy an actual couch, then when I moved and visited an Ikea again they all just looked so sloppy. The fabric covered Kiviks, anyway. Though maybe it's unfair to judge the look of a piece in their showroom that is getting bounced on by every Tom, Dick, and Harry Jr. walking by it? I dunno, I kinda want to see the high mileage poo poo. Every rear end in a top hat and their kid has belly flopped onto it? Great. Because that's what mine is going to look like in a few years of me flopping my goony rear end into it after work. I get not wanting furniture to look shabby and sloppy, but I also can't be hosed to baby crap I use on a daily basis. If something needs to be treated like a fabrige egg in order to keep looking at least acceptable I need to know so I can avoid it. It's a big part of why I like used furniture. If something's already got some miles on it you can judge how it's going to wear. You'll see the high points where finishes get scuffed or dull, you'll see how the fabric or leather handles someone's rear end being on it a few hours a day, you'll see if the stitching wants to give up the ghost after a while. Note that "used" doesn't mean "crappy" either. I've got some nice, solid as gently caress, good looking furniture that I've accumulated over the years that way. Of course this also requires some flexibility about having everything match. All my poo poo looks good together (at least I think it does) but it's not some showroom matched set of furniture either.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:03
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mattfl posted:That is a steep rear end roof lol There's some eaves on this house There's some eaves on this house There's some eaves on this house There's some eaves on this house I said certified peak, five days a week, Steep rear end roofing, make that shingling game weak Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah You loving with some steep rear end roofing. Bring some cat drugs and some pot, for this steep rear end roofing Give me everything you got, for this steep rear end roofing.
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Dec 7, 2020 14:33
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StormDrain posted:I don't care about clear ice cubes, it won't destroy your house, just cause damage, and the ice maker I have provides so much ice I've never run out at a party. The ice bags are for the troughs of beverages. Storage space is my problem. Our current fridge has an ice maker in it (one of the old types where it just fills a hopper inside the freezer and you reach in to grab some ice) and if I could rip that thing out and have more room for frozen food I'd do that in a heartbeat. The real answer is a chest freezer but that's not happening any time soon
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Dec 9, 2020 16:01
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Jesse Ventura posted:Word. Yeah it’s a much cheaper test than I thought. Thanks, folks You might also check your local laws about meth remediation. I'm half remembering something, but I think some states had a moral panic about meth labs and mandated some really onerous remediation if a structure tested positive, and it lead to high profile horror stories where e.g. someone couldn't sell their house because their dipshit brother in law smoked meth in the garage once. If there's something like that on the books it might be why your agent is recommending it.
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Dec 10, 2020 20:22
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Note that that's for the houses where the drug was actually manufactured. Making meth, especially in a non-laboratory setting, is pretty dirty and has a lot of unpleasant byproducts. You're also dealing with large, large quantities of everything from the original chemicals on through the product. Basically it's like someone using your kitchen as a chemical factory. So there are some very legitimate health concerns with living in what was essentially an unregulated industrial site for a while. Where it gets dumb is where people apply the same standards to that kind of contamination as you'll get from one person smoking a few grams. It would be like requiring full housefire cleaning and remediation because someone smoked a cigarette in the living room.
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Dec 11, 2020 14:15
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Dik Hz posted:The threshold for detection is many orders of magnitude below any conceivable biological activity for those compounds. Without a thorough understanding of thresholds for claimed issues, it's fearmongering. Kinda like the studies that show cocaine residue on some really high percentage of $100 bills. Yep. It’s a ton of fearmongering. And in some states it’s fear mongering with disclosure requirements that can damage your ability to sell the property in the future. poo poo sucks. It shouldn’t be that way. But if you’re dropping $LifeSavings on a house you probably want to double check what your local situation is so you don’t end up with an albatross, no matter how bullshit the reason may be.
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Dec 11, 2020 16:55
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Alarbus posted:It's come up a few times in the past, but if you're worried about pets, ferals, birds, I think https://www.automatictrap.com/ is the "acceptable" mouse/rat solution, since it doesn't use poison. Lol when I saw "CO2" I was about to make a snarky comment about how using ye olde neck breaker is about as humane as asphyxiation because I just assumed that the gas was the method and the conversation seemed to be going in the ethical kill direction what with throwing shade on glue traps. Then I clicked through the site.  They made a goddamned rat-sized captive bolt pistol.
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Jan 13, 2021 16:14
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H110Hawk posted:
Even then don't count on it. In our current place we noticed that the washer was filing everything with scalding hot water. Brand new washer too, put in right before we moved in. Rental grade but decent. Don't know where it came from but I'm willing to bet the Home Depot a half mile away. The problem was easy enough to find and fix once we got it away from the wall. The water hookups were reversed, despite the fact that they were clearly labeled on the machine side and color coded on the wall side.
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Jan 21, 2021 21:27
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Sundae posted:Yeahhh, that's a terrible job. That's high-school bathroom floor levels of bad. That's an insult to high schoolers everywhere.
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Feb 12, 2021 00:32
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meta² posted:I talked to the contractor and he said he’d made it right. My in-law is an ex contractor and said they didn’t do the right subfloor. The contractor said it might look better with a second layer of grout... should I tell him to not bother and to rip it up or just let him try to fix it with the grout? I'm not tile expert (or even knowledgable), but I seriously doubt applying more grout is going to all of a sudden make those even and it not hilariously apparent where they laid the sheets down. That's not a grout problem, that's something hosed with how the tiles are laying and what's under them. "Let's put down more grout" reads to me like someone trying to do the cheap fix on the problem.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:56
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Something else to consider is a WiFi mesh setup. I’ve had good success with those in the past in high density living situations where the WiFi spectrum was soaked. Not as good as wired but way better than a single router broadcasting from a few floors down.
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Mar 14, 2021 21:02
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disaster pastor posted:
Basement shouldn't matter at all unless you've got a concrete floor between the ground floor and your basement with a tight rebar weave in it (or some other crazy faraday-cage creating setup) in which case I want to know about your experiences buying and refurbing a bunker. Just have one node at the router and then put another on the floor above it, and then build out from there.
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Mar 15, 2021 13:44
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How are those foam gutter guards? I’ve seen them in Home Depot. Basically open cell foam that you stick in the gutter. Water goes through, leaves stay out. At least according to the sign next to them.
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Jun 5, 2021 17:09
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StormDrain posted:Those seem like an inorganic planting media to me. Collect a year's worth of dust and dirt, and start growing any sort of thing that floats along with those. Lol I hadn't thought about that, but yeah. I could see trees growing in those gutters after a few years. Some of the plants we have around here are aggressive growers to say the least. Motronic posted:The ones I've seen around here are clogged with pollen/mud/slime/oil from your roofing materials and need to be removed and cleaned every year. I mean, they still "work" kinda, but in a heavy rain they stop taking up enough water to not overflow the gutters unless they're maintained, which seems to miss the point. Makes sense. When I saw them they seemed like one of those things that should work, but I was sure there was a catch I was missing. Having helped a friend hacksaw down a downspout that was 100% packed with roofing debris (seriously, it weighed about 50 pounds and was a solid mass from just ahead of the spout all the way up to the gutter itself) I can see how those would clog pretty quickly too.
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Jun 5, 2021 17:39
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Sundae posted:How does a reclaimed wood table have a material shortage? Somewhere there’s a barn owner waiting on their delayed stack of shiny new timber . . . Edit: this is supposed to be a joke but I’m not even sure it is.
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Jun 10, 2021 20:34
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unknown posted:Just to quote myself from many pages ago - I finally pulled the installers manual for my AC outdoor unit/compressor (Carrier 24ABB324A310 from 2010), and it's rated at 76db (!), with an optional noise dampener available that reduces it by a whopping 2db Decibels are on a logarithmic scale. 2db reduction could be pretty significant. To give an idea, the NRR rating for ear protection worn when using guns is usually recommended to be in the 28-34 range. NRR rating has a semi-complex relationship to actual decibel reduction (subtract seven from the NRR and divide by two), but the long and the short of it is that cutting ~10db off a gunshot drops it by an order of magnitude and can render it hearing safe(ish - double up on earpro, you only get one set of ears). Don't know if the difference between 76db and 74 is going to be massively noticeable, but it could be enough to really take the edge off on something that's already outside your house.
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Jun 16, 2021 17:21
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The aftermarket vibration pads helped a lot though. Only solution is a new unit. Ugh.
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Home Ownership Thread: I can't believe after all that work it didn't even last 6 months.
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Jun 24, 2021 16:46
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marchantia posted:Perhaps this is a good place to ask - is there a thread somewhere about emergency preparedness? I've been looking around where I thought it might be and haven't found it, not sure if incompetent forum browsing on my part or it doesn't exist. Go ask in TFR's general thread, someone there will point you in the right direction. IIRC there was a thread there that fell into archives, it probably still has a lot of relevant stuff. Even if there isn't, there are a solid handful of TFR goons who are big on disaster prep and remind everyone to buy water at the beginning of hurricane season, not the weekend before a cat 5 monster fucks your coast. And, despite being in the gun forum, the disaster prep folks over there will be the first to say that a gun isn't necessary or even something you should be thinking about until literally everything else is finished. Can't shoot a hurricane, can't drink bullets, etc. So even if your not the sort to lurk a gun forum a bunch, the people over there are good about accepting "yeah, this person isn't interested in guns, let's tell them what's good for a first aid kit."
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Jun 28, 2021 00:04
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PageMaster posted:It's our first year though through CA wildfire season since buying which is why we might be overthinking it; your comment on the online folder reminded me that a fireproof safe is probably also next on our buy list... Keep in mind that fireproof safes all have a giant asterisk next to them. The tl;dr is that they're rated at a certain temperature for a certain period of time. this random SenrySafe I googled, for example, is rated for 1 hour at 1700 degrees. From what I recall doing my own search on this kind of thing, 1700 degrees is considered an "average" house fire temperature, although that's highly dependent on the construction of the house (as in the shape, how air flows, etc) and the materials involved. I don't know what the temperatures of a full out wild fire blowing through your living room are, but I'd assume they might be on the hotter end of that spectrum. I've also read that a lot of the materials that constitute the "fireproof" bit of the safe will give up moisture while they're being heated that much, which means your poo poo is getting steamed. So papers etc aren't going to come out if it perfectly unscathed. If it's legal documents and the fire stays under that temp/duration threshold they'll still be readable and usable, but they're not going to look like when they came out of the courthouse or whatever. The tl;dr on them is that they're useful and having one is still probably a good idea for random little things that you have to keep in your home and wouldn't want to burn, but if it's something that you don't need access to every day (say a copy of a will, a birth or marriage certificate, etc) you're better off with originals in a safe deposit box and copies stored at home - perhaps in the fireproof safe. If it's something where condition matters, or it's truly irreplaceable, I wouldn't count on them. Edit: that said, not all housefires are equal. They're a lot more useful in smaller fires that never get up to full blown whole-structure fire temperatures. edit 2: another thing to consider is that they put all your valuables into one relatively small, relatively easy to move (depending on size) box. Gowning up my mom had one that an adult could carry under one arm. This could be a good or a bad thing. Good if you're trying to evacuate ahead of a fire and know all your important poo poo is in one place. Bad if someone breaks into your house and finds it at the back of the closet while looking for guns and jewelry and decides to take it home to crack and figure out what you thought was so valuable.
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Jul 10, 2021 16:14
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You have offsite backups for that drive, right?
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Jul 11, 2021 17:49
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What company are you with, out of curiosity? You know, so I can avoid them in the future.
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Jul 15, 2021 20:10
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Epitope posted:I guess I am an eco zealot zero, but I don't understand the preference for poisoning your yard versus having some weeds and bugs. Lol at this. It’s like a parody of conservative humor from a lefty.  Like, yes( growing native plants in presumably a dry area (based on that yard) is good compared to spraying water everywhere while dousing poo poo within pesticide and fertilizer. I mean, yeah, I’m aware of the cartoonist, but I wouldn’t blink if I saw that in some hand-printed college town rag with the subtitle “what conservatives really believe” or something. Edit: the loving wife in the house just beaming with joy at the dude’s all American manly lawn 
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Jul 20, 2021 22:34
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skybolt_1 posted:
What's the reason for the cutback? Basically I'm wondering if it's adding something back into the paint that's going to give me cancer in ten years, or if it's the sort of thing that making full fat paint is terrible for the rain forest.
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Aug 3, 2021 04:05
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Queen Victorian posted:Our house came with a basic white ~20 year old Frigidaire and it's been happily chugging along keeping our food cold without issue for the three years we've been here. After our kitchen remodel it'll retire to the basement where it will keep beer and event overflow foodstuffs cold. I don't know gently caress all about appliances but I suspect there's a hell of a bathtub curve with their survivability. I've known a lot of 10-20 year fridges that just keep on chugging with maybe a hosed ice maker or some other broken "extra" that doesn't keep it from cooling food. Anecdotally it feels like every time I've either experienced or known of (via friends, family, etc) a dead fridge it's been either fairly new and pissed everyone off or so old that it got a fond farewell.
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Aug 10, 2021 17:48
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I’m wondering why the gently caress they don’t have the right tool. I’d be concerned about the quality of everything else they’re doing if they can’t be bothered to have the right tool for a basic task like cutting a circular hole.
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Aug 11, 2021 17:50
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Something else re: rats and mice is that you need to make sure your neighbors aren't attracting them. Do you have a neighbor raising chickens in their yard? If they're not securing their feed properly there's nothing you're going to be able to do to keep vermin away. Worse is elderly people who like to feed wildlife. My grandmother's next door neighbor (a lady in her 80s) puts literal piles of peanuts out to "feed the squirrels" and their block had a terrible rat problem as a result. I believe the county had to get involved. Similar story at a condo I rented in the 2010s. The guy living next door put out food for the squirrels (wtf is it with old people and squirrels by the way?) and while I never saw rats we had an insane mouse problem. He refused to believe that there was a connection between the mice and the squirrel feeders. He died, the food source dried up, and the mouse problem went away like loving magic. Unfortunately there's limits on what you can do if your neighbor thinks that wildlife needs a buffet in their backyard. You might be able to do like my grandma did and get the county involved if that's a thing where you live, but that's also going to start a fight with the neighbor if they find out.
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Aug 12, 2021 13:40
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ntan1 posted:It's philosophical because even if I plan to stay 15+ years, the question is about the risk of refinancing again. Ie can I refinance in the future if rates drop even more? I don’t think I’d count on the rates getting much lower that, lol.
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Aug 15, 2021 03:12
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please knock Mom! posted:
Please tell me that color grade is due to smoke or cooking oils etc rising.
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Aug 16, 2021 13:01
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NomNomNom posted:Don't let your kid eat paint chips from the window sill? Strong username / post confusion here.
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Aug 19, 2021 15:09
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StormDrain posted:What can you do to prevent the clog in the first place? Filters or grates that you have to clean monthly are preferred to me than calling a guy or getting out a tool to find some disgusting debris. Grates on your sink and bathroom drains are huge if you're willing to deal with cleaning them. We had huge clog problems in all sorts of rental bathrooms until we sucked it up and got a silicone drain cover to catch all the hair going down it. A sink strainer does the same thing, only for your kitchen, and keeps food debris out. You want to clean those out way more than once a month, though. The sink strainer gets it every time we use the sink (just knock it out into the trash and give it a rinse) and the bathroom maybe once a week, depending on how much my wife's been shedding (she's worse than a golden lab, I have no idea how she's not bald). Past that, watch what you put down your drains. Don't dump grease down there etc.
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Aug 23, 2021 13:01
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