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We had a lovely 12' x 4' x 6"... raised patio? I don't even know what to call it, it was just some wooden platform at the edge of the backyard next to a hose spigot, so I guess the idea if you bring poo poo to this wood platform in order to wash it off. Naturally the entire thing was rotting and all of the screws were rusted out, so I took a saw to it, and guess what I found underneath? Another raised patio, but slightly smaller and much older. I guess when this older one started looking like poo poo someone decided to just build another platform around the old one. I've since removed all of that poo poo and about a quarter-inch beneath the soil I hit these thick tree roots from a huge nearby tree, which I guess is probably why the raised platform was put here in the first place. I'm debating chopping/digging out the roots and throwing down raised garden beds here.
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May 5, 2016 09:42
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I've also sunk about $100 into building this really nice-looking suspended garden bed (as in it's a raised garden bed that I put a bottom + legs on) that I'm putting on a concrete portion of my back yard. It looks super great, I mean it's totally not an effective way to spend gardening money but I can at least point to it and say "hey I built this cool looking thing and look at all of those nice plants inside of it". But I'm worried about water leaking through and staining the concrete, so I'm thinking of throwing away even more money on building something that diverts water that drips out of the bottom of this suspended garden bed.
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May 5, 2016 09:48
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SiGmA_X posted:You aren't going to line it with plastic? Line it with plastic. Otherwise the dirt will rot your lovely wood anyway. I lined it with garden cloth, which is basically just porous plastic; that should keep dirt in but let water out. But it's not going to perfectly separate those things Completely sealing with plastic seems like it'd cause other issues
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May 5, 2016 19:37
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No Butt Stuff posted:My HOA has a no detached buildings rule. They haven't approved a shed ever, despite people asking to put them up at almost every meeting. Call it a kill room and if anyone voices a complaint pull out a tiny red book and scribble something in it
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May 5, 2016 19:39
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Leperflesh posted:Make sure your raised bed is made of something that won't leach anything into the soil you're growing food in. For example, most pressure-treated wood is not suitable for growing food. So is most paint, a lot of different wood stains, etc. If you're just growing flowers then w/e of course. So I actually did a lot of research on this back when I was planning this project and these were my findings on treated lumber: 1) Older pressure-treated wood was a concern, since one of the components was arsenic (CCA), but modern pressure-treated wood that you pick up at the hardware store is either going to be borate-treated (which is harmless to humans) or copper-treated (which is also basically harmless; there are some illnesses related to having too much copper in your system but those are irrelevant to the small quantities that we're talking about). 2) Of the modern varieties, leaching into the soil occurs but in extremely small quantities. Plant roots then only absorb an extremely small amount of that extremely small amount. Even if you're not convinced that copper is harmless to humans, the quantity found in the plants growing in copper-treated beds is no greater than what is found in plants grown elsewhere. 3) Lots of bloggers still say not to use pressure-treated wood because of "toxins" leaching into the food but these claims aren't really not based on any science at all. Back in the CCA days there was substantial evidence for these claims, but the EPA was pressured into substantially restricting CCA production and now hardware stores basically don't carry it. But if you want to be sure, the type of pressure treatment is always printed right on the wood, so if you see CCA then you shouldn't use it. The real problem with treated wood is that you have to wait around for it to dry out if you want to give it a nice finish. This can take a couple of weeks and I didn't want to sit around and wait for that. What I wound up going with was A) untreated wood that I B) stained a nice color and C) sealed with polyurethane. I researched sealants pretty well in addition to treated lumber, and polyurethane doesn't "leach" at all, it's basically just a layer of hard plastic once it dries and is well-known for being food-safe. I also threw down a layer of garden cloth and a layer of rocks on top of that, further reducing the chance of any "leaching" of anything (garden cloth itself is food-safe so long as you're not buying one of the kinds advertised to come with a layer of weed killer)
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May 7, 2016 01:35
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mastershakeman posted:How do I figure out if my weird maybe 3 season, maybe 4 season room is insulated in the walls or ceiling without tearing them open? For walls, can't you just poke a small hole somewhere inconspicuous and then patch it up? If you find insulation then it's a good bet that the entire wall is insulated. You could hypothetically use an IR camera but that's really only going to work for interior walls, where it doesn't really matter (well, maybe it matters for walls facing a garage, then that might work) For the ceiling, do you have an attic or any sort of space above the rooms you care about that you can reach? That's probably the safest bet. Custom screens cost an arm and a leg no matter where I've looked, relatively few places do them and they know that they can charge a decent amount. I'm hoping someone else comes along and corrects me with some awesome discount custom screen place, but right now that price doesn't sound crazy, based on my experience
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May 8, 2016 06:28
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Zhentar posted:That's backwards, it will only really work for exterior walls (or walls with a substantial temperature difference across them, if you want to be pedantic - which I do). You can do it with an IR thermometer too, though it will be more work. No... no, it's not backwards, for the reason that you've pointed out. I actually use IR cameras (gently caress FLIR forever, seriously their software is bad), and you can spot poorly-installed insulation on an exterior wall without too much effort, but a wall with well-installed insulation doesn't look too different from a wall with no insulation at all. For interior walls, drywall is a poo poo insulator on its own so you just need to stick a heat source on the other side and see how much of it "shines" through. The heat source trick doesn't work with the exterior walls out here because the houses all have thick wood siding, which fucks with the measurement enough that it's hard to tell whether or not the wall is insulated, thereby ruining the heat source trick. So you're left with trying to uniformly heat or cool the house (on a cool or hot day) in order to detect insulation in the exterior walls, which is fine if your wall has insulation gaps but not fine if your wall looks relatively uniform (it could be uniformly insulated, or it could be completely uninsulated) QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 20:33 on May 8, 2016 |
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May 8, 2016 20:22
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I once saw a listing where the homeowner was a serious busybody and had meticulously documented all of the maintenance tasks in a huge illustrated binder. He offered it up for the listing because he thought that it might make his house sell better (but I'm not sure if it worked)
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May 8, 2016 23:50
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Our PO left us half-full paint buckets (with legible color codes), we were thankful for that. Plus the original manuals for all of the appliances Didn't leave us the alarm code though, the fuckers, so we had do disable the whole system while I figured out how to convert it into a DIY alarm system (which was surprisingly not too hard)
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May 9, 2016 02:13
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But then he won't have to worry about how to spend that $25k, which just reduces stress even further. Home ownership is truly a magical thing
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May 9, 2016 02:27
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mastershakeman posted:Thanks for the screen tips, I'll look into DIY. As to checking the insulation: there's no attic on this part, and all the lighting is track lighting. With big daily temperature swings and a standalone AC/heater unit, there's a very good chance that the room isn't insulated at all.
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May 9, 2016 05:33
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2000 sqft is too small for even a family of two, you can't fit an indoor pool or servants quarters in such a small space! I suppose you expect me to share a bedroom with my spouse?? It's absurd!
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May 9, 2016 19:06
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newts posted:Hey all, I have a question about home insurance... Did you get an appraisal at any point? If not, get an appraisal. It should tell you what your house and your land are worth separately, then if you feel like the house is underinsured you can give it to your insurance company and ask them about buying more coverage.
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May 9, 2016 19:28
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newts posted:Sorry to start the house-size debate again It won't really be that accurate of an estimate for the rebuild cost, it's just going to be a ballpark figure. The only reason you're getting it is to A) check to see whether the insurance company's estimate of the rebuild cost is reasonable and B) if it's not reasonable then you have something to show them. You could probably just call them up and be like "we think our house would cost more to rebuild than what you've insured us for", they'll probably be happy to bump up your coverage. But it's probable that your coverage is already reasonable
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May 10, 2016 08:38
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Leperflesh posted:My 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house is 1188 square feet. It's in a neighborhood full of similarly-sized houses full of families with two, three, and four kids. Whether a house "seems small" has as much to do with perceptions as square feet, and then another aspect is how well the house was laid out for usability. A lot of houses are poorly designed and waste a lot of square footage on poo poo like hallways. Some people have formal dining rooms, others don't. Staircases consume square footage too. If you have a laundry room in your home instead of hookups in the garage that can be another hundred square feet. Etc. etc. I'm in a similar boat; we have a 3 bed 2.5 bath house that's 1500 sqft and it feels enormous. The entire neighborhood is full of people with similar floor plans who either have a bunch of young children or who had a bunch of kids 20 years ago. No basements, either; this is one of those areas where the ground is tough enough to make basements cost-prohibitive. Laundry hookups in the garage, storage areas under stairwells, and an open layout can create a lot of space. I think that your comments on layout are spot on; one house can feel much more cramped than another with the same square footage. I've seen plenty of houses that had an extra 200-500 sqft but felt cramped thanks to garbage layouts. We saw one house where the first floor was basically one long wraparound hallway around a stairwell, with the hallway ending in a combo living room / kitchen, divided by one of those little bar/slit walls. It was so lovely. The realtor tried to pretend that the hallway is part of the living room by sticking a couch in the hallway portion, but it just made it hard to walk around and probably had the effect of making things feel even more cramped. That feeling of being cramped even in a lot of actual floor space was especially bad for houses built in the 50s and 60s; people back then just loved clearly-defined rooms separated by thick walls. And they also loved narrow kitchens (which makes sense if you think that only one person is ever supposed be in there). Our house is cheaper to keep warm/cool than those other houses despite feeling bigger.
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May 10, 2016 09:04
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I bought a bunch of LEDs recently too, but for bathroom vanities it felt like a bank of 40 W bulbs was super bright. The bulbs originally in there were 60W equivalent CFLs. Anywhere that you have a 60W bulb, it's worth trying a 40W. They're much cheaper and if you have a whole bunch of them in one place then it's not going to make much difference
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May 12, 2016 19:18
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SiGmA_X posted:Is the general consensus that we should start replacing all CFL's with LED's preemptively, or just upon burnout? I have a few LED's but most of my bulbs are ~3yo CFL's. I picked color temp and wattage as appropriate for my various uses at the time. Just on burnout, but if you have a light bar in the bathroom with 2 burnt out CFLs and 6 working CFLs then you might want to just replace all of them with LEDs for the sake of aesthetics
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May 12, 2016 19:37
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I also bought a 3-way LED for this awesome old lamp that I have, it had a 50/100/150W incandescent bulb and I replaced it with a 30/60/100W equivalent LED bulb (which is really 5/9/20 Watts). It looks exactly the same as the old bulb but is just a tiny bit dimmer. It's the primary source of light in my living room and it's great, gives the room a nice cozy feeling but at 1/10th of the power and with almost none of the heat.
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May 13, 2016 09:02
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SiGmA_X posted:So my buddy was talking home automation last night. He's going with Wink stuff, it seems excessively consumer to me - but kind of cool. There was a discussion on this a few days ago, IIRC. Right now I think that the consensus is that the industry is still very young; devices come with all sorts of non-obvious flaws baked in (sometimes the security vulnerabilities are quite serious) and companies fall over and die pretty regularly. There's lots of VC cash in home automation right now, which tends to foster short-lived startups. While there are some interesting applications (automatic notifications in an emergency, automated emergency response, etc), the Home Automation field is mostly a hub of idiots who just want to wank over the Internet of Things (I want my fridge to use bitcoin to order more pickles when it senses that my pickle jar is empty!), so there's a lot of useless poo poo out there. Don't buy wifi-enabled locks or light bulbs, they're a waste of time and money. Do look at water, temperature, and smoke/co sensors as well as automated thermostats.
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May 13, 2016 20:36
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Leperflesh posted:Are you suggesting that if someone entered your home and stole stuff, and you had left the door unlocked, that your insurance company might refuse to pay out? It's really going to depend on your policy. This blogger seems to think that some insurers will refuse a claim if it looks like there was no sign of forced entry, and I really don't find that surprising at all. Insurance companies don't want to pay out on claims, and if the language of your policy allows them to do that because of something that you did or did not do, then you can be certain that they'll capitalize on that.
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May 16, 2016 04:56
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If you're too much of a football addict to miss a few minutes of the game while attending to the grill (for real, you should spend almost no time next to the grill while grilling) then just get a tablet that you can bring outside. Buying and installing an outdoor television seems like a waste of time and money when there are easier, cheaper, better options available
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May 23, 2016 18:26
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Elephanthead posted:Why are you going back inside? Oh because you don't have an outdoor TV that's why. I'm going back inside because it's probably cold or hot outside and grilling hardly requires spending any time standing next to the grill, a hypothetical outdoor TV wouldn't change that
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May 23, 2016 23:27
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Leperflesh posted:I know that you are trying to obliquely make some kind of point about people loving around with the food on their grill way too much when they're grilling, but you gotta understand that grilling isn't an American passtime just because it tastes good.  Okay, there are two issues hereI've been to a billion cookouts, and rarely do I see someone standing like an idiot over an open grill. I'm aware of the trope to which you're referring, but in my experience it's just not realistic. You can totally still wear the goofy apron and stand around drinking beer anywhere you want, you don't have to stand next to an open grill to do it. Are you really going to a lot of cookouts where the grill is being left open? If you know that it's often not a good idea, why don't you do anything to stop it? Second, do you really only use a grill while in a group? They don't only have to be used for group cooking. Grills keep cooking heat outside of the house, which is really great if you're in a hot climate. Leperflesh posted:
Hey do you see how that guy is holding the lid, and how the lid isn't just like on the ground or something? That implies that he's been keeping the lid on the grill and very recently opened it to flip or remove meat. Do you also see how that guy is by himself, and everyone else is off in the background sitting at a table... aka not next to the grill? This picture shows the opposite of what you're trying to show. How did you gently caress up this badly and not realize it? QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:51 on May 24, 2016 |
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May 24, 2016 01:45
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Kritzkrieg Kop posted:Hey, original solarium/sunroom question guy here. Grass yards are kind of the worst part about home ownership, so I say go for it. And if you have any grass left then toss a raised garden bet on it (or don't and just rip the grass out if that's a good option) and then plant something that you can eat later You could plant a potato mound, more home owners should have potato mounds. What's a potato mound, you ask? It's exactly what it sounds like. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 01:39
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Leperflesh posted:The problem I have with growing potatoes is that they're just about the cheapest food you can buy. So you're gonna go to a lot of manual labor in order to save yourself like $20 on potatoes. It's about 10 minutes of manual labor for about $20 worth of potatoes. They're super easy to grow and harvest. You can go all out with careful fertilization schedules if you want to grow super big potatoes in nicely organized rows or something but that's totally unnecessary.
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May 26, 2016 01:44
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Taste the Rainbugh posted:Yeah I think it was neighbors also. Also If they are as large as he represents them how didn't he hear all that going on? Wouldn't it be at least an hour or so worth of heavy work literally right outside his home Possibly it was done while he was literally anywhere else
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Jun 6, 2016 11:11
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Andy Dufresne posted:I was so happy that my corded mower took a poo poo earlier this year so I could replace it with a gas mower. Why would you ever want to switch to a gas mower? They're messier, heavier, and stinkier. And when you're done mowing BAM, get out the electric weed whacker and put it on the same cord Corded mower 4 life
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Jun 24, 2016 05:21
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Leviathan Song posted:They're simpler, lighter, Nope, neither of these are true. If you really hate having to use an electric cord then fine, that's personal preference, but gas mowers are most definitely not simpler or lighter. They might be comparable to battery-powered mowers, but certainly not the corded kind Case in point: Leviathan Song posted:As long as you sharpen the blades and change the oil once in a while it last forever. You've got three things to regularly worry about here: keeping it gassed up, changing the oil, and keeping the blade sharp. With electric mowers you only need to worry about the blade. My electric motor is also a lot quieter than my old gas mower.
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Jun 25, 2016 02:02
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litany of gulps posted:I've been running a middle of the line greenworks corded mower in Texas for a couple of years and had no issues. I didn't want to gently caress with storing a combustion engine and gas and oil and whatnot. Worst part is that the Mexicans always laugh at me. To be fair, I first saw an Asian man using a corded mower, and I laughed. Why did you laugh? Why do those other guys laugh? Is this some "don't want to look like I'm vacuuming the lawn" misogyny thing? FakePoet posted:What are the odds that a sprinkler system that possibly hasn't seen (consistent) use/maintenance in years would have zero issues with it? My brother and I bought a house in February, and haven't even messed with it yet, for a few reasons. By "haven't messed with" you mean that the system is running but you just haven't played with any of it yet? There's a decent chance that everything is fine, maybe one or more of the valves are leaky but that's easy to detect and fix if you just look/feel around the thing. It's unlikely that you have any underground leaks and I'm not even really sure how you'd check for such a thing other than by leaving the system off for awhile and seeing which parts go brown and which parts don't (the still-green parts would have leaky pipes under them) SiGmA_X posted:Brand suggestions, drip main line sizing for how many 1/4 lines, etc. I've never bothered actually thinking too carefully about the design of my drip system, but I can tell you that I buy all of my drip irrigation parts at Home Depot in separate pieces. I'm pretty sure they're all RainBird anyway, and if you buy one of the drip irrigation kits then you wind up paying more overall than if you had bought the pieces individually. I've got a 2-outlet watering timer, a pressure regulator on each outlet, and then I run 1/2 inch pipe to the watering boxes that need watering and 1/4 inch tubing off of that wherever drippers or soak hoses are needed. I don't really care for the 1/4 inch soak hoses that Home Depot has, they have this lovely coarse texture and they look kind of ugly compared to the normal 1/4 inch hoses; I've been slowly replacing my soak hoses with actual drippers.
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Jun 28, 2016 07:45
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Why on earth would someone put a washing machine on an upper floor
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Jul 8, 2016 04:31
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for what it's worth my front-loading washing machine has been nothing but wonderful
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Jul 8, 2016 08:52
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LogisticEarth posted:Most laundry is "generated" in the bedrooms. Changing clothes, sheets, bath towels, etc. Putting the machine upstairs means you don't have to carry laundry up and down every time you do the wash. I used to live with a 2nd floor front-loading washer and it was loud as gently caress, the vibration could be heard everywhere in the house. Apparently most of the manufacturers recommend against putting one on the second floor for this reason. In our current house, I'm happy having to walk up and down one flight of stairs instead of dealing with that. Second floor plumbing is also often a shitshow so I'm also happy to minimize those risks
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Jul 8, 2016 12:54
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Zhentar posted:I have a front load washer on my first floor, over basement space. No noise or vibration complaints, it's usually less noisy than most top loaders I've used. Mine too, but then there are a million people on the internet complaining about their 2nd floor front-loading washers so it's apparently a real common issue, as it was for me a long time ago. I don't know if there's any difference between a floor over basement space vs a second story floor Rurutia posted:Yeah mine doesn't really vibrate much at all. I was being facetious and implying that the advantage of having a washer right next to your upstairs bedroom was not worth the extra heartache and expense associated with upstairs washers
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Jul 8, 2016 19:29
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Rurutia posted:That's fine but did you expect no one to disagree with you? No, I'm just explaining what a rhetorical question is.
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Jul 8, 2016 22:37
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Rurutia posted:Probably fear mongering then cause I kept hearing about how it was a fire hazard and we were going to burn the house down around our baby. I think it depends a lot on your setup, our dryer vent tube has some grody grating on the outside-end that catches tons of lint and poo poo and we have to clean it out yearly. And possibly if you buy a bunch of new cottony clothes you'll get a lot more lint
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Jul 12, 2016 07:05
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Depends on how deep the scratches are. The basic idea is to sandpaper the area, apply mineral spirits, and then apply stain. Seal with Polyurethane when the stain has dried If the scratches are deep then you can buy some scratch-filling putty, and for that you'd do the sand + spirits thing, then fill the area, then sand + spirits again, then stain and seal.
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Jul 14, 2016 10:59
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That's great I'm still kind of new to this maintenance thing myself, but our home inspector was really cool and was ready to provide all sorts of handy maintenance information. Mostly it's poo poo like "look at the pipes under your sink, check for moisture beyond just condensation, tighten slightly if there's moisture" and "look at the irrigation gaskets, check for moisture, if there's moisture then something is wrong" Other than that it seems like a lot of common sense stuff that people just deliberately ignore for some reason. If an outlet stops working, hire an electrician, that sort of thing. We replaced the lovely old rubber hoses connecting the washer and the fridge to the water line with nice steel-braid hoses. That seemed like a good idea and it hardly cost anything. Keep things clean, generally. Don't let leaves pile up against the house. Keep trees trimmed back so that they're not touching the house. Check the dryer vent yearly, and if it's full of lint then clean it out. HVAC maintenance is something that I know nothing about but I think there are some pretty simple things to do there. You can at least keep the filters clean every few months (by either replacing them or cleaning them if it's the reusable kind) You're supposed to clean dirt off of your fridge's coils every 6-12 months but I don't know anyone who actually does this. It could save you a bunch of money, potentially
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Jul 14, 2016 20:16
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canyoneer posted:One of our friends in the neighborhood got a visit from an A/C contractor in the area. I guess the company that used to service their unit got bought by another so they called down the list offering free A/C system diagnostics. Their system has been a little weak (not as bad as yours), and they're worrying that their 15 year old unit is about to go. I don't know much about hvac systems but my guess is that they're more likely to fail on a hot day, meaning everyone will be calling for service at the same time and you might have to go without AC for awhile. Some people might willingly shell out extra to prevent that sort of thing I would also expect an older unit to consume more power, so maybe there's some savings to be had there to help justify it? No idea if that's accurate
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Jul 19, 2016 02:13
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I've never actually gone around up in my attic. It's not finished or anything and I haven't really had much reason to. Maybe just to do a brief inspection? What's the general rule, stick to the wood beams and you'll be fine? Bring wood planks?
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Jul 19, 2016 07:19
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emocrat posted:What do people here do for fire/smoke alarms? We had a minor scare the other night and are now looking at what we can do for real protection.  The International Association of Fire Fighters recommends that people only use Photoelectric smoke detectors, going so far as to recommend that you replace your Ionization and Dual-Sensor detectors with Photoelectric smoke detectorsIf you have gas hookups then it's also important to have carbon monoxide detectors, at least one near the bedrooms but more is preferable. Beyond making sure that you have photoelectric smoke detectors, the recommendation is that you check the batteries each month. That's it. There are many smoke alarm brands that can be interconnected so that they all go off when one goes off, some of them are very affordable (~$20 each, or cheaper if you buy a bundle). If you buy hard-wired smoke detectors, it's better to get the low-voltage kind. You don't need to connect your smoke alarms to the internet, that doesn't convey any safety advantages; the Nest is trendy but it's seriously overpriced.
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Jul 22, 2016 20:25
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