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GlyphGryph posted:Unless you have some weird super rigid tape, my experience on this wall seems to indicate that is very much not true. Maybe there's something going on with the wall I'm not understanding. I just use the standard blue 3m brand tape, stick about 3" down, then walk/unroll to the other side of the room, pull it taught and stick, then walk along it and push stick it in place properly I also have a laser level thing, that is great my wife uses it for out photo tiles and all sorts of room decorating projects, well worth the $80 or so over the last 8 years
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Mar 10, 2024 09:18
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You better go try and catch it
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Mar 12, 2024 00:28
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Time to start using those tidy bowl 2000 blue water tank sanitizers. Sounds like you're introducing a ton of sugar and ammonia which is going to always cause problems unless the water parameters are actively hostile to algae
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Mar 14, 2024 15:39
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m0therfux0r posted:Do those cause the same issues that the bleach tablets do? I keep reading about how a lot of those degrade the flappers/gaskets really quickly. I realize that's not an expensive fix when it happens, but I'd rather not deal with it all the time. It'll degrade the rubber in like, 7 years instead of 15. You're not going to be changing the flapper every 6 months
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Mar 14, 2024 16:59
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I'd probably dump a gallon of bleach in the upper tank, let it sit all day, then flush it once, then add a gallon of bleach to the bowl and let it sit overnight. That ought to kill/sanitize everything; stuff that gets caked up can survive a pretty intense bleaching event. After that your bowl sanitizer thing should be able to keep up with it
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Mar 15, 2024 01:10
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Shifty Pony posted:I'm in the market for a Murphy bed, but really don't have any idea where to start. Any suggestions from folks? I went deep down this rabbit hole and the answer is Costco's website
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Mar 19, 2024 05:42
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Our boat moves from county to county when we change marinas, usually less than a year, and our address pretty regularly. Eventually we'll keep the boat in the same marina long enough and live at the same address and the tax man will find us But in every case they've waived the late penalty when I called to ask about it. Went from $1000 with penalties down to $500. Might be different for property tax; land property tax is compulsory; boat taxes might only be up to the local comptroller to find and levy according to CA law but I talk have no idea
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Mar 22, 2024 21:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:What's making homeowner's insurance so hard to get now? Is this a CA-specific wildfire thing? CA state law limits how much insurance rates can go up per year With 10%+ inflation since covid a lot of home owners are effectively paying below market rate for home insurance Labor rates in America, and in California in particular, are rising way faster than state law would allow them to raise insurance rates, so they're doing a passive aggressive brinksmanship thing to force legislator's hand. Legislators are hesitant to look like they're giving insurance companies so they're not increasing the annual cap. As a result a lot of people who are insurance companies least profitable customers are getting dropped to maintain correct profit margins Between Florida and California it sure looks like private insurance companies aren't going to be around in those states much longer, imo
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Mar 23, 2024 22:27
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esquilax posted:It's not only a rate increase cap. In CA insurers are generally forbidden to use forward looking models to price wildfire coverage, l I've been shouted down about this, and I'm happy (?) to be wrong, but California inadvertently did a pretty good job of burning up the largest contiguous chunks of state/national Forest. I think we still have 1-2 more Really Bad years but if you look at the 30 year "raging, out of control forest fire" maps, we're very nearly out of 150+ acre contiguous areas that haven't had a forest fire  I'm cautiously optimistic that we've burnt up 45% of the last 75+ years worth of pine needles, and modern forest husbandry is allowing bigger and larger controlled burns going forward, so, Also I'm drunk on 2 years of above average rainfall immediately following a media blitz about the "mega drought" so I'm probably doubly wrong TL;DR skip this post
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Mar 24, 2024 07:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'd hazard a guess that there's a substantial amount of residue in the toilet innards, and since you can't get in there to scrub it, it's just slowly working its way free from the movement of water. The bleach has probably killed it all at this point though. Yeah if you Google "cutaway toilet" there's an alarming amount of surface area for crap to grow in there, that you'll never be able to see. Probably 6x what you can see in the bowl, maybe more. It's probably all dead but without mechanical scrubbing, the dead algae is going to waft out of there periodically for a couple of weeks You might try to flush 2 gallons of pool grade chlorine through it (about $20), and let it sit in the bowl overnight now that new dead algae has been exposed and let it oxidize and it'll release from the toilet faster Whatever you do, don't pee in pool grade chlorine toilet water, it will release toxic gas. Flush it 5+ times before using it
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Mar 25, 2024 19:15
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The Internet says I can get a skylight installed for $2500 That seems... Low? My home office has a SW exposure but it's a little dark because the window is 80% as big as it ought to be We have 4 existing skylights and they don't appear to be leaking, and bring in a ton of light despite having a northern exposure. The correct time to do the skylight is when we do the roof, but we've got at least 10 years before we need to do the roof
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Mar 26, 2024 01:29
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Shifty Pony posted:If you just want light then a tubular skylight like a Solatube or Velux Sun Tunnel would be a better solution. They neatly fit between rafters, can (to some degree) maneuver around obstacles, and don't require any more ceiling refinishing than a new can light. All that makes them much cheaper to install despite the actual unit potentially costing more. We have two in our bedroom and two in our sitting room and they just pour in light; and I love the way the sun tracks/clocks through the room throughout the day. And then the moonlight during a full moon, too.  I want them as big as possible. Guessing, but the existing ones look like they're 24x36" and fit between the rafters.Tangential side note the room I had in high school had blackout shades before we moved in, I was an absolute zombie because I'd stay up all night and sleep past noon because there was no sense of time passing; this is the first house where I actually wake up naturally because it's so goddamn bright in here by 7am.
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Mar 27, 2024 03:24
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It gives me like 20 minutes of personal time before my toddler wakes up and and starts screaming it's pretty great
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Mar 27, 2024 03:42
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Sundae posted:I have a saw and will do it for you for $250. Do you have a hole saw?
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Mar 28, 2024 03:45
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As someone who spent an alarming amount of time building cheap boats out of even cheaper 1/8" plywood, poorly painting them with "wrong color" house paint, then leaving them to (not) rot in my mom's side yard for a decade and a half sitting on damp clay, I think you can safely trust the plywood will be just fine with a roof over it six inches off the ground. It's pretty hard to gently caress up plywood unless you build giant bowls to correct rain water with and even then it's pretty resilient
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Apr 2, 2024 00:22
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CarForumPoster posted:They’re def bowl shaped. So long as they're painted with the cheapest latex exterior house paint, then left to cook in UV indefinitely, they ought to hold up for 10 years. Unless they're soaking in a pool made from a tarp, in which case they'll last 7 years No comment about OC measurements, we call those bulkheads and they're measured in feet not inches on boats Hadlock fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 01:32
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You should set the AC to 60F then crawl in the attic/basement with a rented FLIR thermo camera to look for obvious leaks I lived in a duplex. My ac bill was like $125, $160 on the absolute hottest month My neighbor was paying $550-600 mo Turns out they had multiple rips in the big central tube in the attic. Not enough to completely ruin air flow, but enough that half their air was being vented into the attic Fixed their AC leak and their bill went down to about $200 max
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Apr 2, 2024 03:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit 2: radon isn't great, but it's easy to work around. It's only scary because if you don't test and live in a plume of it for 30 years bad poo poo can happen. In the heavily regulated EU some people do (controlled) radon treatment for pain therapy. Tom Scott gave a tour of the place maybe a year ago. It's in a cave with naturally occurring radon, but they control the air flow in areas visitors go to Probably not great to do that recreationally all the time, but point is, EU allows voluntary exposure as a business to exist, so some expert somewhere determined that short term exposure wasn't all that bad Hadlock fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 2, 2024 |
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Apr 2, 2024 20:51
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PerniciousKnid posted:Nobody has time to learn all that poo poo when we're all working and commuting for 60 hours a week and driving the kids around all evening. Like yeah it's not that hard to caulk and sew and cook blah blah blah but when you add it all up it's way more than most people can handle unless you live the cushiest of lives. Agree I make somewhere in the top 50th percentile, so does my wife, we WFH and we only have one kid, and she doesn't have any disabilities or stuff to make our life exponentially harder. By parenting standards I've got it very very easy. The only thing we argume about is like, who is going to drive the kid 3 minutes to daycare, and who's turn it is to do the dishes. Pretty good I spent like six hours putting together one of those kallax cube storage systems plus 25 of those cubes that go in it. That's my whole Saturday night. I left the house to go pick it up around 6pm and when I got it unloaded and fully assembled and mounted to the wall with the boxes in it it was almost 1am. Each of those flat pack boxes has between 4 and 6 bolts holding them together. If I had to do it again I'd just pay a task rabbit or an IKEA approved installer to do it. I also paid some guy $400 to replumb the kitchen sink because the drain looked like Gary had been drinking when he "I can do it for cheaper" and I just don't have the energy to become a plumber with best practices, finding out what pipe glue is the best, and then refixing it when it starts leaking Between being sick 30% of the time from daycare, and giving my kid attention every waking hour, I'm just loving shot. When I see handyman trucks parked outside of my neighbors houses I slow down and take pictures of the phone number painted on the side of the truck Kids are exhausting
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Apr 4, 2024 17:46
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Well like half that time was the 45 minutes each way to IKEA, probably that much time at the store finding all the accessories etc plus loading and unloading it from our sedan which it just barely fit in is three hours right there. It's big enough (6x6') you need to clear a large area to put it together on it's side too, which, given we didn't get toy shelving before this, was a struggle Plus dealing with a 3 year old who is intensely interested in the shelf you bought to store all their toys "is this FOR ME?" *picks up a handful of irreplaceable IKEA specific parts*
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Apr 4, 2024 19:47
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Yeah the quality delta between IKEA and everyone else is just stunning I bought a solid mango wood thing from Wayfair over the pandemic, it's held up very well Side note, I bought these pliers from harbor freight recently, they are excellent for pushing in 256 tiny wooden dowels. In addition to the regular side grippy stuff, they have, uh, puckered lips to grab on to stuff. Just wrap your lips around that hard wood and you're good to go. I think they're supposed to be for grabbing rusty stripped screws, but they're excellent for assembling flat pack dowel pins https://www.harborfreight.com/8-in-fast-adjust-push-button-slip-joint-pliers-70310.html $22, lifetime warranty from harbor freight https://toolguyd.com/harbor-freight-pliers-knipex-twingrip/ Knipex sells the OG version for $35, but knipex are really hard to find at retail, even harder to warranty Hadlock fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Apr 4, 2024 |
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Apr 4, 2024 21:59
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How well does primer adhere to cured primer. A lot of times cold joints don't matter, but sometimes they do Edit: relative humidity counts for a lot, sometimes
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Apr 5, 2024 00:26
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The fun thing to know is that basically all American insurers buy insurance for themselves, so that if they pay out more than they take in, they're insured. This is sold by reinsurers, which is a sort of cross between the GoT iron bank, and a shadowy cabal of swiss bankers, who actually run the show (actually not making this up). Like four companies in Switzerland underwrite all American insurance. If rates are going up it's probably because of California and Florida, and the reinsurers lost money so they're raising their rates, which impact American insurance rates
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Apr 8, 2024 04:09
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We have an in ground pool with kind of patchy looking floor I'm guessing what's remaining is the original pool paint, or whatever. The "plaster" itself is fine, it just looks weird with lighter and grimier sections, looks like the automatic pool cleaner cleaned certain areas more than others Do I just need to pay a guy to drain it, sand it down and then repaint it. I think we'd also like to replace the rim of rock around the edge, it looks like some kind of natural sand stone and after 20 years is looking pretty rough. I think this is called the coping A full "replaster" can cost $10-30k I guess? I don't think I need that. The pool is about 20 years old and showing no wear besides needing new paint But I have no idea about how this works
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Apr 9, 2024 23:47
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Next time it rains and the ground is soft you can just go after them with a $8 pair of gardening shears. They will degrade in a couple years, maybe. Looks like a non issue Agree those look like runners from a much larger tree maybe 15'-20' away
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Apr 11, 2024 20:15
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Tangentially related, but we have a resume thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3553582
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Apr 15, 2024 01:54
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Apr 15, 2024 03:45
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One old house we were in, the hot water heater was in the garage, and the bedrooms/bathrooms were all on the far side of the house ~65+ feet away, so that's like 2.3 gallons, assuming zero heat loss Here in California we have hyper lovely water restrictors on all the faucets. Doing water changes on my aquariums is a Forever Task unless I go down and use the utility sink in the garage or garden hose
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Apr 17, 2024 23:13
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I mean, California only allocates a small amount of water for residential use (most of it is allocated for important things like growing almonds we export out of state) so mandating the restrictors probably does save a lot of water, allowing wealthy land owners to grow and export more almonds Every time you turn on your unrestricted tap, it's like dollar bills leaving the almond farmer's wallet and going down the drain Or something Water rights in California are hosed up, but restrictors are generally good for preserving water, particularly in dry years
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Apr 18, 2024 18:52
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Your local full service pool shop (Leslie's) will test your water for free, and probably your aquarium shop too. They won't test for stuff like arsenic and lead or coliform bacteria though. About 50% of water companies/cities will test your water for free if you're on their system. Doesn't apply if you're on well water, of course
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Apr 18, 2024 23:09
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Is the rod everything is hanging from, installed half an inch too low? If that's the case, seems like it's best to just open up that whole area, install a modern rod at the correct height, then patch over the area and paint.
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Apr 19, 2024 05:35
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Just make sure you use approved fire retardant expanding foam in your walls, rather than the flammable stuff
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Apr 19, 2024 17:44
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Kefit posted:I'm hesitant to attack the bar hanger with anything too forceful because there's a pipe that crosses about half an inch above it. That's probably why your fan is hanging a half inch lower than it's supposed to. Can you mount the fan 16" left or right (or whatever your joist spacing is) where no pipe is in the way, or, maybe there's a V shaped hanger that only needs to attach to one 2x4 instead of bridging between two
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Apr 19, 2024 22:28
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Option B is a 4" grinder. I wish I'd spent the $14 on the cheap model at harbor freight a decade ago. Between the cut off blade and the grinder disc you can do enormous sums of money worth of damage to your house
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Apr 21, 2024 22:55
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Verman posted:It all depends on what kind of wood you're cutting, how big the wood is, and how often you'll use it. I'm not a current chain saw owner, but growing up we had a corded 120v plug in chain saw in the 80s and 90s, usually attached to two 100' extension cords plugged end to end The other thing I've seen is to undercut the limb, cut a ~0.5-1cm groove on the bottom side of the limb, to give the tree a place to make a clean break, THEN cut through the limb from the top. Otherwise you end up risking the limb breaking, then peeling a bunch of good healthy tree/tree bark as it falls down, like a banana  If you're already invested in a battery system, then just get the battery powered one I guess
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Apr 25, 2024 18:06
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Cleaning service makes my wife Very Happy I don't ask what it costs and she doesn't tell me It also helps with the rhythm of the house and helps reset the "baseline" of cleanliness and order. For us, once the house reaches a certain level of chaos, things go off the deep end very quickly We have the same ladies as the neighbors across the street, they show up weekly or twice monthly (I forget) for about 60-90 min Hadlock fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Apr 26, 2024 |
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Apr 26, 2024 02:14
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I have the $7 harbor freight folding version of that manual branch lopper. It's green and says 7TPI which I assume to mean 7 teeth per inch We had a bunch of thick woody bushes on the corner that were a hazard to navigation/probable legal liability, most were 1" but the "trunk" on a few were 3" and it went right through them despite being effectively hardwood CarForumPoster posted:Homeowners: I own like 8 different power saws, primarily to attract a mate. New thread title?
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Apr 26, 2024 18:25
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Safety squirrel would like to remind you those cables are carrying a (pretty safe) voltage of 30-50v before you start cutting them with scissors. It's probably inconsequential but just FYI There's some tutorials out there on how to charge your cell phone from a POTS line in an emergency using a $0.12 voltage converter chip from, wherever you buy that stuff, now that RadioShack is gone
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Apr 26, 2024 20:52
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Sundae posted:That's why you protect yourself by keeping at least 18" of electric chainsaw between yourself and the wires at all times. In theory if you're using an Ego powered saw, then yeah it's got a 56v battery and the grip should be insulated to at least 56v, and the line is a max of 50v If you're using an 18v Milwaukee or something, on paper it might not be rated to cut through live telephone lines
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Apr 26, 2024 21:01
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 12:40 |
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We have a 16x20' deck I initially wanted a ~14x18' shade. So I got that last year. Turns out rectangles are hard to keep in tension especially as they stretch out. This year we're getting a more reasonable ~8x8x8' triangle I don't like how much of the sky it blocks, especially since ours attaches to the house on two sides Our friends put in a pergola thing off their house which is 20'+ up in the air which I really liked. Make sure it's at least 12' off the ground
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Apr 29, 2024 17:19
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