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Maybe they're actually fronts for laundering money? When you think about it, that would probably be a good vehicle for it, you don't need an office or anything to work out of, and blowing thousands of dollars for very little result is just how everyone expects home work/repair to go. 
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May 12, 2016 16:43
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The best thing to watch while grilling is cricket, because there is no chance that you will be distracted from the important tasks of drinking and distributing meat. Also, grilling while you watch a test match commits you to five days of grilling, and if anyone tries to stop you can you just say 'But the game is still on!'
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May 24, 2016 14:58
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My family used to put rat bait in the attic and while sometimes the rats would crawl off to die elsewhere, once in a while they would just croak in the ceiling and then there would be a slow permeation of dead rat smell until someone went up there and got rid of them or (in cases when we couldn't find them) the rat decomposed/mummified and the smell cleared. Our house also had solid walls and floors, so the only place they could die was in the attic. I imagine the smell is worse if they can manage to die inside the walls or under the floorboards or something.
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Jun 7, 2016 16:37
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Axiem posted:Re: mower chat. There is really only one option if you want a truly  mowing experience
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Jun 27, 2016 02:28
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LogisticEarth posted:Yep. Aren't those also the ones that have a really strong smell? My college campus was full of the drat things and it reeked all spring.
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Jul 6, 2016 16:07
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My parents have had a front-loading washer forever and never had issues, I don't think there is any particular problem with them except you can't interrupt the wash cycle without flooding your room. LogisticEarth posted:Of course, if you have a leak, it can be a big problem if the room isn't designed well. If I ever were to have a unit on the second floor, I'd definitely think about putting in a floor drain in case you ever had a break.
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Jul 8, 2016 16:50
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Rurutia posted:I can definitely interrupt the wash cycle of mine without flooding my room. HE washers shouldn't be using enough water to flow out of the washer when you interrupt them. I doubt their machine was HE. I remember watching it run and during parts of the cycle it would fill up so the waterline was at least halfway up the door. If you wanted to stop it you bumped it to the end so it drained before you opened the door. I am not surprised if new washers are better!
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Jul 8, 2016 22:20
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lovely houses that were built 80 years ago caught fire/fell down/were torn apart 75 or 70 or 65 years ago. In order to last for a hundred years, even with care, something has to be reasonably well built to start with. My sister's house was built almost 200 years ago, but there were a ton of other buildings put up at the same time that didn't make it that long. That isn't to say that we aren't building a lot of lovely housing now, people are definitely going to use cut rate materials or techniques of they know it will save money and the end product will be fine for some length of time, rather than methods that have been proven to work well and last, or even improved ones that will work even better. It's just that people were likely doing that all through history, and we are generally only exposed to the stuff that was built well while all the terrible poo poo got washed away. In 50 years you'll probably find big swathes of lovely houses are gone and we'll have a minority of the decently built and maintained ones hanging around, and people will point to those and say how 20th century artisans took their jobs seriously.
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Sep 22, 2016 20:46
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I think you just lay face down in the middle of it.
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Sep 28, 2016 20:58
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Elephanthead posted:Edit: You can also get a combo carbon monoxide one for a few bucks more if you burn any fuels in your house.
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Oct 14, 2016 14:35
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So what you're saying is that I'm never going to be able to buy a house in metro Boston. Good to know, I guess.
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Jan 27, 2017 15:33
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Boston makes everyone shovel out their sidewalks and its a total nightmare. One of the city council members wanted to exempt old and disabled people, but didn't include any provision on what happens to those sidewalks then - I assume they just stay unshoveled and everyone is hosed trying to use them? It hasn't happened yet. By regulation you're supposed to shovel out a 42" wide path so it can handle all mobility devices, but whenever we have a heavy snowfall the ploughs will drive snow up onto the curb so far you can't manage that, and there are a bunch of places where the actual sidewalk isn't 42" anyway.  This system also leads to no-man's lands where everyone disagrees over who shovels. There was a bridge where the walkway was left blocked because the DOT and city couldn't agree whose job it was, and there is a bustop outside a local community center that is never cleared because the city/transit/community center all maintain that it's the others job to clear it.
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Feb 15, 2017 21:48
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couldcareless posted:Me and my wife just pay different bills or expenditures and split monthly house payment in half. Personal debt is your responsibility and anything left is up for you to decide what you want to do. It honestly works out really well and lots of potential fights are avoided as a result. Out of curiosity, how do you handle stuff like retirement saving or health insurance? Do you plan that out together like house payments, or discuss it periodically, or just hope you're each doing ok?
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Feb 24, 2017 20:32
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Just park your own broken down car on your lawn, then no one can use it to turn around! Bonus: If you put it on cinder blocks people won't even be able to steal it.
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Mar 3, 2017 16:18
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Kinfolk Jones posted:While we're on the subject of natural gas, I have a question regarding a fire pit table. Would this be a good location to put one? It is about 124" from floor to ceiling. We have a natural gas line that runs almost exactly where we would want it and hope we can take advantage even though this is a covered patio. Thoughts? This was from last page, but you might want to check what sort of impact this would have on your home insurance. I imagine 'installing a fire under the roof with no chimney' is going to be one of those things that fucks with your coverage.
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Apr 3, 2017 15:52
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No Butt Stuff posted:Why the hell was he actually mowing 20 acres? Well to be fair, his dad wasn't mowing it.  Clearly he was helping his kid build character through adversity.
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Apr 18, 2017 14:42
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Pryor on Fire posted:I see raccoons get stuck inside dumpsters around here all the time, so just build the outside of your yard out of whatever the inside of dumpsters are made out of. Just make your attic super appealing and they'll go in there instead of messing with your yard!
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May 27, 2017 14:17
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On that topic, is there a goon-approved smoke detector? I'd like to get one of the ones with a 5 or 10 year life because I hate having to replace the batteries.
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Jun 15, 2017 19:43
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HEY NONG MAN posted:Smoke detectors have a life span on the order of years but you'll still need to swap the batteries yearly. They make alarms that have a lithium battery good for the lifespan of the actual unit, so that you don't have to replace the batteries every year (I feel like we're replacing them more often than that anyway, but maybe it's just because we never seem to get them all on the same cycle). I've been looking over some, but I don't know if they're really a good choice.
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Jun 15, 2017 21:02
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Thesaurus posted:Maybe my house is just small and easily monitored, but I don't find much hassle in replacing a couple batteries a couple times a year, at most. I dunno, maybe we have too many, but I feel weird about reducing the number just because of convenience. We have two in the basement where the dryers/furnaces/heaters are, two in each front and rear stairwell, one in the kitchen, one in the living room and one in the hallway.
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Jun 16, 2017 01:03
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I think we all know the chances that the previous owner did that.
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Jun 20, 2017 19:30
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Out of curiosity, do people with corded mowers ever run over the cord?
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Jul 13, 2017 19:08
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Leperflesh posted:I would guess that a person who owns a house that valuable might not do his own mowing. I am going to guess that mowing his own lawn would be far too reasonable for whoever owns that house. I suspect that he probably spends his time covered in wax pretending to be a mannequin in the bathroom or something.
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Jul 20, 2017 21:35
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Not true, depending on your climate they may become filled with centipedes or scorpions instead.
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Aug 1, 2017 15:41
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I have bought a bunch of HF stuff and it seems fine for simple things like hammers, rasps, spammers. I would probably spring for a better grade for anything with a motor though. Their throatless shear was surprisingly good.
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Sep 30, 2017 18:24
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Can you get a chainsaw with one of those crazy conductivity sensors that instantly stops table saws? Because that would be a cool thing. I'm extremely careful with tools but I still don't think I would run a chainsaw without something like that.
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Jun 5, 2018 14:48
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z0331 posted:Has anyone ever called in a general contractor and just gone around asking how much various things might cost? There are so many things I want to do but have no idea about the logistics behind them and feel like just having someone tell me "This would be around $too-many; that would require x, y, and z" would be helpful just to get a baseline understanding of what to expect. More or less; we actually did this when we were doing the inspection on our house, we did the normal inspection and then had a contractor come out and price a bunch of different things we figured we would want to take care of so we could work out what was reasonable immediately and what would be on the five or ten year lists. We walked around and talked about different things and potential options (ie, 'replace this furnace' and 'replace the furnace, but also change the installation location') Then he sent us a long set of quotes for different things that we discussed.
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Jun 18, 2018 15:48
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fatal oopsie-daisy posted:Has anyone here ever negotiated the price of their house down? I don't trust Zestimates as gospel, but a lot of the houses I'm looking at are $10,000-20,000 overpriced according to that. Don't trust Zestimates, it's just some algorithm churning around. One thing you can do is use the 'recently sold' filter to look at houses that have actually sold in the area - that would give you some idea of what places are actually selling for, rather than what they are listing at. You should also be able to ask your buyer's agent to show you some comparisons from the neighborhood, and they might be able to explain if there seem to be weird outliers (maybe they known one house is in a better school area, for instance). There isn't a good percentage to lowball because it's going to depend on what the listing is at relative to the market; maybe someone is listing high intending to come down to offers, but in a hot market people will also list low in order to drum up interest (because you will get more people coming to look at a property at $399,000 than $410,000 and maybe snag more offers that way). If its listed low, lowballing them is just going to get your offer trashed immediately, whether that is 20% below or 5% below.
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Jul 24, 2018 14:30
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It's been a while since I lived there, but Atlanta had areas getting swallowed whole by Kudzu. There was a derelict warehouse that basically disappeared beneath it on my commute, it was pretty cool.
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Jul 30, 2018 14:59
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Have you considered releasing termites into the drains to eat the wood pulp?
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Aug 7, 2018 19:24
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I have not joined Nextdoor because I am luddite, but I assume it's just like your typical police log without benefit of the deadpan delivery: quote:“A person flagged down an officer, at 8 a.m., to report a suspicious black male wearing a backpack, walking down the causeway toward Harbor Avenue. The complainant has seen the same male two days in a row at the same time. An officer reported the man is a security guard at the Eastern Yacht Club.”
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Aug 13, 2018 15:23
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If you trained them to use crossbows they wouldn't have problems with weasels!
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Aug 16, 2018 18:29
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Just build a chimney above your island going up through the ceiling.
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Sep 10, 2018 17:08
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It's not ok to just saw along the property line because that can potentially injure or kill a tree, and you don't get to freely destroy property just because it impinged on yours. Get an agreement with you neighbor or consult a lawyer. Or really both.
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Oct 13, 2018 18:41
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Our house had this really ugly still-life-fruit wallpaper border around the top of one room. My wife was just going to paint over it, but I said 'oh no we own this house, we should do things properly!' So I started removing the wallpaper and found out that the previous owners had no such views, they had just tacked it up over successive layers of wallpaper. Once I started I couldn't work out how to back down, so I ended up stripping off all the wallpaper. Under that was some sort of weird plaster and surfacing layer that is probably as old as the house and started to crumble from age once exposed. So now I am stuck having to remove those crumbling areas, replaster them, and probably apply some sort of skim coat before finally painting. I should have just painted over it all.
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Oct 22, 2018 14:55
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We somehow have two chimneys and no fireplaces. There's one that comes up through the kitchen that I guess might have vented an old stove in there, but any connections in the room were removed/hidden so it just serves the water heater. The second one comes up between the dining room and a side room, but again there's nothing visible in those rooms except some weird shaping in the walls. I dunno if someone in the past remodeled to hide it? Seems a little odd because mostly the house seems to have been preserved on its original plan. That chimney venting the boiler for our heat. We're getting a new combined boiler and heater and we're going to get them vented through the basement wall so we can seal the chimneys and not worry about having to have them cleaned, etc. Now I'm wondering if we have a fireplace hidden behind the walls somewhere. Pity you can't xray your house.
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Oct 26, 2018 14:25
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That's a good idea. We already finished painting the dining room, but the room on the other side is our wallpaper nightmare so there's no problem with punch some more holes there and doing some fishing before we finish it. I'm not sure I would actually excavate a fireplace if we found one, but it would be good to know.
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Oct 26, 2018 14:44
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Queen Victorian posted:Is that second chimney coming up in the middle of the house? And no fireplaces or walled-off protrusions where they would have been? If that's the case, you might want to make sure you don't have a huge column of bricks sitting on top of your upstairs joists... You mean like they cut out the chimney stack in the middle and just left the top half hanging? Pretty sure it's not doing that, the chimney runs all the way from the basement up through the roof and the boiler is hooked up to it in the basement to vent - if they cut the stack it would be venting into the walls, which, uh, I really hope isn't happening! There is still room for the full chimney to run in the structure. Here's a floorplan, please don't use this to kill me while I sleep ok:  I marked where the chimney's run with red. Both the dining room and the bedroom have weird wall lines which surround the chimney, my question is mostly whether there was ever a fireplace on that floor that was walled in/removed, or if it always just ran from basement to roof.It seems a little weird that it wouldn't have any fireplace at all given the age (1880). The chimney runs up between the bedrooms on the 2nd floor between the closets - it's not blacked out on the floorplan because they didn't measure the depths properly. The second chimney runs up through the back kitchen wall, I believe it would have been for a stove to vent into there; it also continues upstairs to make that weird protrusion in wall of the rear bedroom. I don't think that ever had a real fireplace, but I suppose it could have.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:46
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There's no visible patching on the downstairs floors, and they're aged enough I'm pretty sure they didn't replace the whole lot at any point (our entry has this odd sort of cross-hatched wood tiling that is nailed down with rectangular headed nails, so I think its the original floor). If it was a smallish fireplace it could have all been behind the current walling, though. The upstairs rooms are carpeted, so I don't know what the floors look like in there. We're planning to take up the carpets but that's more on a 5-year plan once we deal with more pressing stuff. I guess when we get around to it we'll find out what's going on there, maybe we'll find some clues. Queen Victorian posted:Also, love the super weird servant's quarters in the back. Do the butler stairs go straight into the bathroom? If we ever remodel that area I have no idea how we would bring them to code though, there's not much room to expand them. Probably why no one has meddled so far!
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Oct 26, 2018 17:15
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Oh yea, all our stairs are out of code, although not quite that badly. If we had to do something we could bring the front stairs to code (we'd have to bring the railing to proper height) and we have space in the basement to make those work. The back stairs though, like you said, we'd never fit them back in. I think we're required to have two stairways for fire code, so if we touched them we'd probably end up having to put a fire escape on the back of the house - that's what I've seen on other old houses that were remodeled inside. We'll just leave them as they are for now, they work fine and it's a useful back passage (although a little tricky if you're coming upstairs and someone is using that bathroom....) We just finished getting all the ancient electrical stuff brought up to code, which means that we can now get insulation work done. We couldn't before because knob and tube requires air cooling, so you can't pack insulation around it. We're also replacing the boiler and water heater. None of it is very exciting, but by the end of the year we'll be able to think about more comestic/fun stuff to work on instead. I love a lot of things about these old houses so it's mostly a matter trying to clean things up and bring them back to former glory. We're lucky no one came through in the 70s and gutted it.
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Oct 26, 2018 21:28
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