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BadSamaritan posted:That said, if you’re in an area where most houses are new construction, try to get referrals for contractors that work on older houses and know what to expect. Also be prepared for nothing to be truly square. Ball Tazeman posted:Yanked out the giant cedar bushes from the front of the house today and found this cement going around the front of the house? I want to just make this a nice garden bed, should I work to expose it all or just cover it with landscaping material, dirt and rocks like the PO had done? That cement is keeping runoff water from contacting the sills of your house; it should be sloping away from the house. You do not want dirt on top of that cement. You do your landscaping in front of it, and put in tall plants in the back to hid the foundation.
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Aug 8, 2021 00:05
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Edit: didn't see what he was talking about in the picture...
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Aug 8, 2021 06:13
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So in order to stop points for entry for mice, we shoved some steel wool next to the radiator pipes where there is a gap in the subfloor in carpeted areas (the wood floor ones we were able to spray foam from the basement). These ones also aren’t accessible from the basement because of how the foundation meets the sill and wall. Anyway, the cat keeps yanking the steel wool out from under the radiators every time we put it back, can we just fill in foam from the top? We have a low pressure foam, couldn’t find any of the anti-pest stuff. Edit: just doing some research and it looks like having that next to heating pipes is a bad and can cause toxic fumes/melting. Cool thanks dad. So now I have to figure out how to remove it and what to fill with. Ball Tazeman fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Aug 8, 2021 |
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Aug 8, 2021 21:15
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Ball Tazeman posted:Edit: just doing some research and it looks like having that next to heating pipes is a bad and can cause toxic fumes/melting. Cool thanks dad. So now I have to figure out how to remove it and what to fill with. Steel wool is literally just steel. Where did you find someone saying it's toxic when heated to normal residential system temperatures?
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Aug 8, 2021 21:29
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Holy goddamn, getting third-floor flooring installed to match our second floor (which is nailed down oak with a double border of 1" walnut) apparently would be craaaaaazy expensive. Yikes.
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Aug 8, 2021 21:29
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Motronic posted:Steel wool is literally just steel. Where did you find someone saying it's toxic when heated to normal residential system temperatures? Isn't copper wool a thing too if you're really worried about steel and want a non edible barrier?
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Aug 8, 2021 21:32
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Deviant posted:Isn't copper wool a thing too if you're really worried about steel and want a non edible barrier? Good old Chore Boy
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Aug 8, 2021 21:34
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Motronic posted:Steel wool is literally just steel. Where did you find someone saying it's toxic when heated to normal residential system temperatures? No I meant the foam. The steel wool I’m reading is a fire hazard and also kitten keeps yanking them out. Sorry it was a little unclear.
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Aug 8, 2021 21:36
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Steel wool isn't going to catch at residential hydronic heat temperatures. You need to get it to several hundred degrees Celsius for it to autoignite or expose it to flames or sparks.
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Aug 8, 2021 21:41
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corgski posted:Steel wool isn't going to catch at residential hydronic heat temperatures. You need to get it to several hundred degrees Celsius for it to autoignite or expose it to flames or sparks. And considering it's being packed in it's even harder to ignite. This is all a non-issue. If you have cats going after it cover it with something. There are split/hinged escutcheons to use as finishers that will completely hide the steel wool packed in there.
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Aug 8, 2021 21:45
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Okay sorry very unclear. Some of it is spray foamed, learning now that it should not have been used next to heating pipes. Some of it (in the carpeted areas) has steel wool, in which the cat seems to get a hold of every time we replace it. Looking like copper mesh/wool to fill then putting a metal eschutcheon on top to prevent kitty getting at it might work?
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Aug 8, 2021 22:05
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At my last slum rental, I shoved steel wool in the entry points and covered it up with appropriately sized hardware cloth stapled into the wall. Because slum.
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Aug 8, 2021 22:05
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I put thin strips of packing tape over the steel wool my cat keeps pulling out of the radiator pipe holes. She hates the feel of the tape enough that she leaves it alone now. It only touches like 1/4 inch of floor on either side. But I’m in an apartment and the landlord very obviously does not care about tape anywhere if the painted over kids stickers and pieces of scotch tape are anything to go by.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:43
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Ball Tazeman posted:So in order to stop points for entry for mice, we shoved some steel wool next to the radiator pipes where there is a gap in the subfloor in carpeted areas (the wood floor ones we were able to spray foam from the basement). These ones also aren’t accessible from the basement because of how the foundation meets the sill and wall. Anyway, the cat keeps yanking the steel wool out from under the radiators every time we put it back, can we just fill in foam from the top? We have a low pressure foam, couldn’t find any of the anti-pest stuff. Is this what you're looking for? https://www.homedepot.com/b/Plumbing-Plumbing-Parts-Drain-Parts-Escutcheons-Plates/N-5yc1vZc6ao Find whatever one fits and toss that on the top of the pipe. I would not expect these to stop mice, but they will stop your cat. I'm assuming these are big cast-iron radiators with pipes coming up from the floor?
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Aug 9, 2021 01:40
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devicenull posted:Is this what you're looking for? https://www.homedepot.com/b/Plumbing-Plumbing-Parts-Drain-Parts-Escutcheons-Plates/N-5yc1vZc6ao Find whatever one fits and toss that on the top of the pipe. I would not expect these to stop mice, but they will stop your cat. Baseboard radiators. The lovely metal ones with a copper pipe going through. But yeah, I think the plan is to remove the foam and steel wool. Shove copper wool in all of the holes. Cover it all with those things to keep the cat out of em.
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Aug 9, 2021 01:51
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Ball Tazeman posted:Baseboard radiators. The lovely metal ones with a copper pipe going through. But yeah, I think the plan is to remove the foam and steel wool. Shove copper wool in all of the holes. Cover it all with those things to keep the cat out of em. Wait, are these universally lovely? Or is there a particularly lovely variety? I ask because we're going to be working on this very thing soon.
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Aug 9, 2021 01:54
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Ball Tazeman posted:Baseboard radiators. The lovely metal ones with a copper pipe going through. But yeah, I think the plan is to remove the foam and steel wool. Shove copper wool in all of the holes. Cover it all with those things to keep the cat out of em. How is the cat even getting inside the baseboards in the first place? There should be some sort of end cap on it - https://www.homedepot.com/p/Slant-Fin-Fine-Line-30-3-3-4-in-Right-Hand-End-Cap-for-Baseboard-Heaters-in-Nu-White-101-405/202312902 which should be easy to affix to prevent the cat from getting in. Can you take a picture of what hole you're trying to fill?  cruft posted:Wait, are these universally lovely? Or is there a particularly lovely variety? I had these in my house growing up.. they are uh, not great from my experience. But that also might be because my house was super drafty. I don't think they have the same advantages as the giant fuckoff radiators.
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Aug 9, 2021 01:57
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cruft posted:Wait, are these universally lovely? Or is there a particularly lovely variety? They are just a pain in the rear end to clean, bulky, and rust really easily. There are some nice covers, but the basic ones are ugly and get a lot of poo poo stuck in them. Edit: ^^ she is a kitten. Her little paws get right under the end caps
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Aug 9, 2021 01:57
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Today I was my own PO. I've been working on rewiring my house now that I have a breaker panel with grounds, and today I was putting the gas water heater on its own breaker. Well I added the outlet in the closet for it when I moved in and wired it with 12/2 planning for the future so it should have just been a matter of running the wire from the panel and splicing the two ends together in the attic. Did it all and then checked the outlet only to find it's still not showing a ground. I popped the outlet off to find that not only did I not connect the ground wire to the outlet when I put it in, but that I cut the ground wire all the way back to the back of the box for some reason???  Luckily I was able to get enough of the copper out to hook a pigtail up with a wago, but god drat was I an idiot.
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Aug 9, 2021 02:11
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Ball Tazeman posted:They are just a pain in the rear end to clean, bulky, and rust really easily. There are some nice covers, but the basic ones are ugly and get a lot of poo poo stuck in them. Put some sticky tape under all of them, I'm sure she'll hate getting it stuck and learn real quick.
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Aug 9, 2021 02:20
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SpartanIvy posted:Today I was my own PO. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector?
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Aug 9, 2021 02:21
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devicenull posted:Do you have a carbon monoxide detector?  That story kept me up at night when I first moved into my house with gas appliances. I do have a CO detector in the sealed water heater closet as well as one in each bedroom and the connecting hallway so I think my mistake was just from a simple oversight and not a carbon monoxide induced maligned personality.
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Aug 9, 2021 02:32
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devicenull posted:Put some sticky tape under all of them, I'm sure she'll hate getting it stuck and learn real quick. My one cat likes chewing / eating plastic, she'd probably be happy. She's lucky she's cute.
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Aug 9, 2021 04:27
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SpartanIvy posted:Today I was my own PO. Whomst among us... Also I think the subforum should be renamed P.O. Bullshit
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Aug 9, 2021 04:57
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I am become Previous Owner, the destroyer of houses.
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Aug 9, 2021 05:19
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Queen Victorian posted:I am become Previous Owner, the destroyer of houses. Damnit the current thread title’s only had a few days
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Aug 9, 2021 06:07
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Queen Victorian posted:I am become Previous Owner, the destroyer of houses. Agh the work I did when I was a poor & desperate homeowner in the 1990s on this place - electric and plumbing - I have lost count of the number of times I have re-done something, initially puzzled by, "what rear end in a top hat did this bullshit?" only to realize it was me. Nothing I did thirty years ago was particularly dangerous, and it served...but drat, I spent weeks shining heavy corrosion off of copper lines I'd repaired but not bothered to clean/shine up at the time. Then there's the ceremonial replacement of gate valves with ball units. It is the curse of never moving, along with restoring poo poo that I already restored once and just aged out, like my front porch wood trim/paint. It's a southern exposure, so it gets UV-blasted.
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Aug 9, 2021 15:03
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BadSamaritan posted:A large portion of the housing stock is over 100 years old here (mine is about 130-140 years old- it was built before the town books were really formalized). Honestly, while it has some problems, it’s a really solid house, and a lot of the bigger things we do have to deal with are more due to PO decisions from the 70s-00s. So true.  We’ve been slowly pulling up carpet in the bedrooms and redoing the hardwood floors. This is the last one. That’s brown paint over a layer of light mint green. I think there was white under that, too. Another room had red splatter on top of black. Two others didn’t have paint. After sanding.  There’s also thick white paint on pretty much all the trim except the master bedroom, which was kept stained wood. And for one more fun thing that I don’t know if we’ll ever fix, a lot of rooms have paneling that was clearly placed on top of the old plaster walls, to the point where it’s almost flush with door and window mounding. You can see where they join poorly in the corner in that picture. I guess they didn’t know how or didn’t want to deal with plaster repair or replacement with drywall.
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Aug 9, 2021 15:25
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So my previous house has hardwood floors. Very nice hardwood floors in perfect condition. Because they were covered with tan rental apartment grade wall to wall carpet. The guy's brother lives next door, he's in his 80s. He told me "yeah, my brother never really got out of the mindset from when we grew up that if you had bare floors it meant you were poor." So, uh.....thanks for keeping them nice and new for me I guess!
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Aug 9, 2021 15:43
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Sounds like my dad. My folks bought a lovely 1880s house in the early 90s that hadn't been renovated since the late 60s, and my mom has been battling him to uncover the beautiful wood floors room by carpeted room. Mom is a get poo poo done DIY type, so she managed to pull the carpet in the huge living room and got it prepped and partially finished between 8-5 one day while dad was at work. They've pretty much reached a truce now, with carpet in the family room and master bedroom. Furnace chat: this house had a coal burning furnace when we moved in, which was not at all common in the area. There was the original coal chute that went down into a storage room in the basement next to the furnace, and it was my job to go down and feed the fire every morning. Was fun for a while but got old pretty quick. They replaced that furnace a year or two later with a hybrid wood burning / natural gas model that was absolutely gigantic. It looked like a 1/4 scale locomotive engine. So instead of shoveling coal down the chute and into the furnace, we had to split logs and throw them down the chute instead. Curiously, they switched that one out for a solely natural gas furnace after the last of the kids moved out.
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Aug 9, 2021 16:18
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PainterofCrap posted:Agh the work I did when I was a poor & desperate homeowner in the 1990s on this place - electric and plumbing - I think I first invoked the curse when I made a shim out of cardboard and put it behind the strike plate of a door that wasn't latching well, on top of several shims that were already there, probably added over the years as the house slowly settled and the jamb got more out of square. Six months later the door is latching slightly less well, probably because the cardboard is all compressed now. It'd take me five minutes to add another cardboard shim, but I know I don't want to venture too far down this path. I can at least be thankful that I'm finding jambs full of shims and not sanded down wonky doors. You can shim/straighten/replace a crooked jamb, but you can't unfuck a door that's been sanded/sawn to fit a crooked jamb. corgski posted:Damnit the current thread title’s only had a few days Aw shucks my first thread title!  Except of course I went and checked the original quote and saw that I missed the "now" at the beginning, which I think makes it better and I'm feeling dumb for forgetting it. Why am I so anal retentive? If only I could direct it towards my house in such a way that I do correct and meticulous work instead of lovely/easy PO-grade, good-for-now fixes while screaming inside and then feeling dirty and guilty afterwards because I didn't do it right the first time. Like with the cardboard shim. Should have gone and gotten a real shim in the first place and then consulted with the millwork guy about the eventuality of new jambs and rehanging doors (and replacing the several missing doors) and poo poo because none of the doors fit particularly well and it'd be really nice to have doors that all latched properly and also a way to close off the kitchen so I can cook in peace (just my luck that 3 out of 4 missing doors go to the kitchen).
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Aug 9, 2021 16:24
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Queen Victorian posted:Why am I so anal retentive? Eh, I consider this kind of thing to be a reasonable triage. You want to know if the doors are continuing to go out of square (and which ones) BEFORE you spend the money on millwork and re-hanging, because you may be just a couple of lally columns away from stopping and reversing the problem. You need time in the house to figure that out.
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Aug 9, 2021 16:31
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Enos Cabell posted:Sounds like my dad. My folks bought a lovely 1880s house in the early 90s that hadn't been renovated since the late 60s, and my mom has been battling him to uncover the beautiful wood floors room by carpeted room. Mom is a get poo poo done DIY type, so she managed to pull the carpet in the huge living room and got it prepped and partially finished between 8-5 one day while dad was at work. They've pretty much reached a truce now, with carpet in the family room and master bedroom. My wife hates carpet. I don't necessarily, but rugs over wood just looks so much better and fits the house (1890s Dutch colonial). I don't know if it's a regional thing? I'm always longingly looking at listings for 1800s farmhouses in Maine and they all have wide-plank pine floors and they're beautiful. In our basement, next to the chimney, we have an old boarded up panel that I think used to be the coal delivery chute. We also have a little panel in the fireplace you open and sweep ash into, where it falls down and can be cleaned out in the basement. I didn't even know that until we had our chimney cleaned. Old houses are neat. 
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Aug 9, 2021 16:42
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I purchased a two family house 14 months ago. The inlaw apartment has a Navien CH-210 combination hot water until that provides heat and hot water for that unit. It failed the first time about 6 months after we moved in. It was leaking water and required replacement of the igniter. Now, 7 months later, it's intermittently not producing hot water and according to my daughter "the shower hot water smells like Rust/dirt." We are on well water, and I do have a sediment filter (50 microns). The unit was installed back in 2012 and I very much doubt it's been maintained properly. Any techs know anything about this? Should I just dump it and go back to an old school hot water heater? Should I continue to hate everything high efficiency because it's all unreliable bullshit that's expensive to fix?
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Aug 9, 2021 17:11
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z0331 posted:My wife hates carpet. I don't necessarily, but rugs over wood just looks so much better and fits the house (1890s Dutch colonial). I don't know if it's a regional thing? I'm always longingly looking at listings for 1800s farmhouses in Maine and they all have wide-plank pine floors and they're beautiful. Very similar here. Everyone with nice wood floors puts rugs around so you have the sound absorption/comfort, but can still see the floors. daslog posted:I purchased a two family house 14 months ago. The inlaw apartment has a Navien CH-210 combination hot water until that provides heat and hot water for that unit. It failed the first time about 6 months after we moved in. It was leaking water and required replacement of the igniter. Now, 7 months later, it's intermittently not producing hot water and according to my daughter "the shower hot water smells like Rust/dirt." We are on well water, and I do have a sediment filter (50 microns). The unit was installed back in 2012 and I very much doubt it's been maintained properly. Where was it leaking from before? Sounds like both of the coil loops are trashed. Which isn't a surprise at that age with no maintenance. You ABSOLUTELY NEED to service those things annually. And that includes flushing them. The rust/dirt thing is probably the domestic hot water loop getting cross contaminated with the hydronic heating loop water. That poo poo's nasty. Once they need that poo poo replaced it's usually more cost effective to just replace the whole unit.
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Aug 9, 2021 17:13
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Motronic posted:Where was it leaking from before? Sounds like both of the coil loops are trashed. Which isn't a surprise at that age with no maintenance. You ABSOLUTELY NEED to service those things annually. And that includes flushing them. Yes it was leaking 6 months ago when the tech came out. So your thought is to just trash the whole thing?
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Aug 9, 2021 17:22
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daslog posted:Yes it was leaking 6 months ago when the tech came out. So your thought is to just trash the whole thing? Depends on what shape it's in and what's wrong now. If they already replaced a coil and just screwed it up maybe not. No saying without looking at it, just cautioning to not be surprised if the recommendation is to replace.
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Aug 9, 2021 17:47
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Motronic posted:Eh, I consider this kind of thing to be a reasonable triage. You want to know if the doors are continuing to go out of square (and which ones) BEFORE you spend the money on millwork and re-hanging, because you may be just a couple of lally columns away from stopping and reversing the problem. You need time in the house to figure that out. We've been here three years (I keep thinking two due to the lost year that was 2020) and the workability of the doors have not changed in that time, which makes me think settling is happening extremely slowly or it's not presently actively settling. Most of them didn't work well at all when we moved in, but that ended up being because they had replacement doorknobs with more modern spindles that didn't fit properly into the mortises. Replaced them with period correct knobs and spindles from the architectural salvage place and suddenly they worked fine again. Three doors are a bit tight - they'll work perfectly in the winter but get stuck when it's humid in the summer. This would likely be helped by installing central AC to prevent significant humidity fluctuations (which these solid pine doors are very sensitive to). The loose door with the shim wasn't on my radar until we needed to keep the kittens confined in that room - before I shimmed it they were able to rattle the doorknob loose and pull open the door and wreak havoc in the night. Before kittens there was never a need for that door to latch firmly so I didn't register it as something in need of an immediate fix. I'm guessing the old shims are from the previous previous owner who lived in the house for fifty years, so he probably saw some settling over that time. As for support, this house has a "spine", so to speak. In the basement, there's a thick brick wall that runs the length of the house, with the center walls on all three upper floors built directly on top of it. So it's ever so slightly the high point of the house - it seems to have settled a bit less than the exterior foundation walls. All the doors that are in these walls or parallel to them are pretty much square and don't need rehanging or much or any adjustment at all, whereas a couple of the ones that are perpendicular (including the shim door), are slightly out of square. It's most pronounced on the first floor in the front door and the hallway-kitchen doorway (which is missing its door), which are right next to the supported center wall:  You can see the frame droop ever so slightly away from that center wall. Interesting part is that it's much less pronounced on the second floor and also even though the joinery is not square, it doesn't look out of whack, so my guess is that the settling over 110+ years has been very minimal and/or it was built a little bit crooked in the first place. All in all, this is a remarkably straight house for how old it is. Also helps that the window & door millwork shop I'm going with spends the vast majority of their time making new doors and windows for old houses so I can trust their advice on fitting/hanging doors when we get to that point. So yeah, even though we're frustrated and antsy after getting super waylaid on our remodel projects, having plenty of time to observe all of the little peculiarities of our old-rear end house has been extremely valuable, as well as the time we've had learning how much the kitchen sucks and how to fit a good kitchen into a 11x14 room with six doors, a giant stove chimney, a radiator, and a huge window 18" off the floor. If we'd started doing poo poo to it as soon as we took possession and before we truly got to know it we would have made soooo many mistakes and poor choices.
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Aug 9, 2021 18:18
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Tremors posted:Well the issue persisted. Had the guy who installed my furnace last fall out to take a look and he narrowed it down to the TXV. Unfortunately he isn't a Lennox dealer so he won't touch it, so we have to get someone else out for a quote. The system is new enough we're not sure if it has any warranty left on it or not. I finally got a Lennox dealer out. Turns out whoever installed the system never removed a copper cap on the spot the TXV connects to the suction line and just screwed the equalizing line connector over top of it. They went ahead and replaced the TXV since they didn't know what kind of damage running like that for years may have caused. Hoping my icing issues are now dealt with.
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Aug 9, 2021 18:35
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Ball Tazeman posted:Edit: just doing some research and it looks like having that next to heating pipes is a bad and can cause toxic fumes/melting. Cool thanks dad. So now I have to figure out how to remove it and what to fill with. Your baseboards are probably hot water (not steam) so they shouldn't be above 140F (and that's a very high temp for hot water heating). At that temperature you aren't going to normally see any degradation of polyurethane foam. Most studies looking at heat related degradation of polyurethane foams start around 300F so there isn't much data for stuff in the 'hot water temperature' range. Here's the safety sheet for Great Stuff Low Expansion: https://www.generalinsulation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/great-stuff-pro-window-door-safety-data-sheet.pdf Store below 122F/120F depending on what part you're looking at (that's more for aerosol can safety than anything). This safety sheet doesn't include any temperature information under reactivity, but their other version (gaps and cracks) does. It says to avoid temperatures above 241F. Long term you might see shrinkage and cracking in the foam due to the heat. If you are worried about it don't apply any more, but don't worry too much about what you've already sprayed.
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Aug 9, 2021 18:47
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