|
I'll be getting glass block windows in december so that's nice.
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 20:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 19:52 |
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Not really. Weed seeds are going to sprout because they'll piggyback along with the topsoil. All you're doing is putting a ceiling over the current set of weed seeds and bringing a new set in to replace them. If there are any healthy established weed roots (thistle, say, or any of a number of shrubs), they''ll come back in the spring and tent the landscape fabric. I suspect some of the bumps you're seeing may be old tree roots, or possibly rocks in contractor-quality fill dirt. I do have a tiller in fact. I kind of thought that tilling the soil would just stir up the weed roots, but not get rid of them. Is that not true?
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 21:14
|
|
|
tater_salad posted:I'll be getting glass block windows in december so that's nice. All of my bathrooms only have glass block windows and I love them. All the natural light, all the privacy, and that much less money to spend whenever I get around to putting in more energy efficient and impact resistant windows throughout the house.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 21:30
|
|
|
The Wonder Weapon posted:I do have a tiller in fact. I kind of thought that tilling the soil would just stir up the weed roots, but not get rid of them. Is that not true? e: To make double-sure, put up with a summer of ugliness and cover the tilled bed with either a thick layer of newspaper or garden-weight black plastic. The summer heat will kill anything underneath.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 23:10
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:e: To make double-sure, put up with a summer of ugliness and cover the tilled bed with either a thick layer of newspaper or garden-weight black plastic. The summer heat will kill anything underneath. * actual results may vary. DO NOT TILL AFTER THIS, as you may drag up dormant weed seeds that didn't get totally smoked by solarizng. (you can also skip all of this with readily available herbicides)
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 23:18
|
|
|
So how do people feel about various types of not wood but wood looking floor? My wife got very keen on ceramic wood look tiles but they do seem to have a lot of downsides (cold, hard, expensive). I've seen laminates that look pretty good. (We're replacing carpets with nothing underneath and actual wood isn't an option for a lot of reasons)
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2021 23:38
|
|
|
Crossposting from the Tools thread: My main home office chair had an M5 hex-head screw break inside the socket holding one of the arms on. There's ~2/3 of an inch left in there. I know there are screw extractors, but 1) I'm worried about damaging the threads, and 2) every screw extractor kit I know of seems to imply there needs to be more of the screw left than 2/3", and the broken part of said screw is a little over an inch inside the socket. I thought about going in there with a drill bit and trying to cut a column just wide enough to get a flat head screwdriver in there, but there's not a lot of room to work with. Does anyone have any tips and tricks? I should also mention I've got an order for a replacement chair out, so my attempts here are merely to try and salvage this current left-arm-less chair for someone else's use. Here's a picture of an undamaged screw and the broken one to give an example of what's stuck inside the socket: 
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 00:03
|
|
|
The Wonder Weapon posted:I'm very open to changing this plan up if there's a better bet. If you put mulch and soil on top of weed fabric you will just end up with weeds that are not only anchored to the ground, they're also anchored to the fabric. (This is what you will ultimately end up with anyway, but it will happen even faster.) Even throwing down landscape fabric and covering it with rock is going to result in weeds, though you might slow them down for a year or so. If you don't want anything alive there you basically need to blast it with herbicide yearly, pave it, or salt the earth. If you just want it to look decent and you don't want to have to gently caress with it plant something you don't hate that can compete with the weeds. Assuming you mean Buffalo, NY many low maintenance options are available to you depending on how sunny it is in the spot you want to cover. If it's on the sunnier side there are a number of different types of thyme (serpyllum has a bunch of popular cultivars, so do pseudolanuginosus and praecox) that will work, low-growing cultivars of nepeta (catmint) are also widely available at places like Home Depot. If you're into it there are a number of sedums (acre, album, reflexum, sexangulare, tetractinum all of which also show up at the Depot around here pretty often) that will take care of themselves. If it's shadier, durable options include wild ginger (asarum), lily of the valley (convallaria majalis), any of a million different kinds of bugleweed (ajuga, extremely easy to find), or laurentia fluviatilis (I don't know what the common name is but it's usually easy to find). iv46vi posted:Some people use cardboard boxes instead of fabric but there are some concerns: This works fine for killing grass (I put in a bunch of garden beds early this spring and did this) but it's not going to last very long as a weed barrier and if you aren't careful to keep it moist enough that it breaks down in a timely fashion you will kill most of the important poo poo living in your soil. Wallet fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 00:22
|
|
|
Sirotan posted:You could also just get a blackout shade in the top-down/bottom-up configuration, I have them for all my living room windows (with a light filtering fabric) so that I can leave the shade covering the bottom of the windows for privacy, then open the windows from the top. I'm not sure how they work but they also do 'cordless' ones. We've been shopping for a month and I just finished measuring, but websites like this or blinds galore or Lowes seem to always have a 35 to 40 percent off sale for whatever random nearest holiday as well and I know blinds galore will mail you free samples in a couple days and honor sales price if you order I under the same account; basically never pay full price unless you literally can't wait a couple weeks. Edit: blinds galore is 50 percent off for they birthday right now. PageMaster fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 00:28
|
|
|
Im trying to attach some art to an exterior wall of a 1950s home. The wall is stucco, and the art is about 40 pounds - it’s a painted hood of a Toyota tercel. Does this need to hang from studs? If so, is the right approach to just drill through the stucco with a masonry bit until I hit wood, then go in with a 3.5 inch deck screw or similar? Or should I mount a piece of lumber directly to the stucco itself, then attach the hood to that? In general I am trying to gently caress up my house as little as possible, but it’s not as if this is the first hole that has been drilled in the stucco in the past 70 years.  https://imgur.com/8Xs0Yq5 The Swinemaster fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 01:02
|
|
|
Sirotan posted:You could also just get a blackout shade in the top-down/bottom-up configuration, I have them for all my living room windows (with a light filtering fabric) so that I can leave the shade covering the bottom of the windows for privacy, then open the windows from the top. Or I could try shooting the streetlight out 
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 02:32
|
|
|
FuzzySlippers posted:So how do people feel about various types of not wood but wood looking floor? My wife got very keen on ceramic wood look tiles but they do seem to have a lot of downsides (cold, hard, expensive). I've seen laminates that look pretty good. I think a lot of it is personal preference. I have a nice thick laminate because it was cheaper than real wood and actually harder to scratch too which is good for my dog. Downside is that when I had a water leak earlier this year I had to replace half of it due a little bit of water causing a lot of swelling. I can’t stand the wood look tiles. You aren’t fooling anyone, everyone knows it’s tile. I feel like they’ll look so dated in 10 years.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 03:54
|
|
|
The Swinemaster posted:Im trying to attach some art to an exterior wall of a 1950s home. The wall is stucco, and the art is about 40 pounds - it’s a painted hood of a Toyota tercel. If it were my house, and I were going to hang that from it, I would mount a piece of lumber to the studs and seal the holes where the screws go in with a blob of caulk or a gasket. Then I'd mount whatever bracketry I was using to hang the hood onto the lumber. I don't know anything about stucco specifically but I like to minimize holes in the siding of my house.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 04:25
|
|
|
BIG HEADLINE posted:Crossposting from the Tools thread: Having dealt with several broken bolts, I will say it's a pain in the rear end. From what you're describing I would probably try to drill out the center of the bolt, then get a small bolt extractor bit to bite in the hole I made. If that wasn't working I'd drill the entire thing out and re-tap the hole at a larger size. The hard part of doing this is getting the bit centered and straight. If you can take off the part and fixture it under a drill press it's pretty straightforward (with consumer grade bolts, I'm assuming these aren't hardened steel). If you have to do it by hand, go slow and be as careful as you can. Sometimes if you drill slightly off center you can get the bolt out and leave most of the thread intact and just stick another of the same bolt in, but that's more often a happy accident than anything else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 16:42
|
|
|
Motronic posted:* actual results may vary. DO NOT TILL AFTER THIS, as you may drag up dormant weed seeds that didn't get totally smoked by solarizng.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 17:36
|
|
|
Cross posting from the IYG Home Automation thread, this one kinda fits a few places. Anyone have experience with Liftmaster MyQ garage doors? We have 3 garage doors: 2 are brand new and have MyQ with WiFi, one is 14 years old and original to the house. I’m getting a new wall control panel for the old one to be able to use newer remotes with it and some other reasons (889LM), which is also MyQ enabled. Typically you’d use a separate MyQ internet gateway to make the old garage door unit with the new control panel work remotely through the MyQ app. I’ve seen a reference in an FAQ for one of the new garage door openers that it can be used for up to 10 MyQ devices. Is it possible to hook up a 889LM MyQ control panel without WiFi to a different MyQ WiFi garage door unit to make it work through the app (without its own internet gateway)? I know it’s a bit of a long shot, this isn’t a very typical installation scenario…
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 21:23
|
|
|
So I live in Florida, and recently we were told that our roof is 22 years old, as it has less than 3 years life left, it must be replaced by November otherwise our insurance will be dropping us. Here's some background on that - https://www.google.com/amp/s/cbs12.com/amp/news/local/fl-insurance-companies-dropping-50000-home-insurance-customers The old roof was rock solid, asphalt, never leaked. It's still rainy season, which is a stupid time to put a new roof on, but they're forcing us to have it done by the end of this month. Had a lot of arguments with them about this. The new roof is about half way through - 'passed' it's waterproof inspection on Wednesday, waiting for the tiles. Woke up this morning after a big storm last night and there is water damage EVERYWHERE in the living room. All across the ceiling, down the walls. So in trying to drop us... The insurance company has just forced us to make a claim. My wife is furious but it's far too stupid for me to be that mad about it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 15:08
|
|
|
I'm mostly weirded out they think 22 years is old for a roof. I mean even an old fashioned wooden shingle roof was said to last 25 years if maintained.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:01
|
|
|
His Divine Shadow posted:I'm mostly weirded out they think 22 years is old for a roof. I mean even an old fashioned wooden shingle roof was said to last 25 years if maintained. It's almost like construction type and climate matter in this discussion. Weird.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:22
|
|
|
Yeah 22 years is getting on in age for asphalt shingle in Florida but not holyshit old. We just replaced our 18 year old roof here in Florida, no leaks but the granule loss was getting really bad and we wanted to be somewhat proactive with it. Ended up with a decent amount of decking and subfascia that needed replacing. All the homes in my neighborhood are around 18-20 years old at this point and there are usually one or two roofs a month being replaced around the neighborhood.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:35
|
|
|
Final Blog Entry posted:Ended up with a decent amount of decking and subfascia that needed replacing. If you had decking problems it means your roof was already past it's lifespan.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:44
|
|
|
e: missed him saying his house isn't that old. Yeah decking should be lasting a very long time. Mine is only starting to look like it needs replacing because it's 70 years old, plank decking, and there are so many nail holes in it from its lifetime that it's starting to splinter apart and not be very structural.
SpartanIvy fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Oct 2, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:47
|
|
|
Oh yeah, mine definitely ended up being more due than we orginally thought when we decided to replace it. I'm by no means a roof expert and that's the only one I've ever had done myself, but just from friends, family, and working around builders and contractors for work it seems like some level of plywood replacement is going to be involved in any shingle roof replacement around here. I think they allotted for 10 sheets of plywood in their base price and ended up at 20 sheets or something. I'm seeing all the builders using OSB now for the roof instead of plywood, is that going to work out bad for folks down the line?
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 19:13
|
|
|
Final Blog Entry posted:Oh yeah, mine definitely ended up being more due than we orginally thought when we decided to replace it. I'm by no means a roof expert and that's the only one I've ever had done myself, but just from friends, family, and working around builders and contractors for work it seems like some level of plywood replacement is going to be involved in any shingle roof replacement around here. I think they allotted for 10 sheets of plywood in their base price and ended up at 20 sheets or something. There will almost always be a few damaged sheets because individual shingles that failed along the way from a branch strike or that weren't manufactured/installed correctly, but when you said "decent amount" I took it to me more than a few, which would indicate multiple/large failed sections. It's also possible to need a lot of decking if the existing roof wasn't flashed properly. OSB does worse than plywood. Plywood does worse than tongue and groove. Yes, it's a race to the bottom on material quality.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 19:56
|
|
|
His Divine Shadow posted:I'm mostly weirded out they think 22 years is old for a roof. I mean even an old fashioned wooden shingle roof was said to last 25 years if maintained. House down the street was getting renovated and I sometimes chatted with the crew when I'd walk by and when I asked about the roof (which looked pretty old), they said they weren't touching it - it was the original slate roof (house was built c. 1900) and it didn't leak and there wasn't any evidence it had ever leaked and it was in rock solid condition overall. Seriously, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 20:45
|
|
|
Motronic posted:OSB does worse than plywood. Plywood does worse than tongue and groove. Yes, it's a race to the bottom on material quality. I've been wondering what the old rear end decking i can see in the attic is. Tongue and groove seems likely now. Queen Victorian posted:House down the street was getting renovated and I sometimes chatted with the crew when I'd walk by and when I asked about the roof (which looked pretty old), they said they weren't touching it - it was the original slate roof (house was built c. 1900) and it didn't leak and there wasn't any evidence it had ever leaked and it was in rock solid condition overall. Seriously, if it ain't broke don't fix it. My understanding is that the trade off for durability that you get from slate is that you need to do more constant, small maintenance.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 20:58
|
|
|
Here's an update. it rained again for half an hour after I posted that and the water damage now takes up half the entire living room ceiling, with some of it running down the inside wall. The roofer is on a fishing trip and cant get in touch with anyone to put a tarp over it, so we've just got to either do that ourselves or hope it doesn't rain again before Monday. This ceiling was SPOTLESS white yesterday. Think the yellowing and brown spots might be from the glue that hasn't quite set yet, which probably means they're going to need to rip up the waterproofing layer they just put down and do it again.  I've emailed my home insurance, I really hope they're not going to give us a hard time over this, especially as the only reason it's happening is because of them. They gave us 3 months to put a new roof on, and refused to allow for an extension on the timeline even if we could prove we'd paid a deposit and booked a roofer. had to get tiles we didn't want as none were in stock too. cubicle gangster fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Oct 2, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 21:41
|
|
|
cubicle gangster posted:Here's an update. it rained again for half an hour after I posted that and the water damage now takes up half the entire living room ceiling, with some of it running down the inside wall. That's terrible, but do your research before filing a claim with your home insurance. It sounds like it's a contractor problem, in that case, it's the contractor's insurance. Yes, you can file with your company, they'll pay, then subrogate with the contractor's company, but it will be a ding against you with regards to insurance. In Ohio, you get one freebie, then the second one impacts your rates. Good luck, water sucks.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 23:46
|
|
EVERYWHERE 
|
meatpimp posted:That's terrible, but do your research before filing a claim with your home insurance. It sounds like it's a contractor problem, in that case, it's the contractor's insurance. Yes, you can file with your company, they'll pay, then subrogate with the contractor's company, but it will be a ding against you with regards to insurance. In Ohio, you get one freebie, then the second one impacts your rates. With something as loving annoying as that looks, I might go ahead and do the homeowner's claim and suffer the CLUE backlash / premium increase. I would be worried about filing with the contractor's insurance, having them drag it out for XYZ days, changing my mind and filing with homeowner's, then finding out in the interim I've blown past some maximum days since incident reporting rule and then I'm SOL. Other folks can correct me if I'm wrong though, I know goons are often rightfully anti-claim. Sorry that happened OP, hope you can get it repaired right.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 00:46
|
|
|
For what it's worth - we are planning to sell this house in 5 months and move to a different state. That's been the plan since early summer. I don't really give a gently caress what it dings. I want to do the homeowners just out of principle because they are the catalyst and we wouldn't have this issue without their demands. They forced people to do this during hurricane season thinking it would work in their favor, hubris comes around. We argued endlessly that making us put a new roof on during rainy season was a terrible idea and that we needed a longer window. I was thinking about their ability to fight us on this tonight and argue about how the damage was caused, and unbelievably last week my wife's office curtains fell down and she took a picture - but in the background is the same patch of ceiling, clean and undamaged, in a timestamped photo. I am really looking forward to this fight.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 03:48
|
|
|
Yeah gently caress that company. Doing that work in the rainy season is beyond idiotic.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 04:33
|
|
|
Danhenge posted:I've been wondering what the old rear end decking i can see in the attic is. Tongue and groove seems likely now. My parents house (built 1954) still has the original barrel-tile roof. Dad gets it cleaned, sealed, and painted once a decade, and it’s still going strong. The real tragedy is whenever they sell the house, the buyer’s insurance company is going to make them strip that roof off and replace it, despite the fact that it’s survived seventy-plus years of summer thunderstorms and hurricanes with no damage. It’s absolutely infuriating. My asphalt shingle roof (built 1984, replaced ~2004) is probably in the single digit years of remaining life. Modern construction is a wear item.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 12:43
|
|
|
Vim Fuego posted:Yeah gently caress that company. Doing that work in the rainy season is beyond idiotic. Which one? Because the roofer should have tarped an unfinished job they were leaving over a weekend.........
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 13:22
|
|
|
An acquaintance in PA was getting solar installed on their rowhome a month or so ago. Part of the install was a roof replacement, which was subcontracted out. They were partly through the install one evening when we started to get that huge downpour that hit most of the region and the roofers just kinda hosed off. You can see where this is going. They’re still staying in a hotel while all the drywall and flooring is gutted.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 15:26
|
|
|
My neighbors are constantly, constantly burning wood in their fireplace. They are slightly downhill of me which means their chimney is level with my daylight basement. So like 40% of the time I'm just getting smoke in. I'm really tired of it. I'm sealing the windows and doors etc. on that side of the house. One of the other things I thought of doing to mitigate it is to install and intake/exhaust fan in the laundry room on the side of the house facing away from the neighbors. That way I could turn on the intake fan, pull in clean air from the other side of the house and create positive air pressure when I'm getting smoke from the neighbors. The positive air pressure should keep some of the smoke out. I've been thinking about installing an exhaust fan in the laundry room anyway, so it feels like just a little extra effort to find and wire up one that can also do intake. Does this sound reasonable? Any recommendations on a particular unit? The house is around 3,000 sq ft, ~1500 basement and 1500 upstairs.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2021 21:39
|
|
|
Can anyone recommend a set of low profile lights i can put inside my kitchen cabinets to better see in? They're a bit deep and it's hard to see stuff at the back some times. Ideally they'd be fairly low profile, and only go on when the cabinet is open, to save battery, etc.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2021 00:29
|
|
|
Not a direct product recommendation, but I had some generic LED wall powered strips that I used as under cabinet lights from my last apartment, that I repurposed with a PIR sensor to light up my gun safe when it's opened. May not be feasible to do a setup like that for each cabinet though.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2021 00:57
|
|
|
My house has an old-rear end asbestos tile roof that's at least 50 yrs old. Occasionally a tile comes loose or gets cracked and I have to get it repaired, but it's a good roof otherwise. I live in a heinous hurricane swamp climate.cubicle gangster posted:For what it's worth - we are planning to sell this house in 5 months and move to a different state. That's been the plan since early summer. Ideally you're never in this situation again where an insurance co. makes you get a new roof because your current one is old, but you can get homeowner's insurance that doesn't cover your roof, or covers it at Actual Cash Value (probably zero if it's over 25 yrs old) instead of replacement cost. You'll probably have to go through a smaller independent agent not State Farm or whoever. It's what I have because of my old roof I don't want to replace yet. Basically if a tree falls on my house or it burns down or there's water damage through my roof or whatever I'm covered as normal, but actual damage to/replacement of my roof is covered at actual cash value which in my case is zero.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2021 00:59
|
|
|
Threw some color swatches up on the wall. I'm partial to the green but everyone else I've polled likes the grey. It's crazy how blue the grey looks on the brick (there are only two colors). In other news, I think I need to replace that door. The jamb is starting to rot at the bottom, which isn't that bad in and of itself but it's also a single pane light. Problem is, I measured and it's 34x83, which is a very not common size. So maybe I live with the door and replace the jamb.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2021 01:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 19:52 |
|
|
Tyro posted:Not a direct product recommendation, but I had some generic LED wall powered strips that I used as under cabinet lights from my last apartment, that I repurposed with a PIR sensor to light up my gun safe when it's opened. May not be feasible to do a setup like that for each cabinet though. The problem is this is a tall cabinet with about 6 shelves. I could run a wall port to the microwave outlet, but I really dont' want to drill a bunch of holes in my cabinet.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2021 01:24
|
|