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Parallel Paraplegic posted:I have no idea how this works, do houses have to be certified as a fit dwelling, or does it only work the other way (where the city/town/whatever can say a dwelling is unfit and dangerous to live in)? Because I don't see why a structure (or construction on a different structure) that's unfinished that you don't have to pay taxes on would be signed off as a-okay to occupy. As a general rule, houses in the US have to meet certain standards (enforced by city inspectors) to qualify as "habitable" dwellings. This includes stuff like having adequate insulation, having appropriate fire escapes, having at least one wide door, etc. in addition to the usual "isn't an active peril to life and limb" kind of thing. Of course, as has been established many times in this thread, the inspectors aren't always on top of their jobs, so things can slip through the cracks, sometimes for a long time. If nobody's reviewing the paperwork and nobody's actually going out to look at the job site, nobody's going to pick up on the fact that that house has been "undergoing renovation" continuously for the last eight years...
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Oct 28, 2013 22:26
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:It doesn't help on the outside of the garage they had thrown down pavers on top of the ground, raising it above the slab. It was my understanding that putting down pavers around your slab was recommended as a way to keep plant growth down, since plants could otherwise "encourage" water up against your walls and build up soil to bury the slab. It sounds like in this case the pavers got buried anyway, though, so they probably weren't accomplishing that any more. But that could explain why the pavers were there in the first place. Anyway, you have my sympathies. Good luck!
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Oct 31, 2013 18:12
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Leperflesh posted:that's why if you're me, you never even consider buying a cookie-cutter home built in a large development, especially since maybe 1980 or so when the process got far more "efficient" (read: cheap). As if I needed more reason to avoid the sterile, "every house has the same aesthetic", completely locked-down HOA "communities" you see cropping up all over the place. I got a 1950's house that was originally part of military housing, so they just built hundreds of A-frames to the same plan...but they all have different paint jobs, different yards, many have been remodeled, etc. so it actually feels like you're in a place where people live.
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Jan 29, 2014 00:01
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Ehhh isn't there no safe minimum limit for asbestos? Should you really be flouting that around like that? As long as he isn't kicking up asbestos dust, or at least he's wearing a mask, he ought to be okay. The big danger from asbestos is getting it in your lungs.
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Feb 1, 2014 23:25
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Black PVC is reserved for sewage lines, right? 
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Feb 4, 2014 19:48
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The side gate to my backyard is falling apart -- the facing boards keep popping out of the backing boards (whatever you call them), presumably due to dry rot. I need to replace that gate. Is there more to it than just getting a bunch of 1x6s, cutting them to shape, nailing them together, and applying paint? It seems like a pretty straightforward job, but if there are any gotchas to it then better to know about them now.
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Feb 8, 2014 06:01
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Thanks. I was definitely planning to do a Z-shaped backing, if only because I like how it looks; the extra stability against sagging/slanting is just a pleasant bonus. Though really, I should wait to do this until the fence along that side of the yard gets replaced (the neighbor and I will be hiring a contractor) since the gate is currently mounted on one of the fenceposts. Bah...
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Feb 9, 2014 03:14
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Munin posted:Actually, quickly wondering, could the boards be popping off due to swelling and shrinking due to changing humidity? If the wood hasn't been properly treated and there is no gap between the boards or they're not clinkered this could be happening. Very likely; they're just nailed to the backing boards and yeah, there's no gap. But the ease with which I can drive a nail through tells me the wood's on the way out, so the gate needs replacing regardless.
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Feb 10, 2014 01:03
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ShadowStalker posted:Some of that should have been caught by you or your family during inspections. Didn't you guys have multiple inspections with the builder? I've used Ryland Homes and a custom builder in the past and both of them required homeowner inspections and certain phases of construction along with allowing me to come by the site whenever I wanted to look over things. Just because the homeowner could/should have been more careful doesn't excuse that the builder did a lovely job.
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Mar 6, 2014 23:30
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Motronic posted:Click on "Pro Site" at the top (probably not necessary). Search for 2x4. Lauch at the results. Click on the "In Store" tab and put in your zip, choose a store. Now you get real results. Man, any time you can buy from Home Depot's contractor store instead of their normal-people store, you should. For example, the lumber at my local contractor store is not horribly warped, twisted poo poo like it is at the normal store. It's not surprising that the same holds true for their website.
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Mar 19, 2014 02:09
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Elendil004 posted:If the architect spec'd lags and the builder was all "gently caress it here are nails" why would the architect be responsible? The building inspector should be held liable though, I wouldn't mind seeing that start happening so inspectors start doing their actual jobs. The architect was presumably held responsible because they charged a fee to keep an eye on things and then (apparently) only watched for look-and-feel kinds of problems, not structural integrity problems. Depending on what the contract said the architect's job was that could well be violation of contract -- you aren't doing the job you were paid to do.
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Mar 20, 2014 16:48
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Motronic posted:And this is different from a lot of other "exempt" salaried workers exactly how? They get paid like poo poo? Teachers have a disproportionately terrible work:pay ratio.
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Mar 21, 2014 02:22
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Motronic posted:This is in relation to all of those other exempt employees not getting the summer off. Or "off" if you pick up other gigs. quote:Are teachers typically underpaid? Absolutely. Are they unique or anywhere close to the worst example of this type of thing amongst the academically educated workforce? Hell no. They're unique in that having good teachers is absolutely vital to a functioning society at a fundamental level (like, more fundamental than, say, sewage workers) and yet we treat them like poo poo anyway.
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Mar 21, 2014 02:55
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CopperHound posted:I am trying to do some back of napkin math here about the forces in play there. It is hard to tell how long the span is and the amount of sag because of the angle of the video, but I'm guessing about 1000-3000 lbs of horizontal force is applied to that column. Given the situation of that column (i.e. outdoors, next to a Then again, my inclination is to drastically overbuild whenever given the option. EDIT: VVV well if they can't be bothered to fill their giant hole in the ground with champagne, then they're clearly not high society, right? TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 15:05
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Misogynist posted:The main issue is that most wires aren't rated for repeated movement like that. Something like the cable management arm in the back of a rackmount server that guides the power cable along a predictable path would probably be fine, but I'd otherwise be worried about torsion tearing the jacket right off the cable over a couple of years. I could see having a normal outlet behind the cabinets (or maybe a spare socket on the one that drives your dishwasher or garbage disposal or whatever), and then running some extension cords to the backs of the drawers. The extension cords would probably wear out eventually, but that's trivial to replace. You also wouldn't have a traditional outlet faceplate, but that doesn't strike me as a huge concern.
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Mar 24, 2014 19:48
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Sagebrush posted:Yeah but exactly how many of these plastics that leach ~chemicals~ into your water do you think you're going to find in the plumbing aisle at Home Depot? 99% of the intended uses of the pipes they sell are to put water on or in human bodies. They'd be opening themselves up to huge lawsuits if they sold stuff they knew wasn't safe for tap water, even if they labeled the crap out of it. Bottom line is that anything that causes cell damage is a potential carcinogen, and it turns out cells are ~fragile~. Those "known to be a carcinogen" labels really ought to be reserved for things where your risk of cancer is actually measurably increased by interacting with the stuff in a normal manner. Nobody cares if you increase your cancer risk by 5% by bathing in food coloring or whatever.
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Mar 25, 2014 03:36
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One thing you might be able to do is to take a photo of the chips along with something that you know is white (like a sheet of paper). That white thing should be usable to calibrate the display so that everything else is the right color. At least, I think that's a thing that can be done...
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Apr 1, 2014 04:41
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Leperflesh posted:This is quite a derail, but, vaginal yeast infections surely are caused by yeast, not fungus? Yeast is a fungus 
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Apr 8, 2014 17:12
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Motronic posted:In commercial hoods this is handled by actual ducting for makeup air so the hood works as intended/designed. If you've got some cash to burn you can get the makeup air heated so that you don't end up getting cold air down your back all winter (commercial hoods are huge). Seems like the simplest thing to do would be to have a heat exchanger that tries to equalize the temperature of the vented air with the make-up air. Probably can't get too fancy with the vented air since it could have all kinds of goop in it, but the make-up air should be pretty clean and could be run through whatever tiny hoses you need to get efficient heat exchange.
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Apr 8, 2014 17:44
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Oh man, I haven't even thought to check mine ever. I've been living here for three years and it probably wasn't clean when I moved in 
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Apr 9, 2014 05:24
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asdf32 posted:Anyway, to fill in some of the gaps behind the trim I bought the yellow spray foam stuff which I had never used. Seemed fine at first and I put silicon caulk over it. Then I was horrified to watch the yellow foam continue expanding for 2+ hours and spread itself and the silicon everywhere. I'm sorry, I burst out laughing at this point. Yep, that foam keeps going! At least it's just a shed and not a part of your actual house, right?
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Apr 10, 2014 03:26
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I've been making a handrail for my staircase, since the old one was just a lovely pine dowel mounted on equally lovely brackets. These last few days I finished the wood shaping and finishing, and today I picked up some new brackets to mount it to the wall with. I installed two, figured I'd use the handrail itself as a guide for getting the other two in, and discovered this: If you can't tell, the handrail is too long, by about a foot. This despite that I measured the loving thing like four times precisely to make certain it wouldn't be the wrong length. It's fixable; I have a piece of scrap that I can repurpose into a new end-cap, so I just have to chop off the old one and some of the length of the rail, glue the new one in, re-sand, and re-finish, but man I was hoping to have this done today. 
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Apr 15, 2014 21:26
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Were the incendiary grenades there for any reason in particular or just for shits and giggles? I would assume as an "oh poo poo our systems are compromised / our base is being overrun, destroy them now" measure.
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Apr 19, 2014 05:12
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Were they like... automatic sledgehammers? Or was one poor guy just supposed to stay behind while the building is under siege and whack all the servers out of the racks, hoping he hits the hard drives? As I recall, some old mainframe computers had big switches that, when flipped, would chop a knife through the power cables to make certain that the computer was off. I could imagine a similar guillotine setup to destroy the hard drives/RAM automatically. Though it seems like it would be simpler to just put cages around the incendiary grenades so they won't get stolen...
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Apr 21, 2014 17:34
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On a semi-related note, one thing I've always kind of wanted to do is build a geodesic dome house from a kit. It just seems like it'd be a lot of fun to build, though I'm not so sure how usable all the square footage would be since a lot of the walls are curved.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:03
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I have a couple of building design questions, and this seems the most appropriate place to ask. These are for the detached backyard workshop that I'm still slowly working on (current status: first round of planning approval failed, mostly because my site plan needs more details). In the interests of not having the resulting structure show up in this thread... 1) I belatedly realized that my plan doesn't call for eaves on the "ends" of the building (the 16' walls of the 16'x24' structure). There's eaves on the long walls, but not on the short. Is this a problem? We have a fairly mild climate (San Francisco Bay Area) but do get the occasional storm with driving rain. 2) Any recommendations on siding? My house is blue stucco, which I'm not about to try to replicate, but part of the approval process is that they want to make sure that the structure doesn't clash too much with the house. Why this matters considering the structure won't be visible from the street, I don't know. The siding will be placed on 3/4" sheathing, for what it's worth. 3) On that note, any opinions on OSB vs. plywood sheathing? 4) Currently my plan is to handle building construction first and then do electrical later, just in the interests of simplifying the main construction phase (I'll be contracting out the electrical work anyway). This will apparently require two planning approval processes. How stupid is this? Should I just bite the bullet and plan in the electrical system now? 5) On that note, I'd like to have accessible ceiling outlets so I don't have to run power cords into the middle of the room. However, the ceiling is a vaulted ceiling, with the rafters hanging from a ridge beam that's 12' off the ground. I guess I could run some 16' beams across the room at intervals and stick outlets on those, but that seems kind of hokey and defeating the purpose of having a nice open ceiling. Any ideas?
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Apr 26, 2014 04:56
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Crotch Fruit posted:I say run beams (ceiling joists) so that you can store extra poo poo up in the rafters, copy the last picture fron this post. That post from AI's horrible failures thread is a little shop of horrors that belongs in this thread. Part of the goal of the vaulted ceiling was so that I wouldn't have ceiling joists; I want a nice open space here (and I also have specced in skylights in the roof plan; not much point for those if there's joists in the way!). I mean I guess I could have joists over only part of the space...ehh. Also, that workshop is even more of a deathtrap than my garage is. Cripes.
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Apr 26, 2014 16:49
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Cakefool posted:Put retractable called reels right above where you want them. Put the stop blocks further up the cable so you can reach them when 'fully' retracted This sounds like it might be a good idea if I had a clue what you were talking about  Got a diagram or something I could look at to understand it? From discussion earlier in this thread, I was under the impression that to meet code, any permanent outlet must be totally fixed in position.
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Apr 26, 2014 20:10
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Got it, thanks. That seems simple enough, albeit possibly not-to-code (again, from what I understand of prior discussion here) if it's effectively a permanent installation . Still should be good enough for what I need though!
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Apr 26, 2014 20:24
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Nitrox posted:You could put a couple of outlets in the floor as well. Yeah, but that does mean running conduit through the foundation slab (which is going to double as the floor), and I've heard that putting conduit inside of concrete tends to make the concrete crack. Maybe it'd be okay to run the conduit underneath the slab and then tunnel straight up to where I want the outlet to be  Guess I should probably dive into the code and/or call up the planning office to ask.
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Apr 26, 2014 21:34
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Motronic posted:If they are for fixed uses there is no need whatsoever to suffer the expense and additional length of cable involved with a retractable cord reel. Awesome, thanks! So I can basically have a couple of "hanging outlets" in the middle of the room that are attached to the rafters and go straight down to terminate in a female plug. I'm not sure if this would look better than the reeled power cables, but it sounds cheaper/safer/more reliable. At the very least it's good to know that there's a to-code option.
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Apr 27, 2014 04:39
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The concrete doesn't exist yet, no. I had some concerns about running conduit inside the concrete (apparently it can cause the concrete to crack) but if I can just run underneath it, between the concrete and the gravel, then tunnel straight up to the outlet, that would probably be the best solution. Hadn't thought about running PVC for suction; that also sounds like a good idea. What diameter would you recommend, 1 1/4"? Sounds like I'm going to need to make a detailed layout plan of the foundation slab...
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Apr 27, 2014 19:11
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Nitrox posted:Match either the saw outlet or your filtration system. You can have incremental diameter piping as long as the widest point is where suction originates. Also, make a floor plan. Light and outlet positioning should be heavily dependent on that. Part of the difficulty here is that I'm currently operating out of a small garage and don't have a full-on dust collection system (just a shop vac) or several power tools that I'd eventually like to get, so any decisions I make at this point would be supposition. Assuming I'd have to set up adapters anyway, I was mostly just wondering if there was some recommended diameter for permanently-installed dust collection pipes. About all I know about layout is that I want to put in a long workbench along one of the walls (either 16' long or the full 24') and that my bandsaw (don't have a table saw) will probably be out in the middle of the floor. For lighting, between all the windows (3 on one wall, 2 each on two others, plus 2 skylights) and putting some flourescent tubes (or LED equivalent) at the top-center of the ceiling, I think I should be okay for general illumination. If more light is required then it'll be something focused like a work light, which wouldn't be a permanent installation anyway.
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Apr 28, 2014 16:14
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dyne posted:Well, it's frequently 4" at the machine. I think I would run 6" under the slab. I think that's the recommended diameter for runs through the workshop. Cripes. That is some serious ducting. Can't really just throw ports down on the floor willy-nilly if they're a half-foot across; I imagine it's also quite important to make certain they're absolutely flush with the floor when capped so you don't trip over 'em. Good to know, though; thanks.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:33
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Right, I've updated my site plan and drawn up a very rudimentary floor plan for the workshop I want to build. Any obvious problems that y'all see? For the floor plan, the idea is to have dust collection ducts (6" PVC or something similar) running above the workbench, with the occasional port so workbench tools can plug in, and two T-junctions to go under the slab and over to the middle of the floor where the two tool stations are marked out. Similarly, power outlets will be spaced regularly along all walls (every 8' or something), with a run out to the middle so that those tool stations also have ready access to power.
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May 1, 2014 03:25
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Motronic posted:All with a balloon construction kicker. I thought the only problem with balloon construction was that it required you to have lots of really long timbers which are too expensive to be practical in this day and age. Is there something actually structurally problematic with this design approach?
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May 6, 2014 20:09
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Motronic posted:There is no fire stopping between floors. The typical balloon construction basement fire I pull up to is also an attic fire, with all the floors in between seemingly fine for the time being. Ahh, okay. I mean, that sounds like an eminently fixable problem, just one that historically nobody bothered to actually fix, so the vast majority of balloon-construction houses are deathtraps. Hooray!
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May 6, 2014 20:44
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What? No, you can't close the bathroom door! It needs to stay open so the condensation can drain into the sink!
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May 14, 2014 20:10
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silvergoose posted:This. This is why I don't DIY most things. But paying a contractor to do it gives you no guarantee that they'll do it correctly, with a lot of jobs (where they can hide the fact that they half-assed it). So you're hosed either way.
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May 16, 2014 14:52
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~Coxy posted:Hah, I have the Turkish flag covering one wall of one room. When I moved into my house, one of the bedrooms had lavender walls with pastel lime green doors. And the kitchen had a wall with a fake brick facade (like, thin slices of brick were glued onto the drywall)...which had been painted over with pastel lime green paint. The stairway and upstairs hallway also were painted dark brown and had no windows or lights (well, there was one light, but you had to switch it on at the bottom of the stairs). Painting that area white made it vastly brighter.
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May 18, 2014 14:58
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