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... I am hoping your house hasn't fallen on you?
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Oct 28, 2013 15:15
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 01:53 |
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How much would I have to pay you to move to Philadelphia and just loving attack a 90 year old stone house? Hypothetically speaking, of course.
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Nov 13, 2015 16:48
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I'm only kidding. The place is in loving fantastic shape compared to what you're dealing with, but has a bunch of cosmetic or "structurally offensive but not dangerous" issues. I'm just a loving catastrophe when it comes to construction and such, though. I can stick a tube in someone's chest without breaking a sweat, but God help you if you hand me a saw. Plus I have pretty much no desire to spend my free time on home repair and the like. What I really need is a home renovation savant who lacks the skills to run a business to whom I can just give a living stipend and a credit card for purchases. =)
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Nov 13, 2015 17:10
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An HVAC guy told me the tile in our kitchen is cracking in part due to too high of temperatures through the PEX because of lack of a mixing valve on the hot end. (It also causes the PEX to get stiff over time.) So there's that. You said wood floor -- I swear I could remember reading that you should use quarter-sawn wood with radiant heat, but I could be confabulating here.
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Feb 4, 2016 11:38
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I just put a laser level on my kitchen floor, and my eyes will never be able to unsee the horrors it revealed. Yeah, it's a ninety year old house, but I'm pretty sure it was less ridiculous before they put the posts in the basement. Jesus.
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Feb 5, 2016 16:05
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kastein posted:I put down another 3 pieces of subflooring in the kitchen last weekend. Two big ones and a smallish one to fill in the remaining gap. Officially down to two half-sheets left before the kitchen is done. What kind of flooring are you planning on putting in?
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Jun 9, 2016 03:59
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kastein posted:Strand woven bamboo or other similar laminates in most rooms, maybe tile in the kitchen but we're not sure yet. We just had vinyl laminate tile (I hate even TYPING "luxury vinyl tile" because the word "luxury," like "classy," immediately makes me think the opposite) installed in our kitchen and I might like it more than the actual tile it replaced. The installers mitigated some of the waviness of the floor with compound and it was enough to let the pressure-sensitive glue to grab, though I think even more could have been done by sanding down the biggest hump. Anyway, sone of the LVT is actually really nice, but you HAVE to see it in person. Most of it looks, well, like cheap vinyl -- overly glossy and without texture. The Adura we got for the kitchen and the basement (wood-look floating plank, chosen over regular wood on case we get more water) both look suprisingly good.
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Jun 9, 2016 14:08
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Yeah, the flooring itself is waterproof. In the kitchen it's glued down and then grouted (though it can be groutless and sealed instead) and in the basement it's floating. Here's the kitchen ...  ... and here it is up close.  Likewise for the basement.   It's not clear from the basement shot, but the carpeted floor slopes toward the door, so on the far end of the column there's about a four-inch step. I'm not sold on what they did with the baseboard as a result, but changing it would be more of a pain in the butt than I want right now. Anyway, other than that and the repetitiveness of the planks (exacerbated in some places by how it was laid) I'm really happy with how it turned out. (Edit: phone-post typos.) tetrapyloctomy fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jun 14, 2016 |
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Jun 13, 2016 16:09
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Magnus Praeda posted:I just installed LVP in two rooms. I don't know what the stuff tetra installed is like but this feels... not sticky, but kinda like wood with a thick coat of poly? It's noticeably softer than wood but it still feels pretty good underfoot. Same. I can also feel the slight floor flex that the prior tile installation hid. There are huge differences between manufacturers and product lines, though, and some were just unacceptably ugly in person (though none were nearly as bad as sheet vinyl in appearance or in feel). Sorry for the vinyl flooring derail. =) Kastein, are you going to tile under the cabinets or place the cabinets first? It probably won't matter since your tile install will be done correctly, but boy did it cause issues when we went to replace the tile.
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Jun 14, 2016 15:04
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I think as long as you've got a good, solid installation you're fine laying the tile and then putting down your cabinets. However, in my kitchen there were multiple issues with the tile installation. First off, there was no cement board, just plywood on top of the original subfloor. This isn't too terribly uncommon, apparently. This guy also did that in the master shower, and just out of view on the upper edge of the photo of the kitchen is the patchwork from when we had to tear out the ceiling due to a leak from cracked grout. Second and more importantly, the floor is seriously uneven. If you take the first image of the kitchen, there is a one left-to-right crown at my feet and another at the wall on which you see the thermostat, with a dip in between. Just past that wall the crown flattens out and it's level from the cabinets to the wall at the middle of the door. HOWEVER, from the middle of the door to the outside wall (on the left of the photo) it drops about 2.5 inches, and from the edge of the cabinets closest to our viewpoint to the far wall it also drops. The dishwasher literally barely fits on its left side but has a quarter inch (at least) on the right). In short, the only "flat" part of the floor is directly in front of the stove and fridge to the edge of the door. You can see it waviness a bit in this picture, but it's less apparent than a photo from when we moved in because a) they used some leveling compound to ameliorate the waviness enough that the tile could adhere, and b) using 16" tiles instead of 12" tiles gives you fewer "parallel" lines to compare. Third and of unclear significance is that the radiant heat in the kitchen floor runs straight from the boiler without a mixing valve. Our HVAC guy says that'll beat the poo poo out of tile as well. Glad it's that way in the master bath too! What all of this meant is that a) the two mildly cracked tiles when we moved in rapidly turned into two dozen shattered remnants, and b) the flooring guys basically said, "We will not put tile back in here because it's just going to crack again." So you're then faced with either ripping out E V E R Y T H I N G to replace E V E R Y T H I N G, or you cut the tile out and replace what you can get to. We went the latter route. The new vinyl tile is under the fridge, but ends just under the dishwasher (where, come to think of it, I am a little annoyed because they did a poor job with the transition and there are some cracked pieces of old tile, I need to e-mail the head guy). With the new (thus far unpainted) quarter-round at the bottom of the cabinets you'd never know it, but should we ever renovate the kitchen we'd have to address that. So there you go. If you do your tile right, you can do it first. If think you'll ever want to or need to change the floor, you either plan way ahead and have tile edges terminate just under the cabinet edges or you lay the cabinets down first and tile around them. If you're planning on selling this place in the next few years after you renovate it, just tile everything. It'll save you a lot of hassle cutting tile, and I suspect you'll do a solid install and your buyers won't have the white-hot rage issues I now do. Speaking of which, the A/C compressor on the downstairs unit failed. Rather than pulling a max 27 amps, it's pulling ONE HUNDRED TWENTY. Guess that would explain the lights flickering! Looks like the unit, a single-stage 3.5 ton, was not only mis-paired to a 4 ton heat pump used as an air handler (?!), but given the HVAC guy's engineers calculations was WAY oversized for the space and construction type, so it short-cycled its was to death thirteen years after installation. Guess where my next paycheck is going?
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Jun 14, 2016 22:17
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kastein posted:Wow, that sucks! I've been debating doing air conditioning for the 3 bedrooms but haven't decided for sure yet. I swear to God I'm not a shill for Mannington, but so far their "wood" vinyl is the only stuff I've liked when I saw it in person. Other manufacturers' planks were either printed without texture, had limited texture, or were super glossy; a lot of them also scratched really easily, which is not going to fly with our pets. Something to bear in mind with it, though, is that since it's not actual hardwood it has repeating patterns. In a couple of places our installer started a row with the same print (which is inevitable -- I don't know how many patterns there are per style, but it can't be a lot) and didn't cut the planks to be different lengths, so you see the same "knot" in the wood the same distance from the wall a few times. If you want the look of wood in a location where you don't want to have to worry about moisture, go for the vinyl, but otherwise just get wood. With tile ... it's harder. I actually like the LVT we put in more than the old tile, but one again it's critical to look at it in person because some of it just looks like poo poo. Regarding the air conditioning, it sorta doubly sucks because I'd called the guy out when the OTHER outside unit wasn't running. He changed the capacitor (and never billed me, come to think of it) and it's been fine, so I thought we were all good ... and then one dinner we noticed the lights flickering a little in the dining room. A few days later my wife and I were downstairs watching TV and the overhead BR40 LEDs were REALLY dimming (as they're really susceptible to power fluctuation). I went outside and the larger unit that covers the basement and first floor was intermittently buzzing. The HVAC guy stopped by today on lunch break from a nearby job and confirmed it was a binding compressor. He does Lennox and York; the former has a good reputation and the latter does not, but it sounds like mainly longevity is related more to preventative maintenance and installer quality than it is to manufacturer, and since Lennox is pretty picky about its installers it makes them look better as a manufacturer. This poo poo is confusing, though. I had sort of decided we'd go two-stage or variable compressor with a multispeed air handler -- that way we'd have the power to cool things of when Philadelphia hits the low 100s in August, but wouldn't short-cycle the unit in June and additionally could run at the lower stage(s) to keep the humidity down without having to crank the temperature way down low. The HVAC guy thinks he can save me some money and get the same effect with a smaller single-stage unit and with altering (mumble mumble something about running the handler longer) to keep the humidity level lower, and says that the variable units have been failing more frequently, blah blah blah ... so now I have no goddamned idea how to cool this place down and not have to go through all this again in a decade. Amana has some units with lifetime compressor warranties, but it sounds like OTHER components are taking them out of service, and since only parts are covered and not labor ... you get the picture. If I figure anything out on the A/C front, I'll let you know. Were I in your shoes I'd consider some of the ductless mini-spits -- there are some that do ceiling cassettes, which are a lot less unattractive, and you could just cool down certain rooms instead of ducting a larger zone. If your furnace is oil, then they'd also be nice to use as heat pumps with the more expensive furnace fuel only being expended when it's really cold. For some reason I'm assuming you have radiators, so if you have forced air I guess you already have ductwork and all of this musing is moot. =)
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Jun 15, 2016 00:54
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kastein posted:The furnace will be natgas fueled forced hot water radiant, I've bought it and it's sitting in teh living room waiting for me to install it and all the heating stuff. Due to the way the house is built and my dislike of chopping up major structural beams, I won't be doing central air for HVAC, but I do have an extra fairly useless area of the attic available for an evap unit and wouldn't mind putting the condenser side on the roof or outside if necessary, and there's plenty of space in the rafters available for AC air ducts to the 3 bedrooms and upstairs hall. Thus, I'm considering that route. I'd really like to avoid minisplits simply because I don't like how they look. I'm also not afraid of doing the AC install work myself if it saves some money, I've got all the equipment (gauge set, can taps, vac pump, experience, etc) to do automotive AC repair and recharge, plus everything I need to braze AC tubing, so I'm not really averse to learning how residential AC is different and getting any EPA certs I need to handle the refrigerant they use. I love our cast iron radiators. LOVE. The radiant floor in the kitchen and the master bath is pretty good, but other than keeping your toes from being cold it just isn't the right choice for a 90 year old stone house. I definitely agree that mini-splits ain't pretty. The in-ceiling cassettes, though, don't look any worse than a ceiling vent. If you're going to go ducted and do it yourself, just do a lot of reading and practicing so your eventual buyers aren't staring down some irritating repair/replacement bills. Looks like a matched two-stage compressor and multispeed air handler will set me back about $6300 from the HVAC guy I like, and given than the unit itself will run about $4k the labor seems about right. Darchangel posted:Huh. Never realized that you could grout the vinyl tile.
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Jun 15, 2016 19:34
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As an addendum, for the sanity of whoever buys this house from you: for the love of God, just THINK for a second when you place your copper for the A/C. Right now the power, copper, and condenser lines for the two units exit a hole near the base of the back of the house. No problem there -- it's tidy and out of the way. It's also inaccessible for replacing the lines. We could leak-test the lines and re-use them, but first off there's a decidedly non-zero chance this guy didn't nitrogen purge the copper when putting the thing together, and crap copper installation would basically give the manufacturer a reason not to honor the warranty since flaking oxides apparently love to destroy compressors. Secondly, it is almost assuredly going to develop a leak anyway since instead of bending a single piece of copper there's, like, eight elbow pieces that provide sixteen more opportunities for pinhole leaks that you'd never be able to track down. So the copper is going to be replaced, but there's no way to get to the goddamned hole in the wall without literally tearing down an entire basement wall and re-drywalling afterward. Oh, and did I mention that we probably only have a few years left on the upstairs unit and would have to do it all again? Instead, we have to drill another hole through the stone wall about five feet off the ground and eighty inches left of the outside door. It provides a straight shot from the outside world to the air handler, down a chaseway that has nothing in it and that would have also been almost a straight shot down from the air handler in the attic. It is loving baffling why this course was not used in the first place other than that it is not quite as aesthetically pleasing. gently caress the rear end in a top hat that renovated this place. Don't be that guy. I swear to loving God, if I were building new (which at this point I don't know if I could given my thoughts on contractors and subcontractors right now), water, power, drainage, and HVAC would all be accessible without cutting holes in poo poo. I don't care what it did to the floorplan or usable space.
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Jun 24, 2016 17:41
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Terrible Robot posted:Radiant cooling is an oxymoron. Also, condensation would be a stone bitch to deal with. Yeah, and if you're dehumidifying in order to decrease condensation you might as well just cool anyway. Speaking of which, the two-stage replacement for the single-stage A/C lower zone that broke in June has performed great. The house was more comfortable this summer at a higher setpoint compared to the previous system (and that's set-and-forget at 74 degrees / 45% humidity, not even bothering to set up away or nighttime schedules) and even though August was two degrees warmer this year we used 10% less power. I don't have data, but I think it even let us use the upper zone system less heavily as well because the basement and first floor were so well-controlled in terms of both heat and humidity, so there was less of it to rise into the second and third floors. I mean, we'll never recoup the cost of a whole new installation, but we'll certainly recoup the differential between this and a single-stage system and the house felt sooooooo much better this year. Unfortunately, now there are more trees to remove (one of which is tilting right toward the goddamned house), repointing that needs to happen, a sidewalk and set of outside stairs that have just loving given up, a driveway that might get by with sealant but which might need to be resurfaced soon ... YAY HOME OWNERSHIP.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:16
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When we had our house's septic system -- "tank" is overkill for a house this old, think "cesspool" -- inspected, the inspectors found a second system, into which the first overflowed before percolating into the gravel field ("Less 'field' and more 'statistically-unlikely concentration of subsurface gravel,'"as per said geologist), of which the several previous owners were unaware and therefore never had drained. Still in pretty good shape, at least.
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Jul 21, 2017 02:39
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chrisgt posted:When was the last time they had the tank pumped? Maybe I missed it if you mentioned it, but septic tanks need to be pumped every few years to remove solids that don't percolate to the leach field. The first of the two "tanks" (really, cesspools made of field stone) was pumped every three years. The second? Maybe ten or eleven years, if the person who renovated the property did it? No one knows. But the inspectors evaluated it after it was pumped and said it looked fine.
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Jul 21, 2017 12:26
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... you didn't drown in that septic tank, did you?
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Sep 25, 2017 11:54
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Darchangel posted:Now that's a great phrase. Almost right up there with "lithobraking". "Structural lithotripsy." Edit: "Braking," not "breaking." Hurrr. But it let me check -- spellcheck SUGGESTED "lithobraking" to me.
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Jan 1, 2018 14:37
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kastein posted:Stained the master bedroom door last night, almost got high off the stain fumes. 2/10 would not huff stain fumes again I'm so happy to see this thread back up and active, it's one of my favorites. Now that my choices are "get poo poo done" or "change diapers" I might actually tear into some of the projects that need doin' right now.
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Jan 1, 2018 20:04
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cakesmith handyman posted:This is drywall and a skimcoat of plaster right? Gypsum, not drywall, I assume. It really is a lot nicer than drywall and a skimcoat.
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Feb 17, 2018 16:44
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kastein posted:Drywall is made from gypsum... Brainfart. What the guy above me right now said, you know, correctly. Blueboard and plaster is just a lot nicer than drywall and skimcoat.
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Feb 18, 2018 14:24
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kastein posted:It would fit, but ducts? Nahhhhhhhhh. Space for my head and body and arms while hooking up refrigerant lines and wiring? Nahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. So what is the plan?
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Jul 12, 2018 12:31
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Is this a ducted minisplit we're talking here?
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Jul 12, 2018 13:41
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kastein posted:Yup. It's a midea meu-36mpl2 specifically. Thing is a giant pancake of an AC unit and still didn't fit because I had a triangular space to put it in. Wow, that's nice packaging for a three-ton air handler -- about 2.5 x 4.5 x 0.75 feet per the spec sheet.
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Jul 14, 2018 18:44
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If I've learned anything at all from these forums, it's that all you need to do to make this fit is cut some notches in your joists.
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Jul 15, 2018 00:52
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Careful with lacerations/punctures there -- if it's deep enough to hit tendon an infection can suck
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Aug 15, 2018 23:31
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Peroxide is a great disinfectant ... it just also kills healthy tissue as well. But it'll be cleaned out fine. So keep putting the Neosporin on it. Depending on length I might have just glue the fucker up if it were my hand. It's the left, so I could throw the stitches pretty easily, but I'm better at tying one-handed knots with my left hand (since the right is holding the instrument). Fabrication looks like it's going well. I hope you do a walkthrough of this place sometime.
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Aug 16, 2018 00:58
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kastein posted:It's pretty funny that you think I did one
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Dec 26, 2018 08:14
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Pershing posted:This is gonna turn out like some medieval town building a church...generations after generations working towards perfection But with perfection being the enemy of the good and all, it could make for a fun build thread for sure as he deals with subcontractors who are less exacting.
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Feb 17, 2019 17:03
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kastein posted:It's still very much up in the air. If you design it from the start to be expanded, you could even manage to have your addition not eat into your life too much at a time where you're not going to want much in the way of inconvenience. (Bonus points if you keep the the blueprints in a box emblazoned with Break Glass In Case Of Paternity.)
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Mar 14, 2019 14:05
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Seat Safety Switch posted:I say sink the house into the ground and go full-on concrete survivalist bunker. Solar panels, water purifiers, perimeter defence emplacements. If I were considering expandable new construction, this is one of the approaches I'd take anyway (other than "perimeter defence emplacements," anyway). If you start by basically building a walk-out basement, you can add floors above without any intrusion into your regular home life other than construction noise and the process of adding stairs from your now-basement to your new first floor. And man, is having a finished walk-out basement great. When my parents visit they basically have a little apartment, and when I'm old that's basically how I'll use the space as well.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:19
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sneakyfrog posted:what homeowner doesnt consider what perimeter defense emplacements you could get away with? Perimeter defense consideration, sure. Once you start actually placing pillboxes, you're getting a bit weird.
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Mar 16, 2019 16:58
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Motronic posted:Not if you tastefully design them as part of your landscape. In its own way that's even weirder. "Gotta have some tastefully hidden perimeter defenses for my home which is unlikely ever to be under assault."
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Mar 17, 2019 00:26
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Roughly where is this place, anyway?
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Oct 29, 2019 13:49
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If they're smart, they're sending over cookies. He's raising their house values day by day.
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Nov 2, 2019 11:28
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STR posted:The dorms I lived in had a service corridor that ran behind rooms (so basically you had two rooms that would normally back up to each other, but there was a hallway running between them for plumbing and electrical). Kinda blew me away. It's gonna be like The People Under The Stairs, complete with kastein in a gimp suit.
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Nov 7, 2019 22:13
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kastein posted:I actually just found more damage from them a few days ago, but it was old damage I had not repaired yet from that second, largest nest I found, and replacing a small piece of sheathing fixed it. Not ICF walls and poured concrete floors?
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Dec 19, 2019 14:09
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I feel like your ongoing project would have served as a fantastic reference for this contest. "A 6,000-square-foot, 10-bedroom Victorian mansion could've been yours for only $50,000, but there was one catch: You had to put together a restoration proposal for the historic property in order to be considered." I hope that the restoration work -- which per a quick glance at the interior photos will be extensive -- works out well.
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Dec 27, 2019 16:10
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It's a porch. If he puts it in wet it'll change dimensions when dry, and if he puts it in dry it'll change dimensions when it gets wet. The key thing here is that goddamn, man, even without wide-angle shots it's clear you've made that place look orders of magnitude better, and we also know the structural improvements are even more extensive. Keep up the great work and keep the updates coming, this legitimately is one of a few threads where I'm excited to see updates when I log in.
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Feb 22, 2020 13:27
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kastein posted:Well it's finally hard enough to walk on wearing shoes instead of tiptoeing up and down it only when necessary wearing socks and protective booties. It's really, really weird feeling walking on stairs that don't creak with every step and flex underfoot. I never noticed how much they flexed before but walking on the new ones (3 2-by stringers, outer two attached to studs with 5/16 structural screws, 5/4 risers, 9 hardened decking screws and urethane adhesive holding each tread and riser in place) compared to the old ones (1 2-by stringer, 1 1-by, haphazardly nailed through multiple layers of garbage to studs, 3/4 risers, lovely old nails with no adhesive, stringers not even matching) feels like walking on concrete now. Looking better and better! It makes me happy that you took the time to level out the ceiling. We have a noticeable slope in our dining room as it approaches the center hall that sure as hell isn't going anywhere unless we do a massive renovation. It annoys me a little every time I look at it and wish the guy who renovated the house would have done something about it 18 years and two owners ago.
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May 19, 2020 08:44
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