Home Improvement

Vinen

Vinen

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Chris said:
I had a plan, the tree stumps were tougher than I thought!

I'm a math teacher not biology by the way, what are you, some sort of tree nerd? :)

Anyway some advice would be really appreciated.
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Do you value your foundation. I don't care how far aware the bamboo will be from your house.

DO NO FUCKING PLANT BAMBOO. YOU WILL REGRET IT>
 
Borzak

Borzak

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Some places in the US it's illegal to cultivate/plant bamboo, ranks right up there with Kudzu. Once you start with it, you will never ever get rid of it or even keep it under control without a LOT of work.
 
Hateyou

Hateyou

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Lanx said:
Dont make this an asian thing
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Well there are plenty of things like that you don’t want to plant around the house. We had an ivy around our pool that was insane, crawled up under the siding, had to pull it out and keep it trimmed just as much as the grass. When we replaced the back door I removed the trim and there was a fucking ivy shoot that had drilled it’s way behind the trim and up the wall six feet, looked like a fuckin worm. Trying to remove the shit completely from areas was really difficult. Rip it up completely and the next year it would come back, like hidden underground shit. There’s just some stuff that is not worth planting near your house.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Hateyou said:
Well there are plenty of things like that you don’t want to plant around the house. We had an ivy around our pool that was insane, crawled up under the siding, had to pull it out and keep it trimmed just as much as the grass. When we replaced the back door I removed the trim and there was a fucking ivy shoot that had drilled it’s way behind the trim and up the wall six feet, looked like a fuckin worm. Trying to remove the shit completely from areas was really difficult. Rip it up completely and the next year it would come back, like hidden underground shit. There’s just some stuff that is not worth planting near your house.
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Yea this house has front and back planting beds at the foundation two look like trees imma take a pic later and you guys can tell me what to sawzall
 
Chris

Chris

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Thanks for the heads up. Sounds like I need Clumping Bamboo, the beds already have very thick wood surrounding them (about a foot wide), which should contain it.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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mkopec said:
LOL speaking of GFCI and issues. I have a plug outside that I converted to GFCI with a steel waterproof box for my pool. Anyway one day my fucking bedroom and master bath lights stopped working. For the life of me I could not figure it out. Then we went swimming like the next day and tuned on the filter and noticed the GFCI was tripped. So I reset it and holy shit, my bedroom is working again.

So when this house was built in 1971 they had shit codes compared to today and wired the outside plug inline with my bedroom. So I had to bypass the line in the outdoor box to isolate the GFCI and it solved the problem.
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The house I’m buying, we had the inspection on Wednesday and their outside GFCI is tripped somewhere and the inspector was telling us how he has no idea wtf was going on. That he’s seem really bizarre ways of wiring the outside receptacles through bathrooms, garages, kitchens. Anyways, put that on my list of things for them to try and figure out before close.

The bonus third garage is also wired for 220 already so that’s cool.

When I redid the kitchen and living room at my old house I considered the USB outlets but had two different electrical companies tell me not to. They said the USB always dies quickly and the customers are pissed and they have to constantly come back out and deal with it. So I just said forget it. Not that I couldn’t change one when it went out, just didn’t want to be bothered with that and changing USB standards, plus all the different amperage ratings for charging, blah blah. Was nice in concept but I just wanted simple.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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Yeah thats how they used to wire shit back in the days. Since then more and newer stringent codes were placed that actually make sense. For example today all appliances and kitchen plugs run on seperate circuits, so they can take the amp requirement of a toaster AND a fucking microwave at the same time. And yes my house is the same fucking way as yours. Wiring that absolutely makes no sense, like my can light above my kitchen sink connected to circuit that lights the bathroom and garage both attached to my laundry room. Which was also a problem. The lights in garage and bathroom went out one day. Could not fugure it out for the life of me until one day I accidentally bumped the can light above my sink and they all started to work again. One of my kitchen plugs is connected to 2 more plugs in the living room. Found out the hard way when all my USB plugs on my TV got fried one day when something happened in the kitchen. Its all fucked and it would take thoiusands and thousands of dollars to replace all this shit. So we live with it, lol.

When I get around to redoing my kitchen im going to call up electrician to add in a sub box (no more room in my main box) and do the electrical in the kitchen correctly.
 
BrutulTM

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Intrinsic said:
That he’s seem really bizarre ways of wiring the outside receptacles through bathrooms, garages, kitchens
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When I moved into the current house there were two outlets that didn't work. The GFCI over the sink in the main bathroom and the outlet on the back deck. I figured the bathroom was a bad GFCI and the outlet on the deck (which wasn't a GFCI) was probably just full of water or mouse nests or who knows what from being outdoors. I took the deck outlet apart and it looked great. No sign of damage, no juice on the wires, continuity from the sockets to the screws. So I go downstairs to look at the panel and low and behold there's a single GFCI breaker in the box and it's popped. I reset it and both outlets start working again. Pretty strange because unlike a lot of farmhouses this one was professionally wired. It even has all 8 kitchen outlets with their own breaker. For some reason though, there's a GFCI breaker with just those two outlets on it. There's two other outside outlets and two other bathroom outlets that are not GFCI protected.

Another weird thing was the GFCI outlet on a circuit that was already protected by the GFCI breaker. This was my grandparents house when I was a kid but they aren't around anymore. I did solve that part though, by talking to my brother (who is a former electrician). Apparently he had installed the GFCI outlet in their bathroom as part of a 4-H safety project when he was a kid. I don't even know if GFCI breakers were a thing in the 90's. I certainly didn't hear about them until later and I guess my brother hadn't heard of them at the time either so that outlet wound up with redundant GFCI protection.
 
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Erronius

Erronius

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BrutulTM said:
I don't even know if GFCI breakers were a thing in the 90's.
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They were. We'd occasionally use them, but the breakers themselves were (maybe still are?) more expensive than a GFCI outlet, so most things we did were line/load using an outlet
 
lurkingdirk

lurkingdirk

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Jebus on a stick. Trying to do a little building, and not only is the lumber stupid expensive, it's all crap. Every damned 2x4 is warped to the point of being unusable. I just spent two damned hours at the hardware store and came away with nothing. It's so frustrating.

dad-father-memes18.jpg
 
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BrutulTM

BrutulTM

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Nothing worse than showing up at the lumberyard right before the new delivery of whatever you need.

You: "I need 15 2x4s."

Guy looking at his computer: "You're in luck, we have 17 left."

You: "I'm not in luck."
 
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Foler

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Florida attic needs new insulation. Batts or spray fiberglass?
 
Hateyou

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When I was a teenager I was helping my grandpa with blown in on this ancient farm house they bought. He was filling every wall section with it. One of the walls we kept feeding and feeding and it wasn’t filling. Finally I said “You think maybe it’s blowing into the attic on this one?” He said it shouldn’t be but the way the house was built who knows. So he pulls the attic ceiling panel off and like 3 feet of blown insulation falls on him. Was hilarious, he had a triangle pile on his head and each shoulder. Never forget him standing on the ladder looking like that laughing “Guess we know where it went!”
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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lurkingdirk said:
Whenever possible, do closed cellulose foam spray insulation. In any case, blown in is always going to perform better than batts, every single time without question.
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I've heard too many bad things about blown foam so I'm skipping it.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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lurkingdirk said:
It is by far the most efficient. Not all states have people who can install it, and it can be tricky to do yourself. I've used it as much as possible, whenever possible.
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Home depot you buy 10 bags and you get the blower free for a day
 
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