Home Improvement

Picasso_sl said:

I can't think of any climate where a treated deck would ladt 20 years easy. Maybe functionally but to me they look like absolute fuck when they start warping up around the screw heads and splitting. If your objective is to keep water from getting through a typical treated deck will be far worse than concrete.

Have you tried resurfacing products? I have used the rustoleum concrete restore and was not pleased but i would still do that over smashing up a patio and replacing with wood.

Composite could be a great option if the color helps.

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I've got decks I've built that are still in good shape after 20 years here in Kentucky. Every few years I get calls to come pressure wash them, sink/replace nails and seal them again.
Started out on decks and roofing like 25 years ago.

Anyone have experience/advice in landscape drainage? We live in the PNW and our house sits in the middle of a grade. The flat backyard area where our deck is turns to mush when it rains a lot, which is pretty much 6 months of the year. Behind our house is a ton of water coursing down the landscape towards the river across the street. Our inspector said there was some water disturbance of the soil under our foundation.

I'd like to either a) install a french drain system or b) plant a bunch of trees/shrubs/plants or a rain garden in the middle of our backyard to suck up a lot of the moisture, or c) both.

If we do go with a french drain, I'm hoping to hire someone just to come out and design a plan for us which we'd then execute ourselves, provided it doesn't require huge equipment.

You shouldn't need to hire someone, just do your reading and it will be fine. I've put a french drain in one spot in our front yard where everything collects, and we haven't had any issues with it for eight years.

French Drain is a sort of fancy term for "covered ditch".

Just watch your runoff patterns, you really should be perfectly fine doing one yourself. Unless you just don't wanna spend an afternoon digging a ditch and throwing rocks in it.

LOL.
What is the window size? 32x74.5 windows cost me $245 each that is with kickouts, screen and double latch locking with grid in glass.
Installation for me right now is $75 per window and once you add in aluminum wrap exterior per window and shim/caulking I charge roughly $400 per window. Less if it is a 32/36x36 window.
$5450 that guy would make $3300 on a 1 day job.

Ahh Shelly would LOVE that as her BFF lives there ( she was born there ) but ya outside my range to work with my jobs.
$7500 is a tad high but I've not seen it, it isn't unreasonable though and well within the norm of $3-4 per sq foot on vinyl and with probably $700-1k going to guttering.
4x4 windows double hung run more than I said ~60 more with the grid option removed. So anything under $500 would be a fair deal.
The problem with window places is they often are a car lot, selling windows and markups then selling a contract so someone else ( usually 40-60 per window labor ) to install. They do provide everything but by the time it's done it's been marked up 3 times.
Find a contractor with a window connection to order his own and cut out that nonsense and you are golden.

Olebass, what's the best method for cleaning out black mold?

I had an issue winter of '13-14 with black mold in my attic. I rented a fogger from home depot and that seemed to do the job to kill it off. However, we never really cleaned the wood or anything after fogging.
The reason it happened was my 2 upstairs bathrooms used to vent freely into the attic. We also had a ridge vent previously, that I had filled in once I added a gable fan.

So in the spring of last year, I ran new ductwork in my attic that vented these 2 bathrooms out of the house. It worked great. Anyway, the mold came back this past winter. I can only assume that it's because the other mold that we just fogged was never cleaned up beyond that.

So, what do you think I should do?

Fog that bitch for yet another time!

I honestly don't know but I am under the impression that mold removal consists of removing all the plywood and sheetrock that shows signs of fungus and replacing it. Or painting over it with Kilz and hoping for the best. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's a fungicide you can spray on it.

Other than that maybe a dehumidifyer, and see how it goes?

So I ended up renting an electric jackhammer yesterday to destroy a concrete ramp that went to a shed that we tore down last fall. Damn, that thing was sweet. Destroyed the whole slab (3' x 4' with an average of about 6-8 in thick) in about 20-30 minutes. It did 10x more work in 20 minutes than I did in an hour with a sledgehammer beforehand.

The place I rented the jackhammer from was getting ready to close for the weekend when I went at noon on Saturday, so now I have a jackhammer all day today too...now to just figure out what else to use it on.

Jackhammer = fun as hell
removing broken concrete = horrible

Like I said on the porch thing, Jackhammer rental is love. I love using those things and I dont know why. They vibrate they are loud but I just love them.

Xarpolis, I truly don't know. Every time I have done mold abatement it involved fogging/spraying the attic, scraping it down replacement of insulation and a coat of kiltz with a additive. Mostly those steps were done due to it being fire restoration, but when I took the classes for it, it was nearly the same steps.
If fogging is not killing it then you may still have a existing issue.

We got some torrential downpours (sidepours, really) the other day and I ended up with water in my basement underneath where our front door is. We didn't have a storm door, so I think the water was going down the front of the door and coming inside/down the floorboards. It wasn't a whole lot, but in our one year here it was the first time we took water and it was a bit worrying. So first stop is buying the storm door. I'm also a little worried about the area under the front door where the front steps meet the house. Looks like I could caulk that area up a little better.

Anything else I should look for?

Picasso_sl said:

Caulk the edges where the sill meets the door frame.

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This. Be incredibly generous (but neat) with caulk around the doors. Make sure you get the right stuff, and it should be sandable/paintable, just in case you change paint colours in the future.

3-day weekend coming up, I'm going to be putting together this monstrosity from Costco:


If you never hear from me again, you know what happened...