Home Ownership And You!

aprazer402

mhardy6647 wrote: »

our poor son, who, along with his newly-minted wife is a newly-minted homeowner in VA, is rapidly growing disenchanted with the minor, vexing details of... home ownership. I feel really bad for him/them, and I am too far away to be very helpful.

As an example, the garage door (remote) openers are operating intermittently. He's changed the batteries. He and I differ in our opinions of the likely root cause. He's thinking RFI (which is certainly possible) -- I am thinking the remotes themselves are wonky (e.g., pushbuttons worn and working intermittently).

Homeowners, you have to Piti um
Principal
Interest
Taxes
Insurance
Utilities
Maintenance

Home ownership: most important asset, usually one's most valuable asset, usually appreciates, tax benefits, stable payment vs. rent...

In recent years, we've seen more and more millennials opting to rent apartments or buy condos. I can see their point to some extent. Small family units, choose to be more mobile, less motivation to maintain a home and lot... Same as elderly folks downsizing.

mhardy6647

Jstas wrote: »

If the remotes are old and from the previous owner, they likely are worn and possibly corroded. If they have little IR lenses on them, if those are covered in shmutz that will interfere too.

But, honestly, I'd replace the openers or at least change codes on the openers. Who knows who the previous owners gave codes and remotes to.

I've encouraged him to do both

Jstas

This is what's aggravating about home improvement anymore.

This is a door from Jen-Weld. Had to order it because, despite being a common sized door, nobody stocks it. It's hollow core so it's basically MDF, styrofoam and some wood all glued together. I had to get this because this is the panel design Jackie wanted and her and my dad ordered pre-hung doors and had most of the upstairs replaced because they were in very poor shape.



I have two of these doors. They cost me $153 a pop plus taxes and shipping despite being sent to the store. Highway robbery is what it is. Literally.

Anyway, these are being cut and hung to replace the bathroom and closet doors in the "en suite" bath and walk in closet in the master bedroom. Currently what is there now are bifolds from what seems to be 1965 with frosted glass panels that someone stuck faux gold appliques over. Probably Captain Halfass. Well, they don't match the rest of the decor and trim so I've been working on fixing them. The frames are fine, just not well put in so I've had to do minor surgery and cut the striker plate and hinge plate slots in the frames to be able to put actual doors on. That's why this door is an uncut slab.

What's aggravating here is that I ordered the doors at 80 inches. Both door holes are within 1 inch of 80 inches. The closet is 80 and 3/8ths of an inch so that door doesn't need to be cut at all. Just cut for hardware and hung. The bathroom, though, has a poorly installed...or, well, an incorrectly sized marble threshold. So it sits about 3/8ths of an inch proud of the tile floor in the bathroom and a 1/4 inch above the carpet in the bedroom. I'm not removing it and reinstalling it right now because that's a huge undertaking. It will get fixed when we get the chance to gut and rebuild the bathroom, bedroom and closet. So I gotta trim this door to fit the hole.

So I cut about 7/8ths off the bottom of the 80 inch door. This should be no big deal. Especially since I had to "order" a standard size instead of getting the door custom made at 79 1/8th inch tall. If I had order the door to specific sizes it would have been over $300 instead of the $150-$170 I paid.

The way it USED to be was you would get 1.5 to 2 inches of bracing across the bottom of the door so if you had to trim it, you had at least an inch you could take off. In addition, it helped to make the door more durable against feet, vacuum cleaners, kids toys, etc...

Well I cut the door down and was fearing the worst when the saw was changing resistance as I cross the the door. When I trimmed it off, the worst was true. The bracing on the bottom of the door was 5/8ths thick. So I completely cut the lower brace off of the door frame. It was MDF too which was disappointing to say the least. Why? Because at $150+ a pop I'm expecting a wood frame. I can get a full MDF pile of crap for $75-$90. I "splurged" on this because I thought I'd be getting a better door. I'd hate to see what the real cheap **** looks like.

So I had to fix this by ripping down a piece of wood that was about 1 inch thick by 1 1/16th inch thick and cut to length and then glue and brad nailed in to place.

Now I had several doors upstairs, all cut like a drunkard did it with a hand saw and half of them were missing the lower frame piece because it was cut out. Captain Halfass either left the bottom end open and unsupported or he trimmed it and, quite literally, pop-riveted the MDF crosspiece back on.

This here is the proper way to fix it. What's aggravating is that this shouldn't have had to be fixed. What's worse is that I see doors like this in "high end" homes all the time. I'd like to do solid wood but I need 7 doors for the upstairs and that's going to run $5K for blank slabs that I have to cut and hang myself and I just don't have the kind of wampum on my string right now.

Anyway, that's my rant for today, which feels wasted because I had to spend so much time on a friggin' door.

Jstas

Oh, also, hung some Christmas lights up.

This isn't even all of them. It's only about 3,000 lights. I have 2400 more to put up.

VR3

I hear you on hollow core doors.

I went with solid core flat slabs throughout , run about 200 a door prehung but weigh about 120 pounds plus per door and are tanks!

mhardy6647

I hates me some hollow core doors!

Jstas

VR3 wrote: »

I hear you on hollow core doors.

I went with solid core flat slabs throughout , run about 200 a door prehung but weigh about 120 pounds plus per door and are tanks!

Yeah but with this old house, if I'm spending money on solid doors, I'm doing period appropriate. The arched panel design is an appropriate design for a 1920s house and actually what would have been considered an "high end" option then.

But I'm not getting those doors from Home Depot or something. I gotta go to a specialty lumber yard or millwork company.

I'll eventually do solid doors, the old doors were just so bad that I couldn't leave it. So, inexpensive option that will work for a few years while I get major stuff done.

motorstereo

I tossed all my interior hollow core doors and made doors out of 1x7''ship lap pine. I used new thumb latches that I burned off the galvanized coating overnight in the coals of my woodstove. I took my time and it took me a full day to install each door correctly as each door frame was different and of course none were square. 30 years later now and I've never had any problem with any of them or their hardware. I can only wish I could say that for my exterior metal doors and doorknobs that need occasional lube, tightening, or sometimes full replacement.

Jstas

Yeah, so, cut the bathroom door, thought it was good. Hinges all line up with minimal wiggling in to place. It's square, the door frame is amazingly true (within 1/16th of an inch top to bottom) and the door hung straight without drifting but wouldn't close.

Why, you ask?

'Cause the marble threshold isn't level across the entire width and seems to have been cut crooked. The ends where it meets the door frame are within 1/8th of an inch of each other when measuring the height of the door frame from threshold on either side so the door should be shutting.

But there is a hump that's about 3/32nds tall that contacts the door bottom about 6 inches in from the door frame. If I put the small level on it, it frickin' rocks. I didn't see it with the 24" level because it was long enough to span the undulation and not rock. I thought that the sliver of daylight I could see was a worn spot from 30 years of people walking across it. Never thought it was a poorly milled threshold block.

So I gotta take another 1/8th of an inch off the door.

Thanks, Captain Halfass.

Tony M

I really like to hear about home remodeling scenarios.

After 34 years...I finally installed REAL "return vents w/filter recesses". 34 years!

It took a while, using a chisel to enlarge the openings. I wanted to keep saw dust out of the air!

I also remember sawing hollow core doors to fit somewhere. I'd chisel off the door faces from the sawed off piece and glue and clamp the wood back into the open spot. Did that a few times. I Just can't remember the jobs themselves.

I even hung an attic folding stair case by myself. I'm quite the innovator when I need to be.
It's still being used. It's in my hall above the hall return vent. We had grills on the walls but no filters except for one on the furnaces INSIDE the room;

Here's a couple pics of those return vent alterations.





This second one was much easier. Less chiseling.;









I painted the room where insulation board wasn't put up. Painted the floor a few coats too. 34 years to get to this.

I feel/know the air is a lot cleaner the past couple of months!

Now to get a carpet cleaner in here.

Jstas

Gather around, children, it's story time again!

So I can't remember if I posted about this before in another thread or not and the search function here is garbage so I can't tell for sure.

Anyhoo, October of last year, I had a garage door replaced.

I know what you're thinking! But, John, why would you do something so extreme? Well, muchacho, it would be because this was the state of the door when we took possession of the house.

















So, that gap at the top, at it's widest point, was 11.5 inches.

What happened to it you ask? FIIK. Nearest I can tell is that Captain Halfass had hooked up that garage door opener to the top panel with no stiffening brace and repeated use broke the inner foam core which then led to the aluminum skin getting creased and torn. At some point, it was snagged by a forklift too. So rather than fix it, they just stopped opening that door.

Three big problems with that.

1.) The left side of the door would come out of the track ALL the time. I literally kept a sledge hammer next to the door to beat it back in to place when it happened.

2.) That top panel actually fell out of the track several times. I managed to dodge it all but one time and the one time it did get me, it opened a 3 inch gash on my head and I had a concussion.

3.) The door did nothing to keep out what was supposed to stay out. Birds, insects, the weather, whatever. Everything got in through that gap.

I struggled with that **** for almost 2 years. The day it actually hurt me I decided I was done. The bathroom from earlier in the thread had just happened and sucked down all my money so I had to scrimp and save to get this done. But I had a reason for it.

I had door guys come and help me out. This thing kicked their butts too.



When they first came to look at it and give me an estimate, the guy's words were "What the **** is this ****? It's like, why even bother with a door?" He took measurements and said it'd be about a week to get the door in and they would call to schedule after that, meanwhile I had to clean up the space for them to work.

But they got it done, it looks and works good.







I have not reattached the garage door opener.

Now I told you that because the reason that I had the door done was because I had a boat load of vacation time saved up that we didn't get to use last year because of Pig Vomit and his shenanigans. So I took the week of Thanksgiving off last year to get the work done that I needed to. So I'll get to that in the next post which is going to be looooong.

But, when I decided to do the garage door, I made a plan to get some of the heavier lifting out of the way. I figured my life wasn't complicated and difficult enough. So I thought to myself "Self. What would make this life complete?" And myself rightly replied "Dumpster fire, bro. Totally."



And so it began.....

pitdogg2

I've done a few garage doors John and the biggin's are no F. U. N.

Yes with the large wide doors you need those braces on more than just the top. I've seen more than one here in Illinois crumpled. The straight line winds we can get fold them up and pull them out of the tracks and leave them swinging in the wind.

looks nice brah!

motorstereo

Is that a single 2x4 I'm seeing for a garage door header????

Jstas

No, it's triple sistered 2x8s for the header plate. The 2x3 is just a nailer plate for the siding.

mrbiron

Someone forget to the take the ladder off their truck before parking in front of the garage?

Don't know how keen the dumpster company will be if you torch their can, buuut you could just claim an act of god and absolve yourself from any repercussions. Sounds fine to me.

Next time, just get the 30Yd. Most disposal companies charge the same for a 10/15 as they do a 30...
At least up here they do.

pitdogg2

In my area the smaller dumpsters cost more than the larger. Most of the cost is dumping fees around here.

Jstas

mrbiron wrote: »

Someone forget to the take the ladder off their truck before parking in front of the garage?

Don't know how keen the dumpster company will be if you torch their can, buuut you could just claim an act of god and absolve yourself from any repercussions. Sounds fine to me.

Next time, just get the 30Yd. Most disposal companies charge the same for a 10/15 as they do a 30...
At least up here they do.

Not sure what ladder you're talking about. Or is it 'cause of the folding step ladder? 'Cause the never pulled the 20 ft extending ladder off the truck.

I didn't set it on fire, this was over a year ago now.

That cost me $322 for up to 21 days, I only had it for 17. The 30 yard was $460 and more than I needed. Well, I wanted to do more than I did but I ran out of time and I filled the 20 yard to the brim. I was 220 pounds under my weight limit on it too. Driver was impressed when he picked it up.

Right now, though, the 20 yard is $416 for the cheapest I've seen, a 30 yard is $522 and a 40 yard is $668. There's also a 2 week lead time on them too. Guess the stupid virus has everyone doing major work.

But while a bigger dumpster may cost less overall, if I only have $350 for a dumpster then getting a $460 dumpster is not going to work. Especially when I only need 20 yards.

mrbiron

Ladder, on racks, on someone’s truck, backing up to garage door, garage door down, bend door, no fixy...

Show me someone, anyone, who couldn’t at any moment in time, fill a 30yd dumpster. I’ll wait.

Merry Christmas Jstas. Just bustin’ chops and the way I read it, I thought you were going to start a dumpster fire.

Nothing says 2020 Christmas like a great big dumpster fire!!!

Jstas

Oh, no, it's most definitely a forklift. He had it parked in the garage at the top of the hill when we were looking at the house. It also leaked hydraulic fluid all over the garage floor up there. I had oil dri spread for almost 3 years to soak it all up. There's other spots on the property with damage from a forklift, too. The other garage had a hole punched in the block from a forklift fork and there were broken stringers in the garage and the small middle door doesn't open or close correctly because it got snagged by the forklift track and pulled down at one point. The tracks were held up with bailing wire when I got here. I have them secured with angle bar but only so they don't fall down.

And I wrote that last post because I didn't have time to write out the entire post that I wanted to. So there's more coming.

Jstas

OK, so bear with me here, this is a big story.

We bought this house in August 2017, the fam moved in October of 2017. I had a ton to do before that happened. But the property was in pretty bad shape. Run down, over-grown and just uncared for. This picture of the garage was taken the day of closing. Pretty shabby.



So I dealt with a ton of crap with this garage for a little over 2 years before I got fed up with it and started working on fixing it. The garage door breaking was the last straw. But it had to be the first thing fixed because there was no point in fixing anything else until that was fixed. But now that that was fixed, I moved on to other things.

You can see in the pictures of the garage door that there are pillows of insulation in the roof. I will tell you right now that even after the door being fixed, all that insulation did was hold in humidity and grow mold. Why? Because it was only single faced and stapled right up against the back of the sheathing. It smelled whenever it rained and would drip water everywhere when the humidity got high enough. Additionally, faced insulation that isn't covered is a severe fire hazard. Bad idea for a garage.

So I decided that it was going to come down. I covered everything in tarps as best as I could, I got myself a couple full Tyvek suits, gloves, booties and a P100 mask kit. Donned myself some goggles and a face shield, grabbed my 4 inch cultivation rake. I then proceeded to rip down about 2,000 sq feet of insulation that was caked with mold, sawdust (also moldy), rodent droppings, bird droppings, nesting material and snake skins as well as an ant colony and a wasp nest.

It took all day and filled the 20 yard dumpster twice over with just insulation. The only thing I've ever done that was nastier was cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy down the shore.

So this is what came down.

I started with the bay where the door was replaced because I knew there was electrical problems up there and I wanted to see if I needed to address them immediately before I moved on.



This picture is what filled up the garage bay where the door was replaced



This is the rest of the garage



This is the dumpster. At this point, there is nothing else in this dumpster but insulation and a door that was flat on the bottom of the dumpster. This isn't even all of the insulation. I still had one more trailer load to throw in and it made it another 3 feet taller. This had even settled a bit because it started raining on me and I had to cover the dumpster with a tarp so the insulation didn't soak up all the rain and cost me a fortune in weight.



I did the insulation first on purpose because I knew it would pack down when I threw two buildings on top of it.

So this is what I was left with when I was done pulling the insulation out.



In this picture,






I still get wisps of insulation and paper falling down from time to time but that's no big deal. But you can see the moisture and mold problems in a few of the pictures.

Here's the fun little presents I found that were problems before and never fixed right. But this is what comes from "expanding" a garage improperly. I have not done much besides some halfassed stuff myself to plug up these holes as the entire roof is going to need to be replaced anyway. Like, completely. It's not congruent and the "joints" where the new roof for the extension meets the old roof all have issues.






Next up, the Pool House.

Tony M

That was quite an undertaking!

Congrats on having the will to make it right no matter what.

Jstas

So, the Pool House.

It was a 6 foot by 9 foot structure that was built on a slab. It was old. Like built in the 60's about the same time that the pool was put in. The deck was replaced some time in the late 70's, early 80's, I think, when modern pressure treated stuff first became widely available. The pool house was not built with such things and whomever built it understood nothing about draining water and grade levels.

So when we got here, the pool house was covered in vegetation. I didn't even realize it was there the first time we came and I thought that the 5th structure listed on the property was the gazebo on the island. But since that's not enclosed, it's not considered a structure for tax purposes.

I kinda ignore it for a bit because it smelled and I really wasn't looking forward to messing with it. But it was so overgrown that I did not know that a tree had fallen on it and broke windows. I found this out because during the summer of 2018, there was a rancid stink coming from it. I just figure it was a mold bloom because the lake got overrun with algae and mold too. Just a bunch of rain and really hot.

Yeah, no, I was wrong. A raccoon climbed in the busted window and couldn't get out. It died. Then a 2nd raccoon climbed in to go and dine on the first, festering raccoon carcass. It too perished.

Fun.

It also seems like someone used it as a bathroom. So as summer 2018 waned and things got colder, the stink went way down and with my new chainsaw and a bunch of other sharp things that you swing at stuff, I went and hacked the jungle back and shredded it all in the beast. I was going to work on taking it down in the summer of 2019 but, bathroom fun happened as well as the water tank repair so $3200 later I had no money for a dumpster rental 'cause there was no way I was cutting all that up, bagging it and dragging it to the curb.

So i rented the dumpster for the garage and took all that time off because the pool house was coming down. So in November of 2019, this is what it looked like. Keep in mind, this is AFTER I cleaned up around it.













So I enlisted the help of my friend Brian. He came down and helped me with this because he's just as if not more psycho than me in tackling such projects.

Went to pop the door off the hinges thinking I might be able to sell it to some idiot that does stuff like "Flea Market Flip" but the door was so soaked with water that the hing screws ripped right out leaving on the top hinge attached. So I persuaded it with my 4 pound persuader and it came off. We then emptied the pool house.



Next we pulled down all the panelling to see what the structure was and used the sawzall to start cutting fasteners at all the joints and pulling electrical. That is, after we traced down where the electrical was tied to. Because the day I did the garage, I took a break and went and checked the circuits and they all showed dead. The day of demo, they were live. Then they went dead, then they were live again. So we had an adventure there. Long story short, traced it back to a breaker in the service panel under the pool deck and the break lever actually wiggles inside it's housing. So fun.

Anyway, I cut the main line to the pool house with an ax because I was already passed my nerve limit for the day with it. We cut the fasteners on one side of the roof and we had hooked up the tractor with a cable to see if we could get it to flip over but the yard was too wet and the tractor would get it to just under half way over and start losing traction. So we had to try something different. Cue me with a 2x4 and Brian on the ladder to stead the roof while I re-positioned the 2x4 as teh roof went up.



It was heavy as a hell but we got it flipped off in one piece where I could cut it up with the sawzall.





Then I used the trailer I built to cart the whole thing to the dumpster after we cut it up in to more manageable chunks. This is a shot of the dumpster with just the roof and the broken door on top of the insulation.




We then proceeded to cut the rest of the building apart as we knocked the walls down in one piece.









We carted the junk up to the dumpster in the trailer and this shot was the last major load. It was also the shot right before the trailer hit a soft spot in the lawn and toppled over bending the front bracketry all to hell so I had to take 45 minutes to fix that to be able to keep using it.



Once we were done with the building, while Brian was cleaning up the small parts of the mess, I scraped up the asbestos tiles off the concrete pad.

This was the aftermath.





I'll rebuild the Pool House one day. I still have to clear more stuff around it because I want to build a waterwheel that will help me keep the lake and the channel that makes the island aerated and flowing with water.

That was a messy, disgusting building and I'm glad we were able to get it done. I thought I was going to have to pay someone because it was way too much work for me by myself. It was too much for me and Brian too.

Up next, The Outhouse. That story will conclude the saga of The Great Dumpster Rental of 2019.

Jstas

By the way, this Sawzall from Milwaukee?

It wasn't cheap but it was worth every penny I spent on it.



It came with two of those High Demand 9.0 batteries and it cut down the entire Pool House and only used about 3/5ths of the battery. The Outhouse beat it up good and killed a battery and a half worth of juice but you'll see why when I post that.

But everyone told me that a battery powered sawzall was a waste of time, should have gotten corded and while that's a legit concern and I took a chance here (figured I could just get some Horror Fraught pile of crap real quick incase this didn't work out) and the chance paid off in droves.

I have never used a sawzall this strong, corded or otherwise. It was such an impressive tool that Brian went and bought the same one after using this one all day. We beat the snot out of it on Pool House Day and it got given a hotter supper on Outhouse day too. It took it all and kept on truckin' like it was nothing. So if you need a sawzall, this one is pricey but it's, hands down, the best one money can buy. Period.

motorstereo

Since it's so isolated I'm wondering why you didn't get a burning permit and burn the pool house rather than renting a dumpster for it? Heck with a 30 pack or 2 and a bud on a rainy day you could've cleaned up a lot of debris and had fun doing it to.

Jstas

Isolated or not, NJDEP would never go for that. Plus, there's a very real risk of starting a forest fire. A manual tear down and disposal was the responsible way to go here. No fire risk, no pollution or spillage into waterways and low impact to the environment.

ken brydson

I've got a 28v Milwaukee cordless set. Freaking amazing...

pitdogg2

I bought one of their corded super sawzall's a decade ago it was a beast. I believe it was 13 or 14amp and had a longer stroke of the blade.
Unfortunately someone stole it I was not able to buy another. I had given some thought to one like yours John but never knew anyone who had used or owned one. Very nice mini review.

I've liked and owned many tools but keep coming back to Milwaukee when the cheaper tool wears out.

Jstas

Hey hey! Look what I found! Improperly repaired water damage! Imagine that?

THANKS, CAPTAIN HALFASS!




Time to make a boatload of noise cutting the rot out.




At least it's not drafty. At least not any more than the window is. That's not installed right either.

Jstas

Gonna hafta put some nailers up so I can hang new sheetrock. At least I don't need this spot done to be able to continue with the room. Was planning on pulling the carpet and sanding the red oak floor underneath for my Christmas vacation.

DaveHo

Gotta hand it to you. I'm in the middle of a simple bathroom remodel and am having thoughts of burning the place to the ground. Used to like this stuff, but am at the point where I'd rather just move and make it someone else's problem. Thing is, the house isn't that old, but apparently captain half-**** was a GC at some point and built our house. Stupid mother ****!