Lots of home improvement projects make me really wish I had a truck. It’d make landscaping much easier
I got a 2004 Frontier and it is the perfect sized truck for the most part. It's pretty great.
I also dont have to commute to work all that frequently so it was easy-ish to justify getting it.
PSN: jfrofl
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
You can also rent a u-haul pickup for a day pretty cheap.
Yea but then you have to learn to reverse them, while literally everyone you know and also don't know comes by and watch you suck at it, all the while judging you as some sort of lesser human scum.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
But then you drive off with a trailer full of stuff while they're trying to Tetris 1/10th of what you've got into the back of their Camry and failing badly...
But then you drive off with a trailer full of stuff while they're trying to Tetris 1/10th of what you've got into the back of their Camry and failing badly...
Hiring trailer vs ute, I'll take the ute any day.
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Ugh, we might have just been fucked by our landscape architect.
So our renovation is going to involve earthworks to dig out a foundation for the extension. We want to use that earth elsewhere on the property, to level out and make some flat space in the back and front yards, the idea being we don't really want to pay to remove dirt at the start of the build and then buy dirt to fill the yard up again later.
So our architect recommended a landscape guy who they had worked with before who did good work; we arranged for him to come by in November and do an initial site visit and potential quote.
He was great at the time, identifying some valuable changes to improve the property, but warned us he was quite busy and wouldn't be able to deliver anything for 3 months. That was okay; the build wasn't scheduled to begin for another until 4 months at the time and so we discussed the timelines and he made positive noises so we shook hands and went forward with the understanding he would be preparing some landscaping designs to go with our house plans. He seemed happy to have the work, and were pretty happy to lock in an apparently competent landscape designer.
Narrator voice: this may have been overly optimistic. Since then, we've mostly experienced long periods of radio silence. I mean, a certain degree of non-contact was to be expected; he did tell us he was busy. We sent him an FYI update in January, informing him of dates and deadlines as those began to get confirmed and who the builder was going to be and got nothing back. A quick follow up from the architect when the building consents were going in to see if anything they were doing in the yard needed to be added got back little more than 'nothing needed' and a slightly terse 'we will meet our original 3 month deadline' in response as to what his current timelines were looking like and when we might expect to see some plans so as to incorporate that into our project planning.
The 3 month point came and went with no word from him and still no sign anyone had even been out to measure and plot the property, so another follow up resulted in a visit from his site lead which would have been slightly more encouraging if he hadn't managed to give the impression that he was somewhat surprised that his boss was preparing to take on any additional work under current workload.
Then more silence.
Another email exchange now that the build is due to start a in a couple weeks has resulted in a curt message informing us he was currently busy with a $100 million contract (we think a school in one of the big growth suburbs) and once you consider Christmas it hasn't really been three months yet at all and we wouldn't really need his plans until after the main house build has finished anyway so just hold our britches.
A polite reminder that we had addressed that very point at the initial site visit in November as we wanted the earthworks plans at the very least specifically because we want to know where to be putting dirt has now gotten back a "oh, well, here's a list of other landscape architects who might be able to do this work".
It's apparent that he's completely put us out of his mind since landing us as a client as all his attention and focus has been on his big contract; meanwhile our plans and timelines have been left to shit in the wind to the point where it appears he hasn't even got a very basic outline of what was discussed or agreed when we met last year. Which would be fair enough if we hadn't been continually reaching out to touch base just to check in to see everything was on track and okay at his end and always getting basically 'stop bothering me, you're in the queue', right up until apparently we weren't.
All of which was then complicated by his site lead completely independently sending a completely different email 20 minutes later trying to lock down delivering us a potential draft plan in 2-3 weeks, having apparently not spoken to his boss at all.
So now we've squandered months of lead time for planning while being strung along and have nothing to show for it, and are faced with 2 fairly shit options:
1) Sticking with this very competent-but-overwhelmed landscape architect and possibly getting only a small percentage of his focus and attention in what has become a slightly dour business relationship and may require a degree of constant badgering and bullying on our part, because that always goes so well (but at least there is a business relationship and we're somewhere in the queue).
2) Ringing around a range of who-the-fuck-knows and basically getting anyone who's available on short notice, because those are definitely the guys you want on your project.
Sounds likes you need a Liiya. I'm sure she'll be fine flying all the way around the world to draw you up some plans
I managed to poke through the two missing wires for the smoke alarm and the last light. Instead of making a big hole in the freshly painted / plastered ceiling I went up into the ante-loft and lifted the boards up there to reach down again. The only problem was that they're interlocking caberfloor so you can't just lift a middle board, you need to work your way in from a side as everything butts together and overlaps to provide rigidity. And there's been a structure built on top of the floor (a little raised lip around the outside acting as a buffer between the storage space and the roof itself) so I couldn't actually lift any boards from the side.
So one of the boards came up with a crowbar and some persuasion and I could lie down on top of it and reach an arm under to poke one wire through. The other board though was in a corner and so was pinned down at two ends by this lip, so I had to saw through it.
It took about 45 minutes to hand-saw a hole big enough to fit my arm in to reach this wire. My jab-saw broke about 30 minutes in so the final 15 was spent using the remaining 3" of saw blade still attached to the handle
I am so ready for this loft to be finished
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
Bloody carpet fitters lost the plastic bag that was covering one of the sockets that had the fascia screws in, so I need to dig through the shed to see if I've got any more to reattach the fascias.
Now I've just got to make and fit the last door for the hatch, put a latch and handles on the boiler room door, put the latches on the hatch that I've got the handle on, paint the doors, wire in the rest of the sockets / cat6, fit the smoke alarm, fit the track lighting above my desk, fit the new RCD, wire in the lighting and power loops to that RCD, attach the new loops to the mains downstairs and I can move up there!
Oh, and the light switch at the bottom of the stairs needs splicing into the one at the top, but I ran out of junction boxes to extend the wire because it doesn't quite reach
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
That color is fantastic
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think we need a before and after comparison shot.
I love that color! Of course it’s very similar to what my mother and brother used in their living rooms and I used a similar, but lighter color in our old living room, too!
I think we need a before and after comparison shot.
In the same order as the three above:
This is the closest I could find to that part of the loft. The thing on the floor is the paper template I made of the sofa to see if it would fit there and I could make this wackiness a reality
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
i love that space so much, seems very cozy in the pictures.
i want to sit there and read at night while it's raining.
Funny you mention that because last night after hoovering up all the carpet dander (and emptying the Dyson hopper twice) I fished out all the sofa cushions from where they've been stashed around the house and got the sofa set up
There was (and still is) a massive storm front moving over the North of the UK so you could hear the wind whistling and the rain battering against the tiles and the skylights
I may have had a little sit down and a read whilst my other half thought I was doing some productive
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
edited March 2019
Today in minor home annoyances: When I woke up this morning it was raining, so I wanted to check out my Nest cams. Nest asked me to turn on 2-factor authentication, and since I've done some study on cyber security my instinct is to say yes to that most of the time. Only I realized after that it meant @Strikor couldn't get into the account without my phone. So I went to turn it off! Except now Nest won't send me any more texts. At all. And I can't turn off the 2-factor authentication without it sending me a text to verify my identity. Fucking Nest, if you're going to insist on 2-factor authentication that goes through texts - the least secure way to do 2-factor since texts aren't secure - then at least have fucking server resources adequate to supply your user base with the necessary texts, you bag of shits. They don't even have an option to send the code through email, it's text or nothing. I deeply regret not sticking with nothing.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
You should have Strikor set up as a user on the account rather than sharing access with a common username / password!
Go to "Settings -> Family -> Add a person" and you'll be able to get them set up. They can have their own 2FA then
No, fuck it, I was finally able to turn it off and we're not turning it on again. 2FA with texts as the only method is a security joke. If this were a banking account I'd take what I could get, but I don't really care if Nest is breached. (yeah yeah botnets and all that, I still don't care)
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
If all they have for their text method is whatever brokedown server wouldn't send me any texts this morning, then NO FUCKING THANK YOU.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
If you use the thermostats then that way you can have the home/away assist work properly. When we shared an account but both had the nest apps installed it really confused things as it couldn't figure out where we were. Sometimes I'd go out to walk the dog and the heating would switch off even though my other half was home
I don't have 2FA switched on for Nest though for this exact reason. It's super-easy to wire in 2FA with a third party authenticator app so I don't know why a company as big as Google (who have a Google Authenticator app already available) don't hook it up
The one about the fucking space hairdresser and the cowboy. He's got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin
I'm never at the one I'm in now so I probably won't be at a new one anymore but you know.
Right now, I'm paying like, right at a grand a month for a 2 bedroom that's not shitty but also is old and not great either. It's one of their "remodeled" units and whoever they got to do the remodeling sucked so a lot of little cosmetic things are wrong with it. Fucking towel racks won't stay on the wall.
In a brief perusal of apartments, for a little less than $60 more a month I could get a much newer, (like built in 2015 as opposed to 1979) much smaller unit that's a 10 minute walk to downtown as opposed to a 10 minute drive. Plus, I think it would actually shave maybe 5 to 10 minutes off my commute, which doesn't sound like a lot at first but that's 10 fewer minutes in a car so it's a win. And on my days off I'd only ever need to drive to go get groceries and maybe not even then.
But I would be going from a little over 1,000sqft to a little under 600. I can live with that but it would be tight. So I dunno. I'd need to move back home for a little while to build my bank account back up a smidge to cover all the moving costs and junk. Hopefully though it would only be for a month or so. Whenever I get my raise (that I'm still goddamned waiting on 6 months later) really.
FWIW @Juggernut research supports the notion that an easy commute is more important than a sizable residence for day-to-day quality of life.
It still wouldn't be an easy commute per se. Right now it's about 30 to 35 minutes one way from current place to job. New place would maaaaaybe get me under 30. Maybe. But 25 or so feels more doable.
What I'm doing atm is crashing at my moms on days I work so I only have to drive 2 minutes to work but I end up staying at my apartment maybe 1 or 2 days a week, if that and it's like. This is dumb! If I could get a little closer and also be within walking distance of stuff for barely any more money that seems like the best option. And I'm also not 100% sure why I didn't just do that in the first place honestly?
FWIW @Juggernut research supports the notion that an easy commute is more important than a sizable residence for day-to-day quality of life.
It still wouldn't be an easy commute per se. Right now it's about 30 to 35 minutes one way from current place to job. New place would maaaaaybe get me under 30. Maybe. But 25 or so feels more doable.
What I'm doing atm is crashing at my moms on days I work so I only have to drive 2 minutes to work but I end up staying at my apartment maybe 1 or 2 days a week, if that and it's like. This is dumb! If I could get a little closer and also be within walking distance of stuff for barely any more money that seems like the best option. And I'm also not 100% sure why I didn't just do that in the first place honestly?
Shit, can you move in with your Mum? Give her some cash for room and board, and save what you can for a deposit on buying a place instead?
What should have been a quick job of replacing out the toilet tank to bowl bolts took about 2 hours. I had to bust out the dremmel to grind the corroded bolt head down from the top. Would recommend everyone have a dremmel as part of their home kit thingie.
Ok I had a question
I know I need to replace the floors in this house as the carpet in the living room is well gone and the floors in the kitchen and hall have seen better days
I know Home Depot delivers just how I don't know but looking at their site on flooring it only lists take home copies not what it costs for a box of laminate floors. I know how big each room is because I got really curious and bored over time and figured out the area of each and the house
But would I have to go to a home depot to find out about getting stuff delivered? I only know they do because down the street someone had flooring and various bathroom items delivered
Posts
I got a 2004 Frontier and it is the perfect sized truck for the most part. It's pretty great.
I also dont have to commute to work all that frequently so it was easy-ish to justify getting it.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Depending on how much you'll buy they'll often throw in delivery as well.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Yea but then you have to learn to reverse them, while literally everyone you know and also don't know comes by and watch you suck at it, all the while judging you as some sort of lesser human scum.
Hiring trailer vs ute, I'll take the ute any day.
So our architect recommended a landscape guy who they had worked with before who did good work; we arranged for him to come by in November and do an initial site visit and potential quote.
He was great at the time, identifying some valuable changes to improve the property, but warned us he was quite busy and wouldn't be able to deliver anything for 3 months. That was okay; the build wasn't scheduled to begin for another until 4 months at the time and so we discussed the timelines and he made positive noises so we shook hands and went forward with the understanding he would be preparing some landscaping designs to go with our house plans. He seemed happy to have the work, and were pretty happy to lock in an apparently competent landscape designer.
Narrator voice: this may have been overly optimistic. Since then, we've mostly experienced long periods of radio silence. I mean, a certain degree of non-contact was to be expected; he did tell us he was busy. We sent him an FYI update in January, informing him of dates and deadlines as those began to get confirmed and who the builder was going to be and got nothing back. A quick follow up from the architect when the building consents were going in to see if anything they were doing in the yard needed to be added got back little more than 'nothing needed' and a slightly terse 'we will meet our original 3 month deadline' in response as to what his current timelines were looking like and when we might expect to see some plans so as to incorporate that into our project planning.
The 3 month point came and went with no word from him and still no sign anyone had even been out to measure and plot the property, so another follow up resulted in a visit from his site lead which would have been slightly more encouraging if he hadn't managed to give the impression that he was somewhat surprised that his boss was preparing to take on any additional work under current workload.
Then more silence.
Another email exchange now that the build is due to start a in a couple weeks has resulted in a curt message informing us he was currently busy with a $100 million contract (we think a school in one of the big growth suburbs) and once you consider Christmas it hasn't really been three months yet at all and we wouldn't really need his plans until after the main house build has finished anyway so just hold our britches.
A polite reminder that we had addressed that very point at the initial site visit in November as we wanted the earthworks plans at the very least specifically because we want to know where to be putting dirt has now gotten back a "oh, well, here's a list of other landscape architects who might be able to do this work".
It's apparent that he's completely put us out of his mind since landing us as a client as all his attention and focus has been on his big contract; meanwhile our plans and timelines have been left to shit in the wind to the point where it appears he hasn't even got a very basic outline of what was discussed or agreed when we met last year. Which would be fair enough if we hadn't been continually reaching out to touch base just to check in to see everything was on track and okay at his end and always getting basically 'stop bothering me, you're in the queue', right up until apparently we weren't.
All of which was then complicated by his site lead completely independently sending a completely different email 20 minutes later trying to lock down delivering us a potential draft plan in 2-3 weeks, having apparently not spoken to his boss at all.
So now we've squandered months of lead time for planning while being strung along and have nothing to show for it, and are faced with 2 fairly shit options:
1) Sticking with this very competent-but-overwhelmed landscape architect and possibly getting only a small percentage of his focus and attention in what has become a slightly dour business relationship and may require a degree of constant badgering and bullying on our part, because that always goes so well (but at least there is a business relationship and we're somewhere in the queue).
2) Ringing around a range of who-the-fuck-knows and basically getting anyone who's available on short notice, because those are definitely the guys you want on your project.
:frowny face:
/Rant
I managed to poke through the two missing wires for the smoke alarm and the last light. Instead of making a big hole in the freshly painted / plastered ceiling I went up into the ante-loft and lifted the boards up there to reach down again. The only problem was that they're interlocking caberfloor so you can't just lift a middle board, you need to work your way in from a side as everything butts together and overlaps to provide rigidity. And there's been a structure built on top of the floor (a little raised lip around the outside acting as a buffer between the storage space and the roof itself) so I couldn't actually lift any boards from the side.
So one of the boards came up with a crowbar and some persuasion and I could lie down on top of it and reach an arm under to poke one wire through. The other board though was in a corner and so was pinned down at two ends by this lip, so I had to saw through it.
It took about 45 minutes to hand-saw a hole big enough to fit my arm in to reach this wire. My jab-saw broke about 30 minutes in so the final 15 was spent using the remaining 3" of saw blade still attached to the handle
I am so ready for this loft to be finished
Bloody carpet fitters lost the plastic bag that was covering one of the sockets that had the fascia screws in, so I need to dig through the shed to see if I've got any more to reattach the fascias.
Now I've just got to make and fit the last door for the hatch, put a latch and handles on the boiler room door, put the latches on the hatch that I've got the handle on, paint the doors, wire in the rest of the sockets / cat6, fit the smoke alarm, fit the track lighting above my desk, fit the new RCD, wire in the lighting and power loops to that RCD, attach the new loops to the mains downstairs and I can move up there!
Oh, and the light switch at the bottom of the stairs needs splicing into the one at the top, but I ran out of junction boxes to extend the wire because it doesn't quite reach
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
It looks amazing!
In the same order as the three above:
This is the closest I could find to that part of the loft. The thing on the floor is the paper template I made of the sofa to see if it would fit there and I could make this wackiness a reality
i want to sit there and read at night while it's raining.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Attics while it’s raining are one of my favourite places to be!
Funny you mention that because last night after hoovering up all the carpet dander (and emptying the Dyson hopper twice) I fished out all the sofa cushions from where they've been stashed around the house and got the sofa set up
There was (and still is) a massive storm front moving over the North of the UK so you could hear the wind whistling and the rain battering against the tiles and the skylights
I may have had a little sit down and a read whilst my other half thought I was doing some productive
Go to "Settings -> Family -> Add a person" and you'll be able to get them set up. They can have their own 2FA then
No, fuck it, I was finally able to turn it off and we're not turning it on again. 2FA with texts as the only method is a security joke. If this were a banking account I'd take what I could get, but I don't really care if Nest is breached. (yeah yeah botnets and all that, I still don't care)
I don't have 2FA switched on for Nest though for this exact reason. It's super-easy to wire in 2FA with a third party authenticator app so I don't know why a company as big as Google (who have a Google Authenticator app already available) don't hook it up
I'm never at the one I'm in now so I probably won't be at a new one anymore but you know.
Right now, I'm paying like, right at a grand a month for a 2 bedroom that's not shitty but also is old and not great either. It's one of their "remodeled" units and whoever they got to do the remodeling sucked so a lot of little cosmetic things are wrong with it. Fucking towel racks won't stay on the wall.
In a brief perusal of apartments, for a little less than $60 more a month I could get a much newer, (like built in 2015 as opposed to 1979) much smaller unit that's a 10 minute walk to downtown as opposed to a 10 minute drive. Plus, I think it would actually shave maybe 5 to 10 minutes off my commute, which doesn't sound like a lot at first but that's 10 fewer minutes in a car so it's a win. And on my days off I'd only ever need to drive to go get groceries and maybe not even then.
But I would be going from a little over 1,000sqft to a little under 600. I can live with that but it would be tight. So I dunno. I'd need to move back home for a little while to build my bank account back up a smidge to cover all the moving costs and junk. Hopefully though it would only be for a month or so. Whenever I get my raise (that I'm still goddamned waiting on 6 months later) really.
It still wouldn't be an easy commute per se. Right now it's about 30 to 35 minutes one way from current place to job. New place would maaaaaybe get me under 30. Maybe. But 25 or so feels more doable.
What I'm doing atm is crashing at my moms on days I work so I only have to drive 2 minutes to work but I end up staying at my apartment maybe 1 or 2 days a week, if that and it's like. This is dumb! If I could get a little closer and also be within walking distance of stuff for barely any more money that seems like the best option. And I'm also not 100% sure why I didn't just do that in the first place honestly?
Shit, can you move in with your Mum? Give her some cash for room and board, and save what you can for a deposit on buying a place instead?
Turns out my sewage line has backed up into my basement. So that's cool. Good bye $200-3000 depending on what exactly is the cause.
I had some guests over last night too.
So it's like not even my own poop.
I know I need to replace the floors in this house as the carpet in the living room is well gone and the floors in the kitchen and hall have seen better days
I know Home Depot delivers just how I don't know but looking at their site on flooring it only lists take home copies not what it costs for a box of laminate floors. I know how big each room is because I got really curious and bored over time and figured out the area of each and the house
But would I have to go to a home depot to find out about getting stuff delivered? I only know they do because down the street someone had flooring and various bathroom items delivered