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A very big [house] in the country
SharpyVII
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Homeowners! How is home ownership going for you?
Father in law has been working on the drive for the past few weeks and I've taken some pictures of his latest handiwork:
Just got to gravel it and then it's done!
So what have you lot been doing to your house?
Father in law has been working on the drive for the past few weeks and I've taken some pictures of his latest handiwork:
Just got to gravel it and then it's done!
So what have you lot been doing to your house?
+24
Posts
Houses are a little cheaper there so we could afford a five bed but currently there is absolutely nothing there except housing. There are all kinds of plans for community orchards, schools, doctors and so on, but it seems like a real gamble right now
Plus we'd have to get in the car to do anything at allz which I don't like.
But I would like to have a nicer & larger house. Hmm
Luckily it’s only when the water is running, so we’re just not using the sink until we can call and get it fixed.
The paving looks awesome, Sharpy! Can we borrow your FIL?
I need to have Mori trim the grass all around the fences/house next weekend. And I need to remove the last of the heavenly bamboo. Unfortunately our yard waste bin is completely full (mostly of the last thorny bush I removed), and we already have a bag of grass trimmings in the garage (which is REALLY stinking up the garage) to put out, too.
If the water leak is only when the tap is open, then it;s water leaking around the tap body, up the spindle. This is something you can fix yourself with a new spindle and some spanners that will fit to undo the tap body.
Also yes keep your bags of lawn and garden trimmings outside in the open air where their stink can be blown away by the breeze, because whooo can that stuff get stanky...
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Before:
After: (kitchen still needs a lot of work)
Bonus fluffy cat
Still gotta -
Living room: frame and hang photos in the living room, put up overhead lamp
Baby's room: re-arrange furniture and put up curtains, hang mobile, put up painting/mural above crib
Kitchen: change drawer pulls, put brackets on cupboards, hang curtain rods and planters in front of window
Bedroom: put up shelving on far wall, pet cat
I love your floors and all the plants. I need better houseplants.
There’s nowhere that’s dry that we can store the trimmings
Yeah, this is a dead easy fix if you have about a half an hour and a hardware store close by. I've had to repair ever single faucet in my house, and each time it took very little effort beyond looking it up on Wikihow.
They didn’t have the couch in the showroom but all the other couches were so nice. So we took a gamble and ordered it blind and it really backfired.
It’s a sectional and I guess it was manufactured incorrectly, when we put the two pieces together they are about 3 inches misaligned. The couch is also hard as a rock and the material is so course when I sit on it my ass starts to burn.
I don’t think I’ve ever sat on such an uncomfortable couch before
I can’t wait to make our living room brighter and lighter. I think it’ll be something we’ll save up money to overhaul all at once, though. We have so much mismatched stuff right now.
I do really like turning on the water fountain and listening to the running water, though.
99% of these "tap spanners" are utter garbage:
The very first thing they do is stretch because they're just cheap pipe that's had the end squeezed a bit, they un-squeeze in a flash.
Then they round off the hex corners on the brass tap body and you are neck deep in shitsville, you're proper hooped.
You're far FAR better off buying a set of deep offset ring spanners that cover the likely tap-body size range (which from personal experience here in Australia is from 19mm [3/4"] to 32mm [1&1/4"']).
They'll cost at least three times as much, likely up to ten times or more for a good quality name brand (Snap-On/MAC), but they'll actually work, and the minimization of frustration and anger from struggling with incredibly shitty tools won't take a decade or so off your life...
For instance, these are el-cheapos.
Had a garbage can knocked down and a bag of garbage dragged into the neighbor's yard.
The neighbor had they bird feeder taken out.
We've got company!
not too worried, but I just want this to be finalized. house hunting... quite tedious!
I've lived most of my adult life in apartments where if I sneeze, I'm likely to hear a "bless you" through the walls or ceiling. So far, my experiments suggest that I can play music loudly enough to be clearly audible while taking a shower in the bathroom next to my office, while remaining barely audible from the driveway outside of my office.
This doesn't seem possible, but maybe this is just what decent insulation feels like.
So I finally just drew a line from the window to the wall and sure enough nothing is level.
I put the pic up anyway but now it's driving me nuts. Life was better before I became aware of the problem.
So we had our house re-sided last year, and during the course of the renovation the builders took down our gate post and didn't put it back up.This meant that our gate has been off of the fence for around a year now and there's been no barrier of entry to our yard.
Yesterday Mrs. Facepunch called me at work and informed me that her kayak had been stolen. This morning I noticed that our other kayak had been stolen. The second kayak being stolen isn't that big of a deal, because it was third hand and kind of a piece of shit. They also didn't get the seat.
But this also means that these motherfuckers have scoped out my yard and are stealing shit piece by piece. I'm going to be putting up the post today, but it's obviously too late.
I suppose there's no point to this post because I know how to install a fence post and set up the hardware for the gate. I'm just really pissed off that some piece of shit has been coming into my yard and stealing my shit. I'm seriously giving thought to sitting in the backyard tonight with a bat.
Fucking people.
I'm assuming I'll be going up there to help with maintenance for several weekends throughout this year but still cool!
This means that I need to attach the post to the house because I have no way of digging into solid cement. Awesome.
Can you put up some cheap cameras as a deterrent, too? My coworker had two break-ins and a lot of stuff stolen the first few months after buying his house and he hasn’t had any issues since he put up some cameras.
Do you have hire stores near you where you can hire power tools out at a daily rate? A core drill hire could make you a nice hole through the concrete which you can work with, i.e drill the hole through the concrete, dig the hold down two feet, sit the post in it with a brace holding it at the correct angle and height, then fill the hole in with a couple of bags of quickset cement. It's there forever, then.
Yeah tool hire is a good idea.
My father in law uses a kango hammer to break up concrete that was in the way of our drive.
Speaking of which, the drive is now done! Some pointing left to do on part of the path:
Bollards are temporary and we don't move the two that are up as they're there to protect the path and far corner from people driving on it and cracking the new path.
For comparison here is the drive when we bought the house:
this is anxiety inducing
I’ve also put a rake in the lawn, Sideshow Bob style, just for shits and giggles.
If anything else goes walkabout I’ll look at possible cameras.
Thanks for the suggestions folks. I really appreciate the help.
It was fine
Other than the time when I was sick, fell pit of bed and knocked my crt TV over and broke
My parents did not believe that story, I'm not sure what they thought the truth was, but it was this weird wink wink nudge thing with them for years
I guess they think I was drinking or fucking, I am not sure
My current apartment is about 400 square feet spread across three good sized rooms and a tiny kitchen
This probably means that all they wanted was a couple of kayaks.
A fifth of an acre (800 sqm) is a big amount of lawn to mow, that's for sure. Especially if your mower isn't self-propelled. For an area that large I'd actually buy a ride on mower, zero-turn if the budget allowed.
Don't forget where the rake is!
All of the houses around here have really unevenly landscaped yards. We had a weird dry river bed/fire pit in ours and Mori and I have removed 90% of the rocks that made it up, leaving a spectacularly uneven lawn. I used two buckets of soil + the circle of turf I removed from digging the tree hole to patch up the fire pit. I also think I’ll get some more cheap soil to spread over the dry river bed, then I’ll scatter some grass seeds and let it do its thing. We don’t care enough about the backyard that we want to buy new turf, but we care enough that it’d be nice to have it even and easy to mow.
Edit: I rooted around in the garage and the previous owners left a bag of grass seed so, yeah, I’m gonna buy some soil and scatter the seed today.
Yeah I absolutely did not have a self propelled. It wasn't too bad, it'd have been less bad if there was like 3 less trees in the way. I got someone's old lawnmower but I think I'll just go pick up a self propelled one in a few weeks because I don't know how long I can do that before I keel over and die.
I discovered that the previous owner, instead of taking advantage of the village sponsored yard waste removal, decided the best course of action was to put massive piles of sticks and leaves into the back corners of the property. It was infested with bugs and rotting shit. Took me like 3 hours to get like 10 or so wheelbarrows full of the shit to the front.
I also discovered he used wood glue to stick ceramic tile to the subfloor in the kitchen, so guess what's starting to break apart right now! Fucking idiot.
Top: Finally finished clearing the dry river bed/fire pit of all the rocks. The pile of rocks in the corner is what we moved this weekend; it’s about half the rocks in total. The other rocks all went towards lining the beds you see.
I filled in all the gaps with topsoil, gave it a good raking and watering then raked grass seed into the soil. So, looks like crap now, but fingers crossed in a few weeks we have a more even lawn, and no more stumbling over random rocks.
What you also don’t see is the myriad weeds I removed from the grass. There’s still a ton of weeds and moss in the grass, but I removed all the big ones. Basically it took a lot of work to get the lawn looking like that!
Bottom: I removed the heavenly bamboo that was dominating the bed here. I chopped it down and Mori’s dad very kindly dug up the roots.
The bed’s got nasturtiums and bee plants growing in it, but the big hole I am leaving empty until the fall, which is when I plan to plant a blueberry bush!
Also, if you think the back of the house looks as if it needs some TLC, you are right! In fact we got a quote to get the window beams there replaced and to get the whole house exterior cleaned, caulked and painted.
The back of the house is west-facing and sees the most weather damage.
Total cost: $6,300, which is about what we were expecting, although I was hoping it’d come in under $6k.
Top: I planted a fig tree! It’s in a spot where it can grow and spread and where it’ll get a decent amount of sun. Again, can’t really tell, but the hole went pretty deep (Niko sized) and took me two hours to dig.
Bottom: Also hard to see, but left-to-right we have: lavender, azalea (that’s not hard to see, that’s blooming obvious), a new tiny fuschia, azalea. Should make for a nice purple/red bed.
Nothing like yard work to make your hard work look like nothing...
We're house hunting right now and should be making a decision soon. 2 of our 3 favorites are in unincorporated sections of town though, which puts them on well water and septic instead of Lake Michigan water and sewer. I know that with good equipment the well water is ok, but I don't know if there are things we should be looking out for when it comes to septic or particular questions we should be asking.
In the past two days at open houses I've seen a house with a back yard leading to a river, one with a back yard going to a large pond, and one with a huge back yard that eventually ends when it comes up against a forest preserve. Oh, and another house a few miles away on the other bank of that same river, with a back yard that gives way to a small section of forest preserve leading to the river.
My wife definitely has a type.
In the house my parents live in (which had two adults and three kids in it for about a decade, then three adults for over a decade since then) I can recall the tanks being emptied twice, the second time fairly recently.
As pointed out, you'll need to have the tank pumped on a regular basis. You'll also need to check the outflow filter as well, as it can get clogged. Also, will you have your own drainage field, or are you sharing a communal one?
The bigger problem, however, is the well. If it's your own well - you'll need to have it tested as part of your inspection during closing, as well as regularly (annually + after adverse weather such as flooding.) If it's a communal well, you need to make sure that your HOA is doing the above.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
You can also have it dealt with as a conditional for closing, which I absolutely recommend for septic tanks.
Make sure your home inspector specifically tests it, @Ketar (costs extra usually).
I've been on well/septic 25 years of my life, no big deal.
Biggest gotcha is flushing: make sure you only flush pee/poo/tp and nothing else. Also no Charmin/Cottonelle as they clog stuff up.