@MegaMan001 - at my firm (architecture) we often specify HardieBoard siding and get good results from it over vinyl. It comes out looking clean and sharp. Not sure about bulletproof, but it seems to be a solid product that would last a good long while.
Is it more like ceramic where it's very strong but at some point will shatter instead of denting?
We're going to need new siding soon too, currently have aluminum.
Also thanks for confirming I'm not crazy. I thought there was a cement siding, but the one for we talked to didn't know what i was taking about.
@MegaMan001 - at my firm (architecture) we often specify HardieBoard siding and get good results from it over vinyl. It comes out looking clean and sharp. Not sure about bulletproof, but it seems to be a solid product that would last a good long while.
Is it more like ceramic where it's very strong but at some point will shatter instead of denting?
We're going to need new siding soon too, currently have aluminum.
It's a composite of cement and like...wood pulp? This samples feel a lot like trex decking honestly.
I am in the business of saving lives.
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AbsoluteZeroThe new film by Quentin KoopantinoRegistered Userregular
I have 30 year old aluminum siding that is ready to get replaced too. It's ugly and the paint rubs off easily. But it's still functional and the house has more urgent needs so... ugly it shall stay, for the time being. Yay homeownership.
If it normally gets to 100 then I'd make sure your vinyl is rated for like... 120? Higher?
In WA in our recent hottest-ever heatwave there were issues with vinyl siding getting completely fucked by the heat because nobody ever thought I'd get up to 110 here. But then, global warming!
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Toronto townhouse goes for $420k over asking and I've gone cross-eyed:
A Toronto townhouse on a busy street that drew multiple offers and sold for $420,000 above asking is a sign there is still plenty of heat left in the city’s red-hot market.
But even as sellers are celebrating, there are warnings that the true costs of the high prices will be borne by local businesses facing labour shortages and a generation unable to own their homes.
What. The. Fuck.
so a weird trend (and i don't know the details on this house) is that people are starting to underlist their house to get more hits/views knowing that people are going to upbid it. So maybe the place should have gone for 600k and they listed at 300 and it went for 720k. It's STILL insane and i just don't think sustainable but it's not "quite" as overblown...i mean it's still insane...
The headline intentionally uses the absolute amount rather than relative for maximum shock value. The property sold for $1.52 million, so works out to less than 40% above asking price.
I mean, it's all gradations of "totally fucked" regardless.
Hardie board can be painted, too, it is pretty much pretend wood as far as working with it near as I could tell when they put it on my house.
That is true. I’m just a get-siding-to-avoid-painting person at this point, so I figured color choices might be a part of the equation. Why paint if you don’t have to, after all? 😁
Yeah the smooth looks way better. You can also get larger sizes and lay it vertically with small trim pieces between to look like board and batten, and it looks quite nice.
You can do all kinds of stuff with fibre cement siding, different textures, too. I'd have to look up if they do a lot of work in the US but over here it's mostly by Eternit with Cedral for consumer products and also equitone.
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
We just re did our deck in Trex but as part of the construction they peeled back part of the vinyl siding to get the deck fascia against the house.
Low and behold, there's no fucking Tyvek (house wrap) behind the vinyl. They did me a favor went around the house and yeah no Tyvek anywhere.
Got a referral to a siding company and they did an inspection and found no Tyvek but luckily almost no signs of moisture damage. So we want to take the opportunity to get this fixed now as the existing siding is 28 years old (installed prior to house wrap being code required).
We live in Minnesota so moisture and storms is a real concern, as well as temperature swings from -60 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
I already know we will not be doing aluminum, wood, stucco, or brick based on cost and look. That basically leaves us with vinyl or those new "Hardie Boards" which is like a composite wood pulp and cement, but are also supposed to be bulletproof.
This is our forever home and I intend to die here so I'd like to do this once and do it right.
I like hardiebacker for backer boards professionally. I haven’t used their siding product though.
I already know we will not be doing aluminum, wood, stucco, or brick based on cost and look. That basically leaves us with vinyl or those new "Hardie Boards" which is like a composite wood pulp and cement, but are also supposed to be bulletproof.
Longtime lurker here. As a homeowner of one year doing siding and gutters to replace asbestos panels and insufficient gutters, we made a choice between vinyl and Hardie and opted for vinyl. It wasn’t a clear choice as both products had pros and cons. The companies that gave us quotes pushed Hardie as the better product but the price premium gave us a lot of pause.
Walking our neighborhood I actually talked to random neighbors to understand their siding. Most people were happy to talk. The big factor that really persuaded us is that we did not like the look of Hardie on any house we saw. Maybe it is made better now than what we saw installed but it seemed to age very poorly. Multiple example of extreme fading in sun compared to shade after a couple of years. And some versions that looked exactly like wood pulp meaning particle board to my eyes. Turned us off completely compared to vinyl especially for the price over vinyl.
I’d recommend walking your area for real examples to see installation in different light/shade and of different ages for weathering of materials. At least here, Northern Virginia, Hardie was not a clear winner from what I saw and the sample booklet wasn’t sufficient to understand how materials look on a house.
Now for any house project I talk to neighbors that have our same house design for tips and comparisons of repair choices.
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
It's really best if you check siding at night too.
Go around the neighborhood with a flashlight and rub against the grain. A wooden spoon works well so you don't scratch it.
This tests it's durability and sound proofing; if the owners wake up, it's too loud.
We've had a bunch of burrows show up the past 1-2 days and they are patrolling the front of our house. We also have to use the front to take the dog to the bathroom since we have work being done out back. So, we are constantly walking through them buzzing around and patrolling and all that. Kind of scared the dog is gonna try to eat one.
That, plus it makes things look ugly as hell in the flower beds with just giant dirt mounds being randomly in there.
Well, big move coming up on Tuesday. Nervous as hell; don't currently know how we're going to get our current residence ready for the move in time but oh well.
Leaving Ottawa after living here for half of my life sure is a weird feeling, but I'm excited! I don't think my daughter has fully internalized the fact that she won't get to hang out with her best friend every day anymore
Closed on selling my old house today!
I'm still suspicious somehow this will fall through. I'll believe it when I have the check in my hands next Tuesday (it's a mail-in closing for the buyers so doesn't get recorded until Monday and then they have to overnight me the check because the law firm is 90 minutes away).
PSN,Steam,Live | CptHamiltonian
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zepherinRussian warship, go fuck yourselfRegistered Userregular
We've had a bunch of burrows show up the past 1-2 days and they are patrolling the front of our house. We also have to use the front to take the dog to the bathroom since we have work being done out back. So, we are constantly walking through them buzzing around and patrolling and all that. Kind of scared the dog is gonna try to eat one.
That, plus it makes things look ugly as hell in the flower beds with just giant dirt mounds being randomly in there.
There were a lot of them near my bushes, and then I went heavy in with the roundup, and they went away. I don’t know if it’s causation vs correlation, but I have dead weeds and no cicada killers roaming around.
On Monday, we noticed water dripping from the AC vent in the upstairs guest room. The downstairs AC unit is right above it. We look in the attic at the unit, don't see anything wrong. We shut off the downstairs AC and the dripping stops immediately. Tuesday afternoon we had our HVAC guy out, he takes a look around and doesn't find anything. We turn it back on and everything was fine until last night, when it started dripping again. Drain pan is a little wet but no standing water, and again it stops as soon as we turn the unit off.
We took pictures and recorded some video. I'm going to leave it on during the day when I can keep an eye on it and probably have the HVAC guy back out next week to take another look. Glad I have a service plan with a good discount for diagnostic calls/repairs....
Are there any good resources into the process of buying a home? My wife and I are looking to purchase our first home hopefully by the end of the year and any info would be really useful. So far we found this: https://www.zillow.com/home-buying-guide/10-steps-to-buying-a-home/
Ugh - had to move a sprinkler head, because it was basically a couple of inches in my neighbor's yard (the guys who did the installation were not exactly careful about those things.) I also needed to replace the head with a 180 degree sprayer - the original head was set at 90 degrees, which is part of why I have a patch of dead sod I need to replace now.
This was not a fun task. First step was asking my neighbor for permission to, well, dig up their yard (which wasn't too difficult, as they're pretty nice folks.) Then,, I had to cut away the sod on top of where I was going to dig out the trench (because I was going to recap said trench with the sod.) Then came the digging, because I needed to get to the joint the head was secured into. The soil here is clay, so this was a bit of a slog, but finally I got the old head free and unscrewed it. Then came the fun of putting in the new piping to relocate thee screw point for the new head. I wound up making a second trip to get a female-female adaptor I needed to make everything work, then a bit of digging to make sure that the new head would sit flush with the ground. Then all that was left was filling in the hole and recapping with the sod I pulled. There's some areas that I may need to patch (I have a bag of patch seed from fixing some holes in myy lawn last year, so that won't be a problem), but in the end, the head is moved in,, and with the new spray pattern, the coverage of the dead patch is so much better (which is good,, because the next project is replacing the dead sod...)
if the sod was living last year and just died this year, it is possible to bring it back. 2 inches of water every day for 2 weeks will tell you whether it can be saved (if you want to).
Our kitchen renovation is coming along. I finished polishing the (concrete) countertops last weekend and got the epoxy sealant down during the week. I also got the sink / disposal / dishwasher all hooked up so that is done. My wife finished painting the bottom cabinets and all the pull-outs are reinstalled and most of the doors / drawers are back on.
Yesterday I replaced the one light she hates over the sink with two new recessed LED lights. What should have been a 45 minute job took half the day because the first hole I cut in the ceiling overlapped the main longitudinal support beam for the house, and I didn't have a long enough bit so I had to get a new one at harbor freight. Double checked everything and a .5" hole is structurally fine where I drilled since that was a small bit of concern. Then I got to patch up the original hole in the middle and the first hole I cut that was on the beam but those are in.
Windows are getting installed tomorrow so I spent the morning going through and moving stuff and taking down blinds and curtains. I have the big windows in the front left but I'll need a ladder and decided to wait until the morning sun isn't beating down on them, hence chilling on the couch and posting right now.
My wife is doing some spot sanding of the floor and once that's done/ sealed we can start moving some appliances back in and putting the top cabinets up / mouldings in and get that project wrapped. We are hoping to be mostly done before we go on vacation the week of August 16th.
After that I'm calling to get quotes on a new furnace / AC / heat pump, and we are probably going to do a HELOC to consolidate that, the windows, and then also some other smaller things like new carpet for the bedrooms since that's the only original 25 year old carpet left in the house and is getting pretty gross. Probably also getting one or two rooms repainted since the living room with the vaulted ceiling is painted white with what's technically primer from when we moved in.
Last fall we put a deposit down on getting our trim repainted and planned on doing it April / May, but postponed until after the windows were done. We emailed the guy and he said that because of rain and a paint shortage he is 12 weeks backlogged so that will hopefully be before winter.
It's been nice I haven't had to mess with sprinklers or watering at all because we've been getting good regular rain all summer.
if the sod was living last year and just died this year, it is possible to bring it back. 2 inches of water every day for 2 weeks will tell you whether it can be saved (if you want to).
The sod's been dead since last year. It needs to be replaced.
Wired the pump back up today, after cutting out the plumbing mess of mismatched pex and copper of varying sizes in the basement and replacing it all with 3/4 inch the way it should be.
That's 8 gallons per minute. It was about 6 gpm before I replaced the garbage job they did in the pump terror hole and put in a properly sized pressure tank. The pressure tank holds at about 48psi at that flow rate too, so I couldn't be happier.
We've had a bunch of burrows show up the past 1-2 days and they are patrolling the front of our house. We also have to use the front to take the dog to the bathroom since we have work being done out back. So, we are constantly walking through them buzzing around and patrolling and all that. Kind of scared the dog is gonna try to eat one.
That, plus it makes things look ugly as hell in the flower beds with just giant dirt mounds being randomly in there.
There were a lot of them near my bushes, and then I went heavy in with the roundup, and they went away. I don’t know if it’s causation vs correlation, but I have dead weeds and no cicada killers roaming around.
I think they pollinate, so they try to make up for how annoying they are? Heh. We had our exterminator just spray the holes and he kicked the dirt around. They didn't care and went back to normal. I don't mind them, but we just mulched our flower beds and now it looks a little like garbage with giant dirt mounds.
Yeah the underlist is pretty common now, my friend was looking at a house in Hamilton. Probably about an hour out from the City (Toronto).
It was a 1400sqft detached house, older but somewhat renovated in a clean fashion.
It was listed for 410k, which I thought was low, ended up going for 675k. I would of expected a listing of about 550k-600k from what I've seen and yeah selling for 675k doesn't surprised me at all.
I appreciate the words about siding. We are going to do Hardie board with a full window wrap and a new seamless gutter system.
Our initial inspection didn't actually show that much moisture damage even without the Tyvek so God willing we will get away without replacing a bunch of wood.
All in, the Hardie board (with new drip cap, flashing, trim, fascia, and soffit) is going to end up roughly twice as expensive as vinyl, but since I'm never moving out of this house unless I'm dead, I want something as future proof as possible.
So we're hopefully signing for our house on friday. Final walkthrough is thursday. I am very excited and nervous. But I have some questions!
We're thinking of putting my office in the basement since there's a pretty nice room in there that should work as an office/workout space. However I'm a little concerned about moisture since the room is unfinished. I looked into finishing a basement and putting down flooring doesn't seem crazy difficult. Is this probably necessary before I start putting my computer down there? Wife thinks it'll be fine but I don't wanna take any risks I don't have to. Also worried about possible tax stuff with finishing a basement room. And I might want to try and run ethernet around the house but I haven't done that behind walls before. Doesn't seem like it's too hard though?
Second question! We're going to want to change the locks of course and I hear something called kwikset is good to put in my own locks and set them? And cheaper than a locksmith? I also wanna get one of those fancy video doorbells.
Electrician will be hopefully fixing a few things before we move in but otherwise inspection said the house is pretty awesome. It's older but has a bunch of work done like newer plumbing.
We hired a designer to help with our upcoming mostly-DIY kitchen reno. We got back some of our concept pics recently.
Current kitchen (the white cabinets on the left are against a solid wall:
Concept pics:
The designer and my wife are trying to sell me on closing up the pocket doors to our 3-season room and install a door in our laundry room (spoiler: we're probably doing this).
So even though we're blowing out half of a wall, we're actually gaining storage. The lower cabinets will be a much darker grey, and the backsplash is a placeholder, for now.
So we're hopefully signing for our house on friday. Final walkthrough is thursday. I am very excited and nervous. But I have some questions!
We're thinking of putting my office in the basement since there's a pretty nice room in there that should work as an office/workout space. However I'm a little concerned about moisture since the room is unfinished. I looked into finishing a basement and putting down flooring doesn't seem crazy difficult. Is this probably necessary before I start putting my computer down there? Wife thinks it'll be fine but I don't wanna take any risks I don't have to. Also worried about possible tax stuff with finishing a basement room. And I might want to try and run ethernet around the house but I haven't done that behind walls before. Doesn't seem like it's too hard though?
Second question! We're going to want to change the locks of course and I hear something called kwikset is good to put in my own locks and set them? And cheaper than a locksmith? I also wanna get one of those fancy video doorbells.
Electrician will be hopefully fixing a few things before we move in but otherwise inspection said the house is pretty awesome. It's older but has a bunch of work done like newer plumbing.
Cool and congrats!
Unfinished basements can be pretty variable - edit our basement a few spots will slightly weep when its super wet and snow is melting, so I would be reluctant to put up drywall in those spots or put down carpet but its otherwise pretty dry. We put heavy sealer paint on the bare concrete walls when we redid it last year and put down rubber gym floor since even if there was water we can just dry it out.
I'd get a feel for a few seasons moisture / humidity before I did too much down there, but as long as the computer is off the floor it is probably fine.
Keep in mind treating your basement as finished living space requires multiple points of egress, so if you are going to be spending a lot of time there getting an emergency escape window might be worthwhile for safety and also lets you treat those square footage as living space.
zagdrob on
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
That redesign looks needlessly complicated. Why are they moving your stove? Why is the microwave at knee level? You aren't going to be able to read it or see what's inside without crouching down. I kind of hate that new design.
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Is it more like ceramic where it's very strong but at some point will shatter instead of denting?
We're going to need new siding soon too, currently have aluminum.
Also thanks for confirming I'm not crazy. I thought there was a cement siding, but the one for we talked to didn't know what i was taking about.
It's a composite of cement and like...wood pulp? This samples feel a lot like trex decking honestly.
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Etsy wishlist
In WA in our recent hottest-ever heatwave there were issues with vinyl siding getting completely fucked by the heat because nobody ever thought I'd get up to 110 here. But then, global warming!
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
It comes in smooth: https://www.jameshardie.com/products/hardieplank-lap-siding
The headline intentionally uses the absolute amount rather than relative for maximum shock value. The property sold for $1.52 million, so works out to less than 40% above asking price.
I mean, it's all gradations of "totally fucked" regardless.
That is true. I’m just a get-siding-to-avoid-painting person at this point, so I figured color choices might be a part of the equation. Why paint if you don’t have to, after all? 😁
wish list
Steam wishlist
Etsy wishlist
Yeah the smooth looks way better. You can also get larger sizes and lay it vertically with small trim pieces between to look like board and batten, and it looks quite nice.
Longtime lurker here. As a homeowner of one year doing siding and gutters to replace asbestos panels and insufficient gutters, we made a choice between vinyl and Hardie and opted for vinyl. It wasn’t a clear choice as both products had pros and cons. The companies that gave us quotes pushed Hardie as the better product but the price premium gave us a lot of pause.
Walking our neighborhood I actually talked to random neighbors to understand their siding. Most people were happy to talk. The big factor that really persuaded us is that we did not like the look of Hardie on any house we saw. Maybe it is made better now than what we saw installed but it seemed to age very poorly. Multiple example of extreme fading in sun compared to shade after a couple of years. And some versions that looked exactly like wood pulp meaning particle board to my eyes. Turned us off completely compared to vinyl especially for the price over vinyl.
I’d recommend walking your area for real examples to see installation in different light/shade and of different ages for weathering of materials. At least here, Northern Virginia, Hardie was not a clear winner from what I saw and the sample booklet wasn’t sufficient to understand how materials look on a house.
Now for any house project I talk to neighbors that have our same house design for tips and comparisons of repair choices.
Go around the neighborhood with a flashlight and rub against the grain. A wooden spoon works well so you don't scratch it.
This tests it's durability and sound proofing; if the owners wake up, it's too loud.
We've had a bunch of burrows show up the past 1-2 days and they are patrolling the front of our house. We also have to use the front to take the dog to the bathroom since we have work being done out back. So, we are constantly walking through them buzzing around and patrolling and all that. Kind of scared the dog is gonna try to eat one.
That, plus it makes things look ugly as hell in the flower beds with just giant dirt mounds being randomly in there.
Tumblr | Twitter | Twitch | Pinny Arcade Lanyard
[3DS] 3394-3901-4002 | [Xbox/Steam] Redfield85
Leaving Ottawa after living here for half of my life sure is a weird feeling, but I'm excited! I don't think my daughter has fully internalized the fact that she won't get to hang out with her best friend every day anymore
I'm still suspicious somehow this will fall through. I'll believe it when I have the check in my hands next Tuesday (it's a mail-in closing for the buyers so doesn't get recorded until Monday and then they have to overnight me the check because the law firm is 90 minutes away).
There were a lot of them near my bushes, and then I went heavy in with the roundup, and they went away. I don’t know if it’s causation vs correlation, but I have dead weeds and no cicada killers roaming around.
On Monday, we noticed water dripping from the AC vent in the upstairs guest room. The downstairs AC unit is right above it. We look in the attic at the unit, don't see anything wrong. We shut off the downstairs AC and the dripping stops immediately. Tuesday afternoon we had our HVAC guy out, he takes a look around and doesn't find anything. We turn it back on and everything was fine until last night, when it started dripping again. Drain pan is a little wet but no standing water, and again it stops as soon as we turn the unit off.
We took pictures and recorded some video. I'm going to leave it on during the day when I can keep an eye on it and probably have the HVAC guy back out next week to take another look. Glad I have a service plan with a good discount for diagnostic calls/repairs....
https://clark.com/homes-real-estate/how-to-buy-a-house/
A sawzall wasn't going to do it this time, so I went Dead Rising and bought a chainsaw blade for my trimmer.
Suck it, bamboo.
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/237755/help-me-sell-my-washing-machine#latest
This was not a fun task. First step was asking my neighbor for permission to, well, dig up their yard (which wasn't too difficult, as they're pretty nice folks.) Then,, I had to cut away the sod on top of where I was going to dig out the trench (because I was going to recap said trench with the sod.) Then came the digging, because I needed to get to the joint the head was secured into. The soil here is clay, so this was a bit of a slog, but finally I got the old head free and unscrewed it. Then came the fun of putting in the new piping to relocate thee screw point for the new head. I wound up making a second trip to get a female-female adaptor I needed to make everything work, then a bit of digging to make sure that the new head would sit flush with the ground. Then all that was left was filling in the hole and recapping with the sod I pulled. There's some areas that I may need to patch (I have a bag of patch seed from fixing some holes in myy lawn last year, so that won't be a problem), but in the end, the head is moved in,, and with the new spray pattern, the coverage of the dead patch is so much better (which is good,, because the next project is replacing the dead sod...)
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Yesterday I replaced the one light she hates over the sink with two new recessed LED lights. What should have been a 45 minute job took half the day because the first hole I cut in the ceiling overlapped the main longitudinal support beam for the house, and I didn't have a long enough bit so I had to get a new one at harbor freight. Double checked everything and a .5" hole is structurally fine where I drilled since that was a small bit of concern. Then I got to patch up the original hole in the middle and the first hole I cut that was on the beam but those are in.
Windows are getting installed tomorrow so I spent the morning going through and moving stuff and taking down blinds and curtains. I have the big windows in the front left but I'll need a ladder and decided to wait until the morning sun isn't beating down on them, hence chilling on the couch and posting right now.
My wife is doing some spot sanding of the floor and once that's done/ sealed we can start moving some appliances back in and putting the top cabinets up / mouldings in and get that project wrapped. We are hoping to be mostly done before we go on vacation the week of August 16th.
After that I'm calling to get quotes on a new furnace / AC / heat pump, and we are probably going to do a HELOC to consolidate that, the windows, and then also some other smaller things like new carpet for the bedrooms since that's the only original 25 year old carpet left in the house and is getting pretty gross. Probably also getting one or two rooms repainted since the living room with the vaulted ceiling is painted white with what's technically primer from when we moved in.
Last fall we put a deposit down on getting our trim repainted and planned on doing it April / May, but postponed until after the windows were done. We emailed the guy and he said that because of rain and a paint shortage he is 12 weeks backlogged so that will hopefully be before winter.
It's been nice I haven't had to mess with sprinklers or watering at all because we've been getting good regular rain all summer.
The sod's been dead since last year. It needs to be replaced.
That's 8 gallons per minute. It was about 6 gpm before I replaced the garbage job they did in the pump terror hole and put in a properly sized pressure tank. The pressure tank holds at about 48psi at that flow rate too, so I couldn't be happier.
I think they pollinate, so they try to make up for how annoying they are? Heh. We had our exterminator just spray the holes and he kicked the dirt around. They didn't care and went back to normal. I don't mind them, but we just mulched our flower beds and now it looks a little like garbage with giant dirt mounds.
They should be gone soon enough though I think.
Tumblr | Twitter | Twitch | Pinny Arcade Lanyard
[3DS] 3394-3901-4002 | [Xbox/Steam] Redfield85
It was a 1400sqft detached house, older but somewhat renovated in a clean fashion.
It was listed for 410k, which I thought was low, ended up going for 675k. I would of expected a listing of about 550k-600k from what I've seen and yeah selling for 675k doesn't surprised me at all.
Our initial inspection didn't actually show that much moisture damage even without the Tyvek so God willing we will get away without replacing a bunch of wood.
All in, the Hardie board (with new drip cap, flashing, trim, fascia, and soffit) is going to end up roughly twice as expensive as vinyl, but since I'm never moving out of this house unless I'm dead, I want something as future proof as possible.
We're thinking of putting my office in the basement since there's a pretty nice room in there that should work as an office/workout space. However I'm a little concerned about moisture since the room is unfinished. I looked into finishing a basement and putting down flooring doesn't seem crazy difficult. Is this probably necessary before I start putting my computer down there? Wife thinks it'll be fine but I don't wanna take any risks I don't have to. Also worried about possible tax stuff with finishing a basement room. And I might want to try and run ethernet around the house but I haven't done that behind walls before. Doesn't seem like it's too hard though?
Second question! We're going to want to change the locks of course and I hear something called kwikset is good to put in my own locks and set them? And cheaper than a locksmith? I also wanna get one of those fancy video doorbells.
Electrician will be hopefully fixing a few things before we move in but otherwise inspection said the house is pretty awesome. It's older but has a bunch of work done like newer plumbing.
Current kitchen (the white cabinets on the left are against a solid wall:
Concept pics:
The designer and my wife are trying to sell me on closing up the pocket doors to our 3-season room and install a door in our laundry room (spoiler: we're probably doing this).
So even though we're blowing out half of a wall, we're actually gaining storage. The lower cabinets will be a much darker grey, and the backsplash is a placeholder, for now.
Cool and congrats!
Unfinished basements can be pretty variable - edit our basement a few spots will slightly weep when its super wet and snow is melting, so I would be reluctant to put up drywall in those spots or put down carpet but its otherwise pretty dry. We put heavy sealer paint on the bare concrete walls when we redid it last year and put down rubber gym floor since even if there was water we can just dry it out.
I'd get a feel for a few seasons moisture / humidity before I did too much down there, but as long as the computer is off the floor it is probably fine.
Keep in mind treating your basement as finished living space requires multiple points of egress, so if you are going to be spending a lot of time there getting an emergency escape window might be worthwhile for safety and also lets you treat those square footage as living space.