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Currently ripping up carpet in a bedroom, then going to put down floor leveler and eventually some vinyl plank.

Concrete pad?

Put me down as a SpeedQueen True Believer:





It's the details that really make this thing: thick stainless steel drum, stainless steel door hinges, fully sealed lint trap, courtesy light...and it's relatively quiet and seems to be well-balanced.

Not looking forward to paying this much money again when the washer eventually goes out, but when it does, we're getting another one of these.

Our daughter is home for a few weeks and she noticed the leak in the backyard faucet that I've been ignoring for at least 2 years. I just put a bucket under the faucet and watered some plants in the garden when the bucket got close to full. She decided to tackle the problem and asked if I wanted to help, so I eagerly said yes and got her a few tools from the garage - pipe wrench, a couple adjustable wrenches etc and shut off the water supply to the house. With a bit of help from YouTube and some luck, we managed to open the faucet and removed the 20+ year old compression washer, held in place with a Philips-head screw. Luckily we had a stash of replacement washers that I'd bought at a clearance sale at the hardware store many years ago and one of those fit perfectly. The whole job took us about 20 minutes and of course she was delighted when we turned the water back on and the leak had completely stopped. Helping her do the repair brought me so much more satisfaction than doing it myself - now I know she's more than capable of handling plumbing leaks when she has a house of her own someday.

The dog managed to snag one of the wires to the LED setup on the back deck and ripped it out of the LED controller. I got the one channel to the awning plugged back in and re-ran the lines to where the dog won't hit them. I need to pick up some wire nuts before I handle the other line.

Additionally, I had a slow leak in the passenger front tire. It was getting bad enough to the point where I was filling the tire every couple of days. I finally got some time blocked out and found the sheet metal screw that was stuck in the tire, plugged it, refilled it and remounted it.

Next up is the UHF antenna. A good sized wind storm bent the mast and I need to replace it.

Darkmage wrote:

The dog managed to snag one of the wires to the LED setup on the back deck and ripped it out of the LED controller.

Ours took out the A/C in a similar way a few weeks ago. I assume it was the control wires from the thermostat to the compressor that got trashed. A/C needed servicing anyway (even prior to the wire incident it wasn't working as well as it should). Called the HVAC company we've been using since moving to this house, and they took care of it.

Finally rebuilt the rat's nest of 1974-vintage water supply copper and valves under the kitchen sink. In particular, the dishwasher shutoff did nothing of the sort, and based on accruing evidence, I'm pretty sure said appliance is on death row. Have a clean row of quarter-turn valves now, and my wife can easily figure them out if something happens while I'm on a business trip.

Next stop: the ice maker tapline and leaking thread-valve over the water heater cold inlet.

Aaaand the water heater supply is done, finally have quarter-turn ball valves for the cold water inlet and the kitchen icemaker tap. I was going to leave the hot water outlet alone but bought the hardware just in case, and that turned out to be a great idea. The dielectric union on the cold water side was 30% blocked from corrosion and seal break-down. When I saw that, I pulled the hot water side and found the same thing. Not terrible for a 10yo unit but definitely in need of attention.

Pro tip: do what the pros do, and get your copper flex pipes at a local plumbing supply house. It wasn't any more expensive than the stuff on the shelf at the home improvement stores and the quality was noticeably better.

My house hates me. Get up this morning and notice the HVAC blower is running a lot but not getting cold. Find the outside unit attempting to start for a couple seconds and then shutting down. After troubleshooting a bit it seemed to be a baked-out motor capacitor ($25), but ever try finding one of those on a Saturday? Finally drove 40 minutes to McGuckin Hardware and found exactly one on the shelf that was a close enough value to risk trying, came back home and installed it. Back in business.

On the plus side, it gave me a good reason to disassemble the outside unit's fan motor since I needed to confirm the stator windings hadn't burned, so I went ahead and repacked the sleeve bearings.

I just did a massive radiator hose replacement marathon and radiator fan assembly on my car. A couple of days ago, I was driving home and the warning light came on and the car was completely in the red and overheating. I managed to pull over on a side street and after opening the hood so It could cool off, discovered I had no coolant left in the car. Turned out I had an old hose slowly open up a spilt right near a clamp and it had slowly let all my coolant out over time.

As my car is an 02 I figured it would be a good idea to replace every hose in the car as they all were original and 16 years old now, along with my radiator fan assembly. After starting to take the hoses off to replace them, the stock pinch clamps were all facing impossible to get off ways. I ended up having to use some seriously creative ways to get them off, and I job I figured would take me a few hours ended up taking almost 9 hours. I ended up mostly cutting said hoses close to the pinch clamps and forcibly rotating it enough to get the dang thing off. I did make sure when II put the new screw clamps on, that I could easily get them off in the future.

I also had to disassemble part of my car to get to some of the hoses as they were routed through all sorts of narrow and hard to access ways. Over all, it made me want to strangle the designer that thought this was a good way to route things. At least doing it myself only cost me $150 worth of hoses, $200 for the radiator fan assembly, a bunch of cuts and bruises, and a large amount of rage and swearing.

The majority of posts in this thread seems to revolve around keeping your house in working order. I have been wanting to get a house some time, but I do love the minimal maintenance that my current small apartment requires. It basically just needs a clean now and then and then I can spend the rest of my time doing other, more fun, stuff.

Yesterday was quite productive as I first fixed a Commodore 16 that I got very cheap as faulty some years back but it had been stuck in the back of the queue of 'things I need to look at'. A replacement CPU was all it needed to run again. Those 8501 CPUs are not easy to find any longer but luckily I had a spare one lying around. There's a modern FPGA replacement available but they are not exactly cheap.

I then proceeded to fixing a dead Commodore Plus/4 motherboard that I got for spares along with a working Plus/4 machine. Turns out it just needed a new PLA. These you can get in modern versions for a reasonable price. I had a SuperPLA 3 already which I installed here.

Lastly I fixed a Commodore PC-I (8088 PC) which was completely dead. I found that the PSU was dead on all rails but I found another PSU with similar specs which I was able to fit inside the original PSU case and now this old PC runs again as well. Before ditching the original PSU I did a few basic checks (fuse, visual inspection etc.) in case I could fix it but could not see any obvious signs as to why it was dead. I put fresh caps in the replacement PSU, so hopefully it should work well for a long time.

Three Commodore machines fixed in one day, not too bad if you ask me.

I am currently in the process of removing a 45 year old shed to replace it with a new Amish-built shed. These projects always turn into more than I would have ever envisioned. I had to clear brush from beside and behind the shed that I have never trod upon, and discovered it was a knotted mess of 5" diameter grape vines, old concrete blocks, leftovers from an old chicken coop, and bits of plastic buckets crumbled to dust. It took two weekends to clear and burn that crap up before I even got to tackle the old shed. The new shed is twice the size of the old, and I needed to get a mower around it somehow. The area has to be level, and I am too cheap to rent the right tool for the job.

It has been too hot for this baloney.

Next up, getting rid of the bees in the old shed. I haven't bothered them since they didn't bother me, but there is at least 8 species of bees in there, and multiple nests of each including a pretty cool nest of bumblebees in an eve full of mouse nests and poop. My dad an I tried gopher bombs since they primarily create SO2 which is quite toxic to bees, but it wasn't enough. The bees laughed at us. So off to the hardware store to pick up some big guns and wage war tonight.

liquidsquid wrote:

So off to the hardware store to pick up some big guns and wage war tonight.

Might I suggest a certain product from The Boring Company?

@ liquid - If you're just demoing the shed, how about a propane torch at night after they go to sleep?

The Egg wrote:

@ liquid - If you're just demoing the shed, how about a propane torch at night after they go to sleep?

I don't have enough beer to pay off the fire department. Plus I have electric to deal with and who knows what black and white creatures are living under it! The thought of an "accident" has come to mind though.

Oh, and those flame throwers are for wussies. I made one when I was a kid that sent out a 50' stream of lit gasoline and/or kerosene from a pressurized mason jar. Now THAT was fun! You could light a lot of fireworks quickly with one of those.

liquidsquid wrote:

The Egg wrote:

@ liquid - If you're just demoing the shed, how about a propane torch at night after they go to sleep?

I don't have enough beer to pay off the fire department. Plus I have electric to deal with and who knows what black and white creatures are living under it! The thought of an "accident" has come to mind though.

Oh, and those flame throwers are for wussies. I made one when I was a kid that sent out a 50' stream of lit gasoline and/or kerosene from a pressurized mason jar. Now THAT was fun! You could light a lot of fireworks quickly with one of those.

Well.....the goal wasn't to burn the place, but just to make sure it wouldn't really matter if it happened. Bees/wasps are generally pretty sluggish at night; you could probably light the nest and then knock it down with a pole.

I finally got the time to fix the worn out door hinge on my S10, which had ovaled out the hole enough that the door was drooping significantly, and letting in a lot of air noise from the now non-functional door seal.

The process was fairly easy, remove door trim to get access to the wiring harness for the door, remove and cover that, then undo the two pins from the door, and (gently) put the door away so I had a nice open place where I could weld on some extra steel to reinforce/re-center the holes.

All that went off without a hitch, except when I removed the door interior, I dropped it slightly and it fell down and punched a hole in the door speaker cone.

I had planned on replacing the OEM speakers eventually, but didn't really want to now, but I guess my hands are tied.

Luckily, 6.5" speakers of significantly improved quality are only like $30/pair, so it turns out it was almost a blessing in surprise.

For a while, we've been having a little bit of cold air leaking out around the door seal (lower left corner, right by the handle) on the freezer compartment of our refrigerator. I'm sure it was hurting efficiency, but I hadn't gotten around to dealing with it. So the other day I was looking at it trying to figure out if there's something I could do short of replacing the entire seal, and it hit me -- the seal wasn't the problem. The whole frikkin door was slightly warped, which was keeping it from sealing properly!

So I grabbed the corners of the door and twisted it as hard as I could. It's still not 100% true, but the cold air leak appears to have stopped.

On my old refrigerator, gentle tweaking is sufficient to re-align the freezer door.

Went to all the trouble this weekend to replace the 97% failed thermostat in my TRUE double wide GDM-49 with a digital thermostat. The new unit worked fine giving the right LED codes; so we put the plate cover over it. It worked for about 15 minutes and then failed. I had a pro doing most of the work carefully tracing and double metering every wire. The temp adjustment dial now has an gravelly uneven feel. so we chalked it up to early failure mode in the electronics failure paradigm. Put the old one back in and ordered a mechanical one instead. I'd like to nick Amazon for the $90 on the failed part but I've had it for several months while waiting for a lull in business. Guess I'll submit a refund request and see what happens.

As someone noted earlier, owning a house generates plenty of opportunity to fix things. Owning two....

I've been updating things in a house we just purchased. For example, I replaced the 25 year old hot water heater the day after we bought the house. The original hotwater heater had no drip pan. When I put the new one in, with a drip pan, I teed the overflow line into the drip line from the AC. The AC drip line was 1" PVC that ran up through the water heater closet into the ceiling. The drip line, despite being 1" PVC, was flexed into a curve from where it came out of the slab to the ceiling. One of my prior visits to the house, I noticed that some cardboard siting in the corner seemed a bit damp.

This is the area in the garage. The two doors are to the water heater closet.


This is what I found when I busted out the drywall. Yes, that is standing water, along with a lot of other crap left from building the house.


My initial cut out of the drywall under the closet.


Cleaned up the drywall edges to make sure they were straight. You can also see the drip line where I cut it off. The upper end is in a bucket in the closet as the AC was running full throttle and generating about a 1/2 gallon an hour of condensate.


The new, upper section of the closet drip line, including the overflow line from the hot water heater pan.


The lower section no longer bends. It now is straight, with a proper 45 degree elbow. Must less stress on the whole system.


I cleaned all the debris out from under the closet floor and soaked up all the water I could.


I let it dry for about 18 hours. Looks SOOO much better!


New drywall. If this hadn't been in the garage I would have been a bit more particular about the drywall. Being away from home, I really didn't want to buy a 4x8 sheet of drywall just for two feet of it. No place to store left-overs. So I picked up a pair of 2x2 "repair" pieces from Lowes. The seam between the two isn't supported. Again, interior, I would have put a furring strip on the seam to reduce movement and give it a bit more strength.


Taped and spackled.


Dry and sanded.


Primed for painting.


Painted to match the rest of the garage -- though missing the scuffs, dirt, and grime.... You can see the unsupported seam where the two repair pieces match. Compare that to the two outer seams which are on 2x4s and well supported. It's in the garage, in a rental property, so I'm not terribly worried about it.


The whole project took about 4-5 hours split over two days and interrupted by several other activities too. Last weekend, the AC was replaced -- it was also 25 years old and could not maintain the temperature in the house on an even mildly warm day. I didn't do that project though. Some things are better left to the proffesionals.

--SS

Personally, I would have left a 16x16 cutout, and screwed an 18x18 vent grill over it (i.e. into the studs) to breathe that space and provide future inspection access to the pipe.

ludi wrote:

Personally, I would have left a 16x16 cutout, and screwed an 18x18 vent grill over it (i.e. into the studs) to breathe that space and provide future inspection access to the pipe.

I considered it, but the other wall is the living room and is uninsulated. Leaving it open would have let a significant amount of heat through from the garage. Not how I would have built it, but I wasn't going to change it on such short notice and without some thought and planning.

--SS

SecretSquirrel wrote:

ludi wrote:

Personally, I would have left a 16x16 cutout, and screwed an 18x18 vent grill over it (i.e. into the studs) to breathe that space and provide future inspection access to the pipe.

I considered it, but the other wall is the living room and is uninsulated. Leaving it open would have let a significant amount of heat through from the garage. Not how I would have built it, but I wasn't going to change it on such short notice and without some thought and planning.

Would it have been letting heat through from the garage, or venting heat from the water heater into the garage?

just brew it! wrote:

SecretSquirrel wrote:

ludi wrote:

Personally, I would have left a 16x16 cutout, and screwed an 18x18 vent grill over it (i.e. into the studs) to breathe that space and provide future inspection access to the pipe.

I considered it, but the other wall is the living room and is uninsulated. Leaving it open would have let a significant amount of heat through from the garage. Not how I would have built it, but I wasn't going to change it on such short notice and without some thought and planning.

Would it have been letting heat through from the garage, or venting heat from the water heater into the garage?

It would have been letting heat in. The closet that holds the hot water heater is sealed off from the area below the closet floor.

--SS

SecretSquirrel wrote:

It would have been letting heat in. The closet that holds the hot water heater is sealed off from the area below the closet floor.

Ahh, OK. Didn't realize they were separate areas! Should've looked closer at the pictures...

Oh man, that water heater job looked ugly.


In other news, I got the floor in. Now just need to repaint the baseboards (really should have done this first), and the quarter round.

SecretSquirrel wrote:

ludi wrote:

Personally, I would have left a 16x16 cutout, and screwed an 18x18 vent grill over it (i.e. into the studs) to breathe that space and provide future inspection access to the pipe.

I considered it, but the other wall is the living room and is uninsulated. Leaving it open would have let a significant amount of heat through from the garage. Not how I would have built it, but I wasn't going to change it on such short notice and without some thought and planning.

--SS

Also, you don't want to remove part of the seal between the garage and the house. Carbon monoxide is a real danger.

Not repaired but yesterday changed all the halogens of my cars with LEDs. Went with this as my normal halogens were just not good enough for freeway driving.

Please note: If you are upgrading to LED lights go for 4 way LEDs or 360 degree LED Lights as they replicate halogens light throw hence you get exact OEM type focus from your headlight.

This was toilet weekend.

Friday night as I'm going to bed I go to flush the toilet in the ensuite and it doesn't. The chain had pulled off the flapper as the flapper was disintegrating - fine I'll deal with that in the morning.

Saturday morning I go get a new flapper and while I'm fitting it I notice the toilet rocks slightly. I check the mounting bolts and find that they are just slightly loose. I tighten them slightly and all is good so I go and check the other toilets as they are all the same age (house built 12 years ago). The one in the powder room is fine but when I go to pull the covers off the bolts in the main bathroom one of the bolts comes up. We are heading out that afternoon and evening so I mark that toilet as "Do Not Use!" and leave it for Sunday morning.

Sunday morning I pull the toilet and my nightmare begins. The flange was set down on the subfloor, there's then 1/2" of ply and 1/4" of tile on top so the flange is way down there and the mounting bolt slots are broken. The builder had used a couple of foam versions of the wax ring glued together to try and join the gap. I cleaned everything up and got some flange extensions to bring the flange up to floor level. Of course none of the holes line up, so I just got some nice long 3" screws to drive all the way through the extensions, the old flange and down in to the subfloor proper. I used a rubber type seal replacement that has a funnel on it to help direct everything down the pipe and protect the joints between the extensions. I put the toilet back on and replaced the tank to toilet seals (house is 12 years old so old seal disintegrated when I pulled the tank). This now meant that the tank was in a slightly different position so the hard water supply line didn't line up by about 2mm. Off to the plumbing store for a new flex line to replace that as well.

I think I still have a slight weep from one of the tank to toilet bolts, but I'm terrified of overtightening and cracking things. Of course my father-in-law is turning up today as well for a few days so we need this running for now. I'm just going to leave it with a towel under the bolt while he is here before going at things again next weekend.