The Home Ownership Thread - Page 14

Fans and dehumidifiers were running for about 3 weeks straight, which was annoying. Had to live in a motel for a week while they laid the tile floor throughout the main floor to all exterior doors. Probably 21/2 to 3 months before the whole thing was finished.

Oh, and the damned pool saga continues -- new liner is in, but still losing water somewhere in the lines ...

So here's my report on the various herbicides I tried.

metsulfuron - sprayed the bahiagrass parts of the lawn with it at the centipede dose. Supposed to be safe under trees at that level, seems to have caused no injury to the centipede or shrubs. Killed a lot of clover, caused the bahia to turn yellowish. Where it was sprayed in higher concentrations a lot of the blades died but the stems still seem to be alive. The bahia that got hit good hasn't grown for a month now, but it's still alive. Label says to reapply after six weeks.

sethoxydim - I spot sprayed it on patches of bermuda in the centipede lawn. This stuff is "grass killer" and is supposed to be dangerous to centipede at high concentrations, so I was very careful to follow the label -- and I don't think I applied enough. It seems to have killed about 1/3 of the bermuda I sprayed, the more I sprayed the more damage it did. Retarded the growth of the centipede a little and caused some very minor yellowing. Not nearly as hard on the centipede grass as, say, 2,4-d. It doesn't affect broadleaf weeds or shrubs/trees. Didn't seem to cause any injury to bahiagrass (there were some patches of I missed with the other stuff).
Both of these were hard to find but much more effective than the weed killers they sell in the home improvement stores.

That was a cool part of your house. Nail it back up.

 

What's the story behind that pole? It's not original to the place, is it? 

 

lefty

Too bad it didn't land on you.

Cool. You want to get that back up asap then.

 

Like the stucco/concrete garden wall. Some time down the road you may want to swap out the iron fence.

 

lefty

My dryer broke. 2 Months out of warranty.

Attention must be paid.

same thing happened to my A/C earlier this year. it's like they design the fucking things to break this way

Dryers are very serviceable and the parts are widely available online. If you can turn a screw you can probably fix it.

It's not worth my time to do it myself. Here goes the rant about it though. I called the service center last week and described to them with excruciating detail what the problem was. The guy comes this morning, opens it up and sayd he needs to order a part. No fucking shit you need to order a part. Certainly a repair person with information given about a job has a good idea of the solution before he gets there. Why not have these parts on the fucking truck upon arrival? Pisses me the fuck off.

You might not be able to fix it faster than the repairman, but all the time you spend dealing with them and the extra cost, you might be surprised about the economy of DIY. Eventually you just get good at stuff like that. It's certainly paid off for me over the years.

I replaced the bearings, sleeves, pulleys, belts, heating elements -- just overhauled my dryer not that long ago. Cost me about $30 in parts and 3-4 hours taking my time.

Step one. Torx screws. Ah fuck it!

I have two sets of torx wrench/sockets because I forgot I had the first set. Talk about needless redundancy.

This past weekend was rough: we replaced more boards on the garage - this though was the upper part of the back of the garage. The only saving grace was that I could stand (well, crouch or sit, really) on the adjoining kitchen roof which was a double-edged sword. Got the Hitachi parts in and the nailer works quite well. I also disassembled the filter / pump assembly and got the pool squared away, thank heavens.

One of the hassles that keeps kicking up is the differences between flat shiplap siding and the stupid hardie boards, which are plain and flat. That ship-lap board was probably a dream to install.
Edited by Thomas - 7/23/12 at 8:21am