lmao the nerve of these fucking people. 2nd window guy comes out, first words out of his mouth “wow someone threw a rock into your window, you don’t even live in south minneapolis!”. And 2 fucking handshakes. His quote was like $7500 holy shit.
We’re having a glass company out on monday yeah IDK guess it all depends on what the insurance will do right.
We’re having our attic insulated today. Is tipping the workers standard here or am I overthinking things?
It’s certainly not standard.
Good lord, no. Absolutely not. Nobody who does any work on your home expects a tip. If you want to give them one it should only be if they went way above and beyond on something.
Thanks all.
Anyone with any advice/tips/tricks on how to prevent water from coming in the basement? I’m like 99% sure it’s coming from where the foundation wall meets the basement floor. Not wet on the walls. I suppose it could be coming up through the floor itself but most of the water seemed to be where the wall meets the floor. Unfinished standard concrete basement floor.
In our nearly decade of living here we’ve never had an issue though this year we’ve had an extraordinary amount of rain. I just vacuumed it all up and have multiple fans going to dry it out but it’d be great if there’s something I could do to not have it happen again. Or not have it happen as bad.
we had something like that, it wasn’t bad or anything, but we wanted to prevent it from being much worse in the future. the only thing that was feasible was installing a french drain around the perimeter (ended up being about 40% of total footprint). digging around and sealing from the outside wasn’t an option.
That probably is where it’s coming in, and unfortunately there probably isn’t much you can do about it without spending a bunch of money.
If you have a lot where water can easily be diverted away from the house but currently isn’t, you can try to address it that way. Like if your gutters just dump straight onto the ground instead of pointing away and downhill, or if you don’t have gutters at all. Or if you’ve done some weird landscaping that collects water next to the foundation. That may help, if your yard slopes in directions where it’s possible to fix it.
Otherwise, you have two options. The first and correct way is to excavate the entire foundation, waterproof that joint, and (if possible with the lot slope) install correct subsurface drainage.
Alternatively, you can install an interior french drain. This involves cutting a ~12" channel along part or all of the interior perimeter of your basement walls and filling it with stone and/or perforated pipe. Then in one corner you cut out a slightly larger area and dig a pit for a sump pump which the channel drains into.
What happened? Lol
Thanks for the advice.
However, I think we may have a different issue. I checked it out this morning and everything is now dry except I noticed water forming around the HVAC.
I regularly change my filter but upon further, closer inspection when feeling around for more wetness I found this note stuck to the opposite side of the unit that I’ve never seen in all the years of being here. Checked the filter and it’s pretty soaked too so a new one is gonna be needed.
There’s also a small piece of tube I found. You can sorta see it here. Any ideas where that needs to go for me to blow some air into?
I don’t know a ton about mechanical systems. I believe that white box in the bottom picture is your condensation pump. The clear tube should go to a drain line somewhere, maybe a sink or laundry area if you have one in your basement.
The black line looks like it has a cleanout plug you can remove - that square nub on the top is for a wrench or pair of channel locks. That’s probably where they expect you to blow.
Also, make sure the pump is still working. You can pour some water in the open hole to test it. If the bottom tray is full and it doesn’t turn on, it’s not.
The refurbishing is inching away from the epicenter of luxury, across the bedroom and down the hall.
Trying to sell my house. My realtor said I would need to repaint my porch steps because they’re peeling and that’s bad for certain inspections. I’m having trouble finding a contractor that wants the job though. At this point I think it would be easier to do myself, not sure of the best way to go about it though. Special exterior paint? I have a similar color for the inside but I’m guessing that won’t work. Just throw new paint over the top? Or do I need to clean and/or scrape the old paint off? Bearing in mind I’m doing this for an inspection and I guess also curb appeal so I need it to look OK but I don’t care if it lasts more than a few months.
If, like me, you’re lazy and terrible at doing stuff yourself, then one reliable solution I’ve found for small jobs like this is taskrabbit. If you’re in a decent sized metro, you can find some competent people who will charge a reasonable hourly for jobs like this. It’s great for small stuff where you’re not that concerned about quality.
At a minimum, you’ll need to scrape ALL of the loose paint off, and use an exterior paint. If scraping causes noticeable edges, you should sand them.
I need to re-grout between several tiles in my bathroom. It’s confined to the area in front of the sink.
A couple questions for the home improvement experts itt:
Here is a photo of the situation.
Should be fine to just grout a section, only issue is the colour might not match perfectly.
Up to you, if it’s bad you could do the whole floor, if the chips are minor you might not need to do the rest of the floor for a few years.
You can buy a manual grout saw, shouldn’t be expensive.
You want to saw or grind it out using a manual or electric tool, you don’t want to chip it out as you are likely to damage the tiles. Other than that yes, just remove old grout, and put the new grout in and level it off,
No idea,
Assuming those are ~12x24 tiles, which means they were most likely installed less than a decade ago?
Do the absolute minimum necessary for you to live with it, because it was a terrible installation and you’re going to be ripping it all up eventually. Grout should never crack like that, especially not on a floor that new. Your floor is moving way too much, and the tiles themselves are going to start cracking soon too, if they haven’t already.
I’d go to the tile aisle of the local big box store and buy a tube of colored caulk that’s close to the grout and call it good enough, because that floor isn’t going to last. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
you know what else is a funny word? caulk
I was talking to my landlord about caulk recently and made a point to enunciate the L which makes it sound weirder.
