Home Improvement

A lot of the ones around here are very strict at the outset, when the neighborhood is being established and they want everything nice and consistent etc. Then over the years the members change and fall off, new members aren't as interested. The adjoining neighborhood to me had a very strict HOA 30 years ago when the neighborhood first went up but now you can find RVs/Trailers in people's driveways and toolsheds in back yards. My neighborhood which was traditionally strict didn't even respond to my email about the roof replacement or the exterior house paint. 10 years ago they were still asking about that stuff.

I don't really care about weeds

Unless it's musk thistle. Then fuck that shit

Carpenters will commonly modify nail guns to bypass the trigger so it’s always squeezed (allowing you to shoot a nail by pushing the nose against the lumber). You can also modify it to bypass the nose safety mechanism so that when you squeeze the trigger it shoots a nail in any position. That seems less common, but maybe good for ladder work or situations where you don’t want to overextend your body position?

Hateyou said:

Mine is definitely compacted. The first thing the housing companies do when they buy a field to build houses on it is remove all the topsoil to sell to companies to repackage and sell back to you. Half of the trees we plant die. Growing shit in clay doesn’t work well, even the trees native to your area struggle when a foot of soil from hundreds of years of nature and farming gets removed.

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In fairness, you never want to build on top soil.

Lanx said:

so i never moved with appliances b4, probably only gonna take the deep freezer (agent said houses w/ w&d move fast)

am i correct in that i should turn it off for 24hrs and that drain on the left is what i open to let the ice flow out to prepare for the move?

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Yes.

Back when I lived in the Buffalo area, we did a fuckton of residential electrical.

One builder we did work for always spread himself too thin by buying too much land, so he was always pressuring homeowners to take possession before homes were even finished, so he could get money from the banks.

The guy used to promise people 90 days from basement pour to occupancy. Which is nuts.

One homeowner was already living in this one house on a cul de sac before they even had flooring down. We showed up one day to do devices and fixtures, and they were already sleeping there. It was nuts.

Well, the builder pushed that couple, and the couple was like "Sure, we'll totally take possession!" He probably nutted that they didn't fight him and he just got paid.

A week or so later, we pull up to work on a house at the corner. There's a line of dumptrucks down the street. Ask the trim guys what was going on, and they pointed to that couple's new backyard.

When they took possession, they still had the giant scraper-pile of topsoil in their backyard. Well, they figured it was theirs if they took possession, so they called somebody up to sell it to. I think I heard it was like $60k of topsoil? No idea if that was a legit number, but they brought in a track hoe and were filling up dump truck after dump truck.

One of the guys called the builder, and he showed up within minutes, furious. It was fucking glorious.

Captain Suave said:

I'm surprised you can even get an occupancy permit on a house with no fixtures or flooring.

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I was thinking the same thing. Are occupancy permits not standard throughout the US?

I honestly don't know the exact details. I think a large part of it was over-promising homeowners to get them to sign up (the 90 day part), they sell their old home when the new house is half done, and if the new home isn't finished on time then they're living out of pocket. I vaguely remember there being talk about representatives of the banks being pressured by the homeowners as well...I remember it starting out as a "we're just missing a couple small things" and then over time it got worse and worse. My impression was that with a couple of people the lenders/banks didn't due their due diligence, and in other cases they tried to blur the lines a little for the homeowners, but I can't say for certain and it's been 20 years since then at this point.

What finally tanked him completely was subcontractor liens. The guy had a pushy-asshole vibe, and when he didn't get his way he'd get confrontational. Well, there was a framing crew that was only 2 guys, and he pushed them too far. They told him to fuck off, and left. Then the put a lien on him for all he owed them. Then it chained through the rest of the trades he was using. I remember him owing my boss like $40, promising $30, and paying like $15 if he was lucky. But then all the subs were still doing work for him hoping he'd fully square up with them, but he never did.

But the dude was a sketchy scumbag. I've got a lot of stories about that guy.

He disappeared a few times. Just up and vanished for several weeks. His guys told us he would go off to horse races and have these huge benders.

I doubt I could find the info now, but I'm pretty sure he married into the business and got help from his father in law, who had his own contracting business, before doing the same shit to him.

This is him. I was up there in the late '90s and left in 99-00



From skimming some of the articles, they didn't get him for the majority of the shit he pulled.

I'm not sure who besides Breakdown is from up there, but I did a lot of stuff around the Tonawandas, Grand Island, Niagara, Amherst, etc. And I think I found where I was talking about. I def remember Witmer/Pinelake/Mallard. 7150 was the house we were working on the day the people at 7154 sold the topsoil (LOL that there's a fucking garden there now).

At one point (I think the folks who moved in 7159 or maybe 7160) called the Buffalo News about how he had them move in and their yard looked like a fucking moonscape of rocks and backfill. So a news van pulled up, started doing interviews, and he pulled up and just stood there like an angry jackass. (doubt any of that is still around from like 98 or 99)

That was another fun day LOL