Home Improvement

Sludig said:

Any good pointers for insulating a 70's era farmhouse. Not sure how cost effective trying to put anything in the walls or the limited semi inaccessible attic. We certainly have door drafts (can see light through front door). Not sure if one kind of stripping is better than another especially for a frame with uneven gaps.

One room is a converted garage with tile laid by the tards directly on the old concrete pad that is at a slope, so we've had some tiles popping up a bit loose from the mortar, but more than anything the floor is just cold as fuck and I'm sure is zapping the houses heat. Problem is it's the backdoor to let dogs out, so carpeting the whole thing to hide slope a bit or deal with any unevenness isn't great since we have muddy dogs coming and going. Maybe just find a ton of carpet squares.

Major concern in all this. We are electric heat/ac. Most of the year even with our 104 degree June didnt seem so bad. But now over winter, we shot from like $180 bill to $350 and now $450 even with a fairly hot winter with some cold streaks in OK. Not sure how easy we could change our heating since it's all in a pretty dang small combined unit in a wall closet thing. (Lol someone telling me electric heat was so efficient?)

We have a unused fireplace, on the back a room was added, so not sure it can be used for wood fire possibly heating up too much through the brick into the closet on the backend, but was thinking of trying to get a propane insert if we can run gas to it without much issue. We have a 250gallon tank we barely use for just water heat/stove and would also help with possible power outages if it can be ran without power.

Almost want to go ghetto and throw foam panels in the windows of a few rooms we hardly use.

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Erronius said:

You can have the woods. I hate camping. I've never understood it.

I could do it as a necessity if I had to. If you're living in the 1800s and you're walking to California? OK. If you're living in California in 2023 and camping in the mountains for funsies? I hope you get caught in a fire PGE started.

If you're out hunting then I guess you're camping for a purpose, so fair game there. But all of this bullshit with millennials dragging 100lbs of trash they bought off Amazon so they can 'reconnect with nature' before going home to their urban shitholes to post a bunch of pics to their social media accounts? Fuck them.

I mean, I guess I 'camped' in the Army but that was usually miserable anyways so no idea why I'd want to try recreating that bullshit.

Why would I want to go sleep in a tent and leave my A/C and shower behind, just to get super funky and smelly with bugs crawling all over me and fucking mosquitos, where if you're lucky a bear will find you and drag you out of your tent before starting to eat you alive starting with your junk, thereby ending your miserable camping experience?

No sir, you can HAVE camping. Go camp your fucking ass off.

GOOD DAY, SIR!

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Daidraco said:

Ive got a couple houses that were my introduction into rentals/property management way back when, that were built in the 60-70's (I cant recall what the inspections said). These houses, Im sure, are far worse off than yours. Theyre both rented out as boarding houses with a house supervisor in each. Five rooms total in each that are rented out to separate people, with communal kitchen/bathrooms, in both houses. Both bringing in about 2600-3000 each. Of course you can guess what type of neighborhood theyre located in, but I'm giving you the backstory so you know why I pay for the utilities myself.

I have one house using central air/electric heat and the other house using oil heat and window a/c units. The HVAC unit in house 1 went out, so I replaced it with a brand new unit instead of replacing parts on that 30 year old thing that was already there. The electricity bill went up from there, and that same months electricity bill was almost 300 bucks more than the previous year. So I had a couple HVAC buddies come in and got separate suggestions/quotes. One guy simply said replacing the windows and doors would work wonders for the house.

I dropped just over 3k to replace both main doors and all the windows with efficiency marked cheap stuff. That brought the electric down quite a bit, but it still wasnt where it was before the HVAC replacement. The other guy said doors, windows and some new duct work in some areas. So I called him back to the house to explain to me what he was saying about duct work... and it made perfect sense. Turns out the Thermostat is in the Kitchen, that is also free flowing into the hall and stairs. There was a total of one vent out and the return vent is also there. Where as each room had at minimum, one vent. So the thermostat would read 64 in the kitchen, turn the heat on, and inside the rooms it would be 78+ degrees. So what do the tenants do? They cover the vents (since I control the thermostat with a wifi - Ecobee) and that just creates more problems with the HVAC and its pressure.

I had him install some major ductwork from the HVAC in the basement to the central area in the hallway. So now, instead of just one vent, it has two - with the second vent being a major vent that is about the size of the return itself. This major relief in the pressure of the system not only cause the rooms to roughly equal what the thermostat is set at, but now the HVAC isnt running near as much as it used to. This new major vent cost me about $700 bucks and lowered this properties electric bill to lower than it was originally, and ultimately saved me more money in the long run.

The bill for all those people living in that house was at 1400 a month. With the new doors and windows, that took it down to 1200. The new major vent in the hallway took it down another 300, to 900 bucks on average. Since all that stuff was done, those changes have already paid for themselves in savings and will recover the cost of the new HVAC unit by October or so. The oil furnace in the other house and the window units, average out to about 1100 a month in the other house for reference. Im slowly making the same type of changes there, just in case that furnace goes to shit.

TL;DR - Replace doors, windows, and have an HVAC guy tell you if you have proper pressure and air flow in the house from your HVAC. Your concrete floors could use insulation to reduce their impact, which an easy fix for that would be to do a vinyl plank floor installation, and splurge on the really nice floor underlayment material. You could buy a few bags of leveler mix to level the floor, also.

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