Home Improvement

I don't understand how people can talk on the phone so long. 1-2 minutes is all you get from me.

Yeah but you are a guy. We only call people if we need a specific piece of info. We get it, and we're done. We don't chit-chat about nothing for hours.

When I was younger, I used to talk to chicks on the phone for hours on end, just because. I still prefer the phone for important things, but texting works most of the time.

I think what's worse than the RJ11 cabling all up in your walls is an old, out dated, not working home security system. House we are in the process of selling, has old school pin pads only at the back door from the garage. Every window had cabling ran and from somewhere, and attached to old school metal tape to detect if the window broke. We looked into taking out the wiring, because it looks ugly as shit, but on the traditional windows, it's buried in the window sill somehow, and not worth messing with. On our sliding glass door, it was ran up the wall about half way along the trim. We went to rip that out and latex paint started coming off with it. What a damn mess!

But we have RJ11 coming in at least to the kitchen, where a wall mount/jack is, and we've had it covered up since we moved in.

Old houses man. Secrets you find in them walls!

Got the 4 estimates back on for my roof - not surprisingly the family friend came in well under the other three. I'll post more info later if you're interested in laughing at prices in this area.

Crone_sl said:

I think what's worse than the RJ11 cabling all up in your walls is an old, out dated, not working home security system. House we are in the process of selling, has old school pin pads only at the back door from the garage. Every window had cabling ran and from somewhere, and attached to old school metal tape to detect if the window broke. We looked into taking out the wiring, because it looks ugly as shit, but on the traditional windows, it's buried in the window sill somehow, and not worth messing with. On our sliding glass door, it was ran up the wall about half way along the trim. We went to rip that out and latex paint started coming off with it. What a damn mess!

But we have RJ11 coming in at least to the kitchen, where a wall mount/jack is, and we've had it covered up since we moved in.

Old houses man. Secrets you find in them walls!

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Yeah man. We were in the basement when we installed cable and there is some crazy shit down there. Remnants of a very old security system just cut to pieces, random cables that are cut, makes no sense.

What makes even less sense is the dude rehabbed this house 2 years ago, had it down to the studs and rewired all of the electrical in the entire house... yet he didn't run any basic cable for TV or anything. There were even holes pre-drilled in the floors from where cable used to be. Made no goddamn sense.

I need to do a lot of annoying painting for the next few nights.
I don't want to.
Sigh.

I ripped out over 500ft of phone line when I moved in. The previous owner was an agoraphobic who worked from home and had since like '93. So of course his internet for years was like 6 phone lines multiplexed together. And he wired it himself, by running it around the house outside. Looked hideous. I also can't figure out why he never switched to a broadband provider.

House needed a lot of work. Still does. I built a mason jar chandelier today, wife's belated birthday present.

There are probably twice as many surprises as you think there will be.

There was a fire across the street last night. Started in the basement and spread to the entire house. I didn't see any actual fire (I was in the shower when the fighters arrived), but there was smoke bellowing out of the place. They broke out every window, which is expected. So tons of smoke damage and water damage from the hoses. That really sucks for my neighbors.

Lejina_sl said:

To give ya an idea of what I'm dealing with here: the sewer pipe under the toilet was a 5" lead pipe.

I'm genuinely amazed that the entire electrical is copper.

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We had some of our plumbing redone a couple years ago to coincide with a bathroom remodel. Was still original plumbing from the late 60s, so was all cast iron. The plumber pulled all the cast iron pipes out and replaced with PVC. He threw the old cast iron in our front yard. I asked him if I needed to dispose of that or if he did. He said "neither, scrap metal scavengers will get it pretty quick". I had my doubts, I didnt want this heavy as shit cast iron piples laying in my front yard forever. But sure enough, about an hour passed and some old man and an old lady pulled up in a little Nissan pickup and grabbed it all.

WTF? I guess people just assume if old metal pipes are laying around that they can have them? And how the hell did they know the stuff was even there, is there like a scrap metal bat sign or something? I was with the plumber the entire hour, he didn't call anyone to come get it. Very odd.

joeboo_sl said:

We had some of our plumbing redone a couple years ago to coincide with a bathroom remodel. Was still original plumbing from the late 60s, so was all cast iron. The plumber pulled all the cast iron pipes out and replaced with PVC. He threw the old cast iron in our front yard. I asked him if I needed to dispose of that or if he did. He said "neither, scrap metal scavengers will get it pretty quick". I had my doubts, I didnt want this heavy as shit cast iron piples laying in my front yard forever. But sure enough, about an hour passed and some old man and an old lady pulled up in a little Nissan pickup and grabbed it all.

WTF? I guess people just assume if old metal pipes are laying around that they can have them? And how the hell did they know the stuff was even there, is there like a scrap metal bat sign or something? I was with the plumber the entire hour, he didn't call anyone to come get it. Very odd.

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LOL. I do that, anything with metal I toss out is gone within 2 hours usually and I live in a nice area. Always amazes me.

Finished. Finally.

joeboo_sl said:

We had some of our plumbing redone a couple years ago to coincide with a bathroom remodel. Was still original plumbing from the late 60s, so was all cast iron. The plumber pulled all the cast iron pipes out and replaced with PVC. He threw the old cast iron in our front yard. I asked him if I needed to dispose of that or if he did. He said "neither, scrap metal scavengers will get it pretty quick". I had my doubts, I didnt want this heavy as shit cast iron piples laying in my front yard forever. But sure enough, about an hour passed and some old man and an old lady pulled up in a little Nissan pickup and grabbed it all.

WTF? I guess people just assume if old metal pipes are laying around that they can have them? And how the hell did they know the stuff was even there, is there like a scrap metal bat sign or something? I was with the plumber the entire hour, he didn't call anyone to come get it. Very odd.

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My brother in-law does a lot of boiler stuff with copper lines for very high end clients. Often times they'll have him rip out everything and completely redo it all. He asks them if they want it and when they say no he plops it at the end of their driveway. Says it is gone by the time he's done every single time.

One day he took some home for a project he was doing and put it at the top of a very long driveway, it was gone by the morning. It wasn't even visible by the road.

It's almost like there are copper pipe goblins

Er why isn't he selling the copper pipes himself?

Who the hell knows. Last week had a guy subbing for the same company I was tearing off gutters/alum siding on a house and he mentioned hauling it to the dumpster. I said uhh why not recycle it. Was a waste of time for him. We took it down and got $180 for it all.

So update on the house across the street that had the fire. The pictures don't look bad at all. Supposedly the house is "totaled" in a house sense. Going to need to be rebuilt, possibly from scratch. A large chunk of the first floor collapsed into the basement. The fire originated down there, but they still don't know the exact cause as of yet.

I'll update pictures as they start to do the work. I can't really imagine them salvaging any of the house at this point, with the exception of the concrete in the basement and the cinderblock walls that make up the basement and the fire wall between the two houses.

The neighbor suffered smoke damage as well, but that isn't the end of the world.

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what they do with the place. Maybe it's just me, but I see a chance like this as really nice. You could re-design your entire house (as long as it fits in the same square footage) for the rebuild. I would absolutely do that as opposed to putting things back the way they were.

Plus, you would already be aware of things you didn't like about the previous build, so you could address them for the rebuild. But maybe that's just me. Other people might not care enough or would be frightened of the unknown.