281–290 of 402 posts
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You really shouldn't be saying "you could do it if you really tried" to people when you don't know their situation. Maybe they have a bad knee. Maybe they have a chronic illness. Maybe they don't have the money to spend. It's not a personal failing to be unable to do something, and it's toxic to take that attitude.
"Don't encourage anyone because they might not be able to do it" is the shittiest and most toxic attitude I've ever heard.
My family owns multiple cabins, mostly built by family members with the occasional framing and finishing work by friends of the family and/or a local contractor. The one my father owns was framed and roofed by contractors, but the closing, finishing, deck and float construction, and 30 years of repairs and renovations were done by himself and us kids. It sits on a steep hill, so putting a 60x20ft deck on 15ft stilts…
I agree with you that some of this comes from snobbery and ignorance, but I think it's also motivated by a naive form of human curiosity. There's a line in East of Eden about one of the main characters (Samuel Hamilton) that talks about how he abhorred the sprawl of knowledge and increasing specialization of the human race. That trend has of course led to an immense improvement in the quality of life of our species,…
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I can you that the amortized cost of a septic system could easily work out to $300 bi-monthly over a decade or two. Managing your own sewer is not trivial or inexpensive. For me, the tank plus installation was almost $10k CAD, and then the septic field itself would probably run between $30k and $50k CAD. So to be generous we could say $50k total for the full install. So that's about 8 years at $300 bimonthly just to…
Yeah, septic and well are definitely not something you do to save money. They're things to do because you can't get water or septic at a location.
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For renovations I try to do as much work as possible, eg tile removal/replacement, backer board removal/replacement....let the plumber come in to a clean and prepped worksite for a valve sweat....he’s in and out ASAP, I’ve saved budget from just throwing money at a GP contractor to do everything, and I get to do the non-expert stuff myself. But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical,…
>But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical, plumbing etc. HE’S the pro, and I’m the Schmo. IMHO, this is backwards. Electrical work is twisting wires and screwing them down. Plumbing is gluing or clamping stuff together (unless you're sweating copper). The actual mechanics of doing it takes little skill and pros aren't going to be that much better/faster than you. The real difference…
That said I'm a cheapskate and do my own finish work even though I hate making things look nice.
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Yeah, septic and well are definitely not something you do to save money. They're things to do because you can't get water or septic at a location.
My overall point is... let's dispense with the libertarian yeoman self-sufficient fantasy: if you want to save money, live in the place where economies of scale have been achieved... towns. People have been doing it this way since the neolithic. Should you really like nature and having space and big gardens and farming and the like, then be prepared to pay for it.
When we had nothing but the floor, we were still sketching and debating ridiculous design ideas over our morning coffee—curved, pagoda-style rooflines; walls that folded down into decks; a spiral staircase wrapping around a tree trunk to the loft—as if we were made of money and time. I wonder if they told the buyer that the cabin was built by 2 underfunded inexperienced guys with no plans? They aren't out of the wood…
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And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle. I think that if you have to build a cabin that conforms to certain building guidelines, bank standards, codes, mainstream retail expectations.... then for sure you are going to encounter expenses and risk. But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this propositi…
> And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle. You're forgetting time. Not sure if you've seen "Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG3fUIoXQ5A ). It's a great watch, and a good example of what I think you're referring to overall...that said it looked like an extremely hard way to build and from persona…
My family owns multiple cabins, mostly built by family members with the occasional framing and finishing work by friends of the family and/or a local contractor. The one my father owns was framed and roofed by contractors, but the closing, finishing, deck and float construction, and 30 years of repairs and renovations were done by himself and us kids. It sits on a steep hill, so putting a 60x20ft deck on 15ft stilts…
Agreed. My father is a carpenter and I helped him build our family cabin when I was a pre-teen. We did mostly all of the building except putting up the trusses and finishing the roof. My dad was smart enough to farm out that work. Now I write software and I work with a lot of people who dream of going off in the woods and building a cabin, as though it's the same as building software. I have to remind them that "ther…
Agree completely. I have a project car and have a particular buddy who's a great mechanic. His understanding of the various systems on a wide range of cars is quite deep, and he was incredibly helpful when I got stuck with things. If it was just the physical effort, i would've been finished with the project years before I did, but the mental challenge of figuring out how one system worked and how that system needed to properly integrate with all the other system was far beyond what I thought it was.
As a counterpoint, my buddy didn't get why I might be tired at the end of a long day of work. He didn't seem to get the connection that the high level of mental effort that software development could be physically tiring as well.
There's a lot that white collar workers and blue collar workers can learn from each other, but you don't have to build a whole cabin or a project car or a whole application in order to see what things are like when the shoe is on the other foot.
The biggest learning is that the process is vastly more complicated then whatever I could imagine.
Different materials of materials Priming & painting (on lumber boards, and repair some surrounding areas) Tools Measurements and design Woodworking to hide small blemishes
The amount of labor is staggering as well. To name just one idea, carrying lumber and a bag of tools between the 2nd floor and the garage workshop has been a constant tiring experience.
And a lot of learning, each time when I progressed a bit, new study is required on dozens of youtube videos, and search on HomeDepot/Lowes/Amazon to get an idea on the materils/tools needed.
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I can clearly see both sides by now. I've built a high sleeper in my old apartment from scratch (which is kind of an understatement as it was effectively half a floor on top of a whole room including real stairs as a concession to my then-pregnant wife). After 3 months of advance planning, I finally realized the gravity of my mistake when the delivery truck lifted half a ton of wood onto the sidewalk and drove away.…
The software is only in our heads. It's mind blowing, but you can't see and feel it. I also love to build physical stuff - last month I built a bed into my car, now I can go anywhere and sleep there - what an awesome thing it is, and my girlfriend loves it too. She appreciates software as well (being a genetic biologist/data analyst/programmer), but the bed, a comparably simpler thing, is what we talk all the time ab…
For example, there probably is some work that the software world can do to transform how humans currently go about cooking food. A wifi crock pot is a step in the right direction, but what about a wifi controlled airfryer, or a system of machines that is coordinated to do food processing in more human-ways?
Hardware and software alone by themselves are unable to solve this problem without working together: a knife and a pneumatic arm can't achieve anything without human/AI/preprogrammed input, and a human cannot possibly take themselves out of the cooking equation without some physical device, i.e with just an app and a database.