261–270 of 326 posts
I have a steam-based heat and didn't understand, when I first moved in, what was required in terms of maintenance. You MUST flush the boiler at least every season and preferably once a month. 5 years later I needed a boiler replacement-- just shear ignorance on my part.
This didn’t happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab at nights just to connect to people as she worked. One night she was streaming the teardown of a bathroom wall. There, in between the walls, was a clipboard with some notes. She slowly took the clipboard up and started reading. O…
After that I've done two more major jobs on other houses but I'm at the end of my enthusiasm for this kind of work.
This didn’t happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab at nights just to connect to people as she worked. One night she was streaming the teardown of a bathroom wall. There, in between the walls, was a clipboard with some notes. She slowly took the clipboard up and started reading. O…
She couldve planted that herself to make livestream more interesting with some sentimental drama.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a home-built system for monitoring the levels in our water tanks (we live on rain water). Of course some people get by with a simple float indicator, but why would I do that when I could be using high accuracy hydrostatic sensors, esp32, influxdb, grafana, spring, keycloak and mysql running in AWS? I certainly wouldn't want to be getting support calls if we were to ever sell, so I would probably remove it myse…
Why would you use AWS for that? That seems like an extremely strange external dependency for a house running on rainwater.
This didn’t happen to me but to a friend. She lives in an old home and has a neverending list of projects, many of which she took up during the pandemic. She would often livestream her rehab at nights just to connect to people as she worked. One night she was streaming the teardown of a bathroom wall. There, in between the walls, was a clipboard with some notes. She slowly took the clipboard up and started reading. O…
Many stories from people creating documentation only for it to get thrown away. Let me share an opposite one: I bought a house that was empty after divorce, both had moved out some months before. We mostly dealt with the agent, only saw one of the previous owners for a very short time at the signing meeting with the notary. Then in the house we found a "congratulations on your new place" card, a bottle of sparkling w…
I bought a new-construction place, and I was around during the process. After they were done with all the plumbing/wiring/etc, but before they filled in the insulation and sheetrock, I walked the whole house and took cellphone pictures of every bare wall to show where all the pipes and wires are run, and then labelled it all up by room. I plan to hand those off if I ever sell the place! I don't know why builders don'…
For my last house, I had spent years on smart home automation, I had a binder that contained clear instructions I wrote for everything, and receipts for every upgrade I ever made on the home, warranty docs, QR codes to download smart home apps to control the devices, plot maps, floor plans, a 1-page list of repairmen for everything- you name it. I made short YouTube videos for everything like turning the water on/off…
I love the idea, but yeah that outcome was predictable. Home automation is very much still in the hobby stage and most people simply don't care about it. I own my home & am into automation - but I don't plan on living in this house forever. As such I try to only install things that can be easily reversed when I move out, e.g wireless instead of hardwired smart switches - devices that piggyback on 'normal' home things…
That's an optimistic view. I think the most common position would be one of active avoidance. I know that's true for me.
I recently had drama with a contractor... it went into mediation, and the contractor was able to say, "How do we know this damage wasn't caused before we got there?" Contractors are shady, and likely that wouldn't change, but I wish I had more photos of my house before the flood.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anyone-have-connections-usaa-...
Many stories from people creating documentation only for it to get thrown away. Let me share an opposite one: I bought a house that was empty after divorce, both had moved out some months before. We mostly dealt with the agent, only saw one of the previous owners for a very short time at the signing meeting with the notary. Then in the house we found a "congratulations on your new place" card, a bottle of sparkling w…
I have a whole stack of them for various things.