though not as home oriented as most posters here, i have a denim jacket i’ve been working on for the past couple months. have been making and sewing my own patches on, and am currently looking at dyeing the sleeves, though i’ve been procrastinating from that a bit ;)
Currently stripping popcorn ceiling on entire first floor, shoring and patching dry wall on all walls and ceiling, painting entire first floor, and replacing most fixtures and rugs. May not sound like much, but it’s full time. First spruce up place has had in 21 years. Also replacing pads and rotors on car when I need to take a brake (intended) from the dust and endless sanding.
These are mutually exclusive. The best case scenario for popcorn ceiling is that it’s a tedious pain to remove, and it only gets worse from there (painted, asbestos, etc.)
We are renovating our Atelier to be a temporary house while we strip and redo the main house. My girlfriend’s parents have done a full renovation, he is an industrial electrician, her brother is a woodworker just out of school and a modular house designer. They are all super helpful and I am so grateful and learning a lot.
During the 2 weeks I worked only 2 days per week and a few weekends before we have:
trash removal of previous owner
ripped out electrical in the main house
tore down the gyprock in one room and found that the main house and atelier both have a moisture blocking barrier after the first brick layer
washed away the gritty loam paint that the previous owner had used over much of the house
primed and painted the entire 44m^2 atelier stone walls
placed 6cm cheaper insulation in the storage area since there it was only 1 brick thick instead of 2 bricks plus a space.
cut a hole in the brick wall for the gas heater stove
got a quote for switching to 3-phase 25A, 400V and prepared the site
made a temporary fence to keep our dog in the first piece of our garden that is closed on the sides
cut and dug trenches inside for gas, water, electric and internet
broke up and hauled away 6cm thick concrete slab where we had to route things under
placed and hooked up electrical in the atelier loft, storage room, and the outdoor storage shelter behind it
made technical drawings for electrical, gas, sewer, and water
found a quality 2nd hand gas stove to heat during our mild winters
dug out and mapped sewer and gas lines through the property
dug a 24 meter trench 70cm deep and laid water, gas, and 3-phase electric (in a flexible pipe) in that layer, and laid internet and sewer at ~40cm deep with a measured 1cm per meter “afwatering.”
Quotes for redoing the asbestos filled roof in the main house and currently setting up asbestos testing for the slanted wall since the attestation documentation seemed to be wrong and there is asbestos-based insulation according to a roofer + asbestos remover we got a quote from
temporarily rennovated the small bathroom, repainted, replaced the broken toilet, removed the leaky sink, and re-silicones the tiny sitting bath/shower and replaced the shower head
Found 30m^2 of click laminate for 40€. Proud of that find. Good condition too.
Next up is hooking up the gas and water fittings fully inside, getting a plumber to come test and hook us up to the main 22mm line to the boiler in the house, place and hook up the electrical in the kitchen/living room and for the appliances, find a 2nd hand oven, stove, and fume hood, and fill in the inside trenches and re-pour the concrete, place the floors and finish up for the year in the next month.
Oooh, this is a post for me. I have a handful of projects going.
I have a network room that needs a fan installed where the window used to be, I have the fan, just need to cut open the board covering what used to be the window, install the fan, and wire it up to exhaust hot air out of the room directly outside. Non time critical, I have the door to that room open for now, it used to be a root cellar in the basement.
I also need to fix the insane electrical work for the basement lighting that the former owner of this house put in. He put in one of those light socket to plug things, then wired together all the new lights in the basement with Romex (all fluorescent) and finished it to a plug that connects to that light socket. I want to pull apart this hot garbage and wire it correctly, and replace the light switches box in the process (some of the threading in the electrical box is stripped, so the switch doesn’t mount correctly), and move it to a different circuit, because it’s currently sharing a circuit with the recreation room, and a couple of bedrooms for seemingly no good reason.
I also have to replace all the magnetic ballasts in the basement light fixtures with electronic ballasts because we have fluorescent replacement LED bulbs, which only work on electronic ballasts. Yay. I have to check the garage and at least one other room with fluorescent fixtures to see if they’re on magnetic ballasts and replace them too so we can finally have all LED lighting in the house.
Going with lighting here: I have to find my multimeter to test and hopefully fix a lamp my brother purchased that doesn’t work that will go in the living room, and replace all the lightbulbs in the living room with smart bulbs, then have them controlled by an in-wall smart light switch (which is already in place), via home assistant. I also need to do smart bulbs in the recreation room, I also have new light fixtures for the rec room to replace some that had loose bulbs (the bulb base was loose in the fixture), and replace the light switches in there with in wall smart switches.
A whole room is lacking power, it was split between different circuits, one was the basement lights/rec room, the other was to the bathroom, I managed to rewire the room to a single point, and I’m trying to pull a new circuit to the room with 12/2 Romex. Holes are drilled, just need to feed the cable along side another run of Romex, and likely pull one more circuit to separate the bathrooms (which are on different floors above/below eachother), from the fridge in the kitchen. Two new circuits, woo. Need breakers for them.
My brother also bought a gazebo from the hardware store that needs to be built and set up in the back yard, and my father in law bought us some pathway lights that I have yet to unpack.
The back yard garden is overgrown with weeds, and I need to deal with that. We didn’t do any gardening this year so nature took over… I don’t really have many if any tools to deal with it, so I need to do some garden supply shopping.
I’m also prepping to install ethernet throughout the house, I have two boxes of category 6 cable, 1000 ft each (2000 ft total), including wiring going up into the attic for access points.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot, but that’s the projects that are foremost on my mind… Some are pretty easy (like the rec room fixtures, I have them, I just need to hang them, or the new wire pull from the power-less room, I have the cable partly run, just need to pull it the rest of the way).
Longer term, I want to build raised boxes in the garden, plus renovate to add a kitchen and another bathroom (with a shower)… Build a new shed, and replace the old antenna tower with something less rusted and perhaps taller, plus run coax from the antenna tower to my office for my ham radio hobby.
Maybe eventually put solar panels on the roof and perhaps a battery system so we can produce and store our own power…
I also have to replace all the magnetic ballasts in the basement light fixtures with electronic ballasts because we have fluorescent replacement LED bulbs, which only work on electronic ballasts.
Chiming in because I just finished swapping over 15+ fixtures. You can get LED replacement bulbs that do away with the ballasts entirely. At first I went with the LED retrofit lights that used the existing ballasts but I still had issues with the ballasts failing (because they were all 20-30 years old). Found the “ballast bypass” replacements and swapped everything over.
The back yard garden is overgrown with weeds, and I need to deal with that. We didn’t do any gardening this year so nature took over… I don’t really have many if any tools to deal with it, so I need to do some garden supply shopping.
I’m embarrassed how much time and money I put into my garden this spring just to let the weeds take over. It’s so hot out there.
Thanks! I think in the short term we’re going to try to make the electronic ballast lamps we already purchased work… If we hit any issues, I’ll look around for the bypass.
We only have 10? Bulbs, I think, and we have at least 8 fixtures, each taking two bulbs. So we’ll have to buy more anyways, I’ll probably get what you suggest for the remainder, and test them along side the direct ballast driven ones… Either way, thanks
They both work fine. I mainly meant if you were having to buy electronic ballasts to make the bulbs you have work, it may be cheaper to buy the bypass bulbs and do away with the ballasts. Same amount of work.
I strongly recommend Bully Tools for shovels and other garden tools. I bought the most heavy duty shovel home depot had on the shelf and broke it two hours into my project. The bully tools shovel handled the same work no problem. I have two shovels, a rake, and a hoe from them.
I have a couple of air quality sensors I need to get wired up with wireless interfaces. I also have a book that I’m hollowing out to turn into a crystal radio-slash-diorama that I need to get back to work on.
I destroyed an old, out of order chimney. I rebuilt a wooden formwork with an electric radiator which looks like a fireplace. Now, my SO and I are going to cover the formwork with mosaic tiles (she knows how to lay tiles, I’m going to learn to). After that, I’ll put wooden shelves on top, for books and geeky decorations.
Also, on the evening, I’m helping her sewing amigurimi toys, as she is a professional crochet craftswoman.
Kind of hate slide 1. There's no point in specifying 'in billions of USD' if you're only including percentages. The entire pie chart could represent a trillion dollars, or $25, and they wouldn't have to change a single thing about it.
Edit: Ah, I see, you can hover over them to see the values. Useless as a static image and useless on my phone.
You just need to hit the angled part of the scissor blades a couple of times with the file, following the already established angle. The file is probably too coarse to make a smooth edge though. So you have anything to finish up with? A honing steel or something?
I’m having a bit of a tough time making out the bevel in your second picture - the angle looks steep but not unreasonably so. Are you flat filing the backs of the cutting faces to work the burr? Here is a guide to determine the angle you should be aiming for.
I love flat files for sharpening larger blades like my axes and hatchets (they’re still finished with a stone) but tend to reach for a sharpening stone for smaller blades like scissors and secateurs. The wider face of the stone makes it easier to keep a consistent angle even without the use of a jig.
Thanks. That’s helpful! I don’t have a stone just yet. The angle seemed a little steeper than I expected but I couldn’t tell if flattened out nearer the handle. I did some work on the back but not much, it’s not concave on the backs.
It’s normal for scissors to have different angles on the thumb arm than the finger arm, depending on their intended use. You shouldn’t have to work the backs too much, but they should be revisited every so often during filing/honing to work the burr that is formed by the sharpening. I personally feel that a stone is more economical but you can finish hone with high grit automotive sandpaper too. If you’ve got an old leather belt, some scrap wood, and some glue you could make yourself a strop and only need some polishing compound. The finish work with a strop removes the burr, leaving the sharpened edge - if you don’t remove the burr your tool is likely to lose the edge more quickly.
Thank you. I meant on the same blade, the angle looked like it could be steeper at one end than at the other. But it seemed odd that it would come like that or wear like that over time? So maybe I was imagining it I’m not sure
I see what you mean - is it possible that you’re a “back third” cutter? I tend to cut close to the lever end of scissors and will have to touch that section up well before the point end needs any maintenance.
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