The internet is full of places where low grade antagonistic sarcasm is considered a desirable way to communicate. Those places tend to be toxic shitholes, but whatever. Point is, if you feel like that communication style fits you better, go forth and prosper.
Those and round phone jacks about every 10 feet or so. There’s a phone jack in the hallway! Not even connected to a landline anymore. And because we opted for the ultra-deluxe old home, an intercom system that made a zapping noise accompanied by a perfect little curl of smoke when we turned it on for the first time. Yeeeehaaaaaa!!!
Yes, definitely that. But I also dream of being able to press a button and say our little “all ducks, go to bed” and have all those truants down in the big pond know what they’re supposed to do 😂
I suspect you might be joking and I just didn’t get it, but just in case - do your ducks actually respond to verbal cues??
I have friends with ducks, and another friend who tried to have ducks this spring and lost them all to predation, and I know they would all love to be able to get their ducks to get to bed on time.
Ducks would really rather party outside all night, but we use “all ducks go to bed” every time we bring food or treats or water changes to the coop. It took some time but now when we say it they come in to see what the deal is and we can lock up behind them.
Omg. This at my house. All old cat 3 phone line. The lines aren’t even terminated anymore but I can’t pull them out. Same with all the coax lines. So frustrating.
We also had the owner installed intercom system! I pulled it out since it didn’t work anymore either. On top of that we have Central-Vac! It still works, and my toddler has yet to figure out she could put stuff in there.
Wow, fancy, you have a PLUG for your TV antenna? I just have the wire coming through the wall from the attic. Although I did think it was rather modern that my antenna was mounted in the attic instead of on the roof.
Same here, we tried to figure out how old our house was once and the furthest back we got was 1850. The house existed before that for sure but that’s the oldest bit of paperwork we could dig up for it.
Oh yeah that’s a good idea! I want to check with a nearby estate too because it used to be part of that, 1850 was just when it separated and became an independent property.
Stone? We had only unburned bricks, no right angles, several kinds of walls put together and bulging out to rooms. It is always funny to add or redo some furniture, electric work …
The outside walls are stone, but inside it’s a big mess: I never know what color the dust will be when I drill a hole. And I can’t even imagine right angles or straight walls. It must be so handy.
Funniest part of it is that for some parts even exists some drawings, some electric work was made by students (friend was teaching electricians), something done by friends…
My workplaces is like this: Some walls are red brick, others white/yellow brick. I have one random concrete wall. A couple plywood walls. I have yet to find a plasterboard wall.
My house isn’t even that old but there’s still technology built into the walls that I’ll never use, and speakers in the ceiling that I’ll never hook up an amp for (they’re in such bad spots they serve no practical purpose)
I wish home builders knew how quickly technology aged so they could be more careful about what they drill into the walls. But they just wanna flip a house. They don’t care otherwise.
I did get around to the hand plane this week. Most of the rust and grot is off and now I need to lap the sole as best I can.
If there’s still a bit of rust left somewhere . . . I don’t actually care. It’s a 1970s Canadian-made Stanley Craftsman plane, which means that it’s effectively worthless. I just want it in good enough shape not to leave rust streaks on whatever I’m trying to plane. In five years or so, I expect I’ll either have given up on woodworking or bought a higher-quality replacement.
(I also need to fix a chair, which I didn’t quite get to today.)
My gut says tapcon, but my head says you’d better look up the code for that one. Deck collapses can be pretty ugly and you don’t want to have an insurance claim denied because you didn’t build to code.
Use the same place where the old flight of stairs used to be: the house’s structure and floor statics were calculated to have stairs there. You don’t want to mess with a house’s structure without the help of a statics engineer!
A little bit of “Stair maths” to start. Sorry for metric units, you might have to convert them if you’re in the US.
The ideal stair has an angle of 30°, a rise of 17 centimetres up, from step to step, with steps 29 cm deep, from front to back. Two rises plus one depth should be as close as possible to 63 cm because of the length of a human’s step.
You won’t get this ideal in most cases, because the distance between the upper and lower floor will rarely be an exact mulitiple of 17 cm.
1: measure this distance, finished upper floor to finished lower floor. Divide by 17 cm. Round up or down to get the number of steps you need.
2: Divide the distance between the floors by the number of steps from above
3: Use the “2 rises plus 1 depth = 63 cm” to determine the ideal depth. Stay as close to that as possible to make the stairs easy, safe and comfortable to walk on. It’s a good idea to make a drawing to scale at this point, to see how the stairs fit in the floorplan.
4: Now you can calculate the length of the stairs using good old Pythagoras (a^2 + b^2 = c^2, “a” being the distance between the floors, “b” is the depth of one step multiplied by the number - from above, “c” is the length of the stair - and the boards (“stringers”) on either side as well as the handrails).
Now you can calculate the material you need. Two stringer boards, the required number of steps of the correct length, plus brackets and screws on either side of each, plus one or two handrails plus balusters.
Definitely gonna save this for later. Having the formulas laid out like that is nice. Plus, what you said lines up pretty well with the wikihow linked above. While that isn't the best source for confirmation, it makes me comfortable knowing that multiple sources came to the same methodology.
In addition to these general guidelines, there are likely specific building codes in your area for minimum dimensions of stairs. Plenty of homes have non-compliant stairs, but it’ll save you a lot of hassle in the long run if you do things to code.
If you haven’t found him already on YouTube, I’d recommend essential craftsman. He did a whole series on building a house from leveling the ground and pouring foundations, right through to the finishing touches.
He did a couple of videos on stairs, I seem to remember he made a mistake on the heights so took everyone right through how to do it properly. I must admit I got a bit lost as he was working on Imperial rather than metric, but he did cover metric and it seems 100 times easier.
I don’t know the first thing about building stairs but I can tell you what I’d do to learn: not use YouTube or social media as a primary source for learning.
You should go to the library and find a book or five that talk about stairs, including basic principles. Maybe buy one of your favorite books or use that information to find one online.
This is major structural work on your home. You can cause a bunch of damage and expose yourself to uninsurable liability if you do it wrong. Unlike many other projects, you can’t necessarily redo a wrong turn you take here without substantial investment. If you don’t have someone you 100% trust to build stairs themselves watching over you, failure to adequately plan can make this a nightmare.
Do It Yourself
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