It does, and it largely mirrors what I was expecting. I had hoped that there is more concrete advice, but I suspect that we are beyond the level where advice is straightforward.
"Congratulations! You will never be able to do your own taxes again," was the advice from those coordinating our current co-investment opportunity. I suspect that may be the last direct advice we may get for a long time.
Our health plan does not give us access to an HSA, so that is off the table for the foreseeable future. I will check out the wiki, so thank you for that!
I am currently redesigning my kitchen in a 1930’s Midwestern USA house. The kitchen has a decent floor area but the floor plan is oddly restrictive....
I would strongly encourage you to get standard-sized appliances, especially for ones that slot into a specific space like a dishwasher.
We recently needed to buy a new refrigerator. Our opening could not take a standard 36" French door fridge - or must be either a single-door 36" or a French door 33". Neither of those are the current standard. While on the surface there are several models that could work in this space, it quickly became clear that we have virtually no options. Fancy ice maker? Not available. Door-in-door? Nope! Multiple interior layout options? Hah, no!
It turns out that companies only make significant options in the most common size. Thinking that you do not care about those options? I believe that you do not want them now. That may well change in the future, and then you will be stuck. A family’s needs change as everyone ages, and the things that feel great now may not be good choices for you later. Flexibility is king when it comes to long term planning.
It took longer than I wanted, but my son’s room is done! Many thanks to the folks here who shared their thoughts on wall repair and LED strips. This project took longer than I wanted, but every step was done right....
Those are kind words - thank you. He is a good big brother who puts up with a lot. The kid deserves and needs a space that is just his, where he can get away from the chaos of life (and his younger brother).
Thank you! This was my first big project after a few years of big health issues, so it was a real test of where my skills are now. Thankfully, it seems I haven’t lost much.
A couple friends have asked me if I would do this for money. I had to politely explain that they can’t afford me. It’s not that I am that good - I am just that slow! I can fake a lot with enough time and trips back to the garage to fix things.
I think this is a case where getting someone to look at it would be wise. Depending on your foundation, those stairs could be part of the structure of the foundation. Even if they were not pissy or the structure, removing them could damage the surrounding foundation.
My project is going slowly, but I finished building and painting the feature wall in my son’s new bedroom. Now I just need to install and program the LED strip along the top!...
Hah! I love it. If it helps at all, the color fidelity in this photo isn’t great. The mountains are actually a non-vibrant shade of blue-green that gets turned much darker by my phone’s camera. The natural lighting today also doesn’t help with it raining outside. We specifically chose the color of the White Mountains of New Hampshire through the haze of a warm summer day.
I have found photographing this project to be especially challenging. Between the changing light throughout the day and the limits of my phone camera, it is hard to get both accurate colors and a proper impression of the texture of the wall.
It’s not black, but instead a mildly dark blue-green. The lighting is awful today, and my phone is struggling to pick up the actual color. I’ll see if I can upload a photo that better grabs the color.
Edit: I can’t get Boost for Lemmy to accept my image upload in the comments. I don’t know why. Boo. Maybe I’ll upload to another service later.
I will share more once the whole build is done. If you look back a month or so in this sub, you can see the notes page there I planned my layout for the mountains. I think the room will be finished in a week or so, and there will be plenty of pictures then.
I am only running the lights along a channel in the uppermost boards that will make the topmost mountains, so I will not need a complex path. My goal is to have a sunrise-behind-the-mountains effect.
I am renovating my son’s bedroom and trying to make the walls as nice as is reasonable before repainting. There are a few cracks like this in the paint. It looks like on top of the drywall there is paint, wallpaper, and then a few more layers of paint. The cracks could be at the seams of the drywall from expansion and...
Can I do mesh tape over the cracks as they are (with some initial sanding to remove high points), or do I need to strip it down to drywall first? Getting down to drywall would be tricky without damaging the drywall
Any settling should be long finished. The bedroom is on the second floor, and the additions that border these walls were completed ~30 years ago. The drywall in this room predates that addition, but these cracks are through layers of paint that came after the additions. Upon further inspection, I think the weak drywall is limited to a much smaller area than I first anticipated. That area has no cracks and will be trimmed with a cover out in for better plumbing access anyway.
I grabbed some tape and will do that repair. Thankfully, I have taped drywall before so this is not new. I don’t think my wife will be thrilled that this is going to add a day or two until we can paint, but she will agree that it is better to do it right than fast.
Thank you to everyone who commented. If these cracks do not come back it was worth the time to do it right. If not, then at least I got to practice my drywall finishing skills.
I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.
Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.
It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.
Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.
Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.
Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.
My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.
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Talk me out of an 18" dishwasher. (or into it)
I am currently redesigning my kitchen in a 1930’s Midwestern USA house. The kitchen has a decent floor area but the floor plan is oddly restrictive....
Completed mountain feature wall for son's bedroom ( photofed.world )
It took longer than I wanted, but my son’s room is done! Many thanks to the folks here who shared their thoughts on wall repair and LED strips. This project took longer than I wanted, but every step was done right....
What to do with an old cellar bulkhead are?
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Mountain feature wall in child's bedroom ( lemmy.world )
My project is going slowly, but I finished building and painting the feature wall in my son’s new bedroom. Now I just need to install and program the LED strip along the top!...
Can you recommend an LED strip light that can have an unlighted break in it? ( lemmy.world )
I am putting a mountain feature wall in my son’s new bedroom....
What is the best way to fix cracks before repainting ( lemmy.world )
I am renovating my son’s bedroom and trying to make the walls as nice as is reasonable before repainting. There are a few cracks like this in the paint. It looks like on top of the drywall there is paint, wallpaper, and then a few more layers of paint. The cracks could be at the seams of the drywall from expansion and...
Will a quokka brighten your Monday? ( lemmy.world )
Yes they really are that happy usually