This Old #%&@*$ House

I have an 18” electric chainsaw from Ego I’ve been very happy with. Good to hear the other machines in that battery system are well regarded. I’m considering an electric snowblower for next year and will probably go with an Ego.

For hanging guitars, there's a String Swing that holds five guitars:

IMAGE(https://u.cubeupload.com/MilkmanDanimal/Geetars.jpg)

I think I paid $100 for it, but it looks like it's $120 these days on Amazon. Still, individual String Swings ~$15 or so, which means if you wanted to hang a number, you're pretty far along to the five-pack one. No buying lumber, no staining, no worrying about edges, just put this thing up and be done. It was really easy.

Honestly between the wood and work do what MMD did.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

For hanging guitars, there's a String Swing that holds five guitars:

IMAGE(https://u.cubeupload.com/MilkmanDanimal/Geetars.jpg)

I think I paid $100 for it, but it looks like it's $120 these days on Amazon. Still, individual String Swings ~$15 or so, which means if you wanted to hang a number, you're pretty far along to the five-pack one. No buying lumber, no staining, no worrying about edges, just put this thing up and be done. It was really easy.

Did you get it in studs?

My wife wants the flat look, so those are too close together for our needs.

Yep, it's in studs, IIRC there's a thin line on the mounting bar where you put the screws in wherever you need, so it couldn't have been much easier to put up. It was like ten minutes, and that probably included opening the box.

I used the String Swing CC11K for flat hanging.

We're doing wood laminate flooring in the big bedroom now, and I made a video to hopefully help someone else. The first room we did was so frustrating going with the instructions that came with the flooring. It requires a ton of force to lock the planks in place, and shifts the flooring if you don't somehow put something there to block it from shifting. I love the flooring once you get it down, though. Waterproof and a thick veneer of wood. All feels great. This house has some great subflooring too, so there are no creeks. Tongue and groove planks covered with particle board.

We can put lawn stuff in this thread too, yes?

We sold and bought, ended up on a wooded 1.08 acre lot. Probably 1/2 an acre of front yard that I need to caretake.

The previous owner left a John Deere tractor that works.
For leaf cleanup, I was thinking of buying a backpack leaf blower. My small battery powered one isn’t going to cut it. My wife suggested a tow-behind yard sweeper. Any thoughts on this? I feel like it’s probably gonna end up being both.

Neither, and mulch the suckers.

Blind_Evil wrote:

We can put lawn stuff in this thread too, yes?

We sold and bought, ended up on a wooded 1.08 acre lot. Probably 1/2 an acre of front yard that I need to caretake.

The previous owner left a John Deere tractor that works.
For leaf cleanup, I was thinking of buying a backpack leaf blower. My small battery powered one isn’t going to cut it. My wife suggested a tow-behind yard sweeper. Any thoughts on this? I feel like it’s probably gonna end up being both.

If I was your neighbor I'd want you to have the tow-behind yard sweeper. The thought of having a neighbor with a backpack blower hitting an entire acre every week or so makes me so sad.

I’ll have to try the mulch thing.

It isn’t really a weekly thing, just 2-3 times in November and December than one Spring cleanup. My neighbor to the right uses a backpack blower, not sure about the other guy.

If you get the leaf build up I used to then mulching isn't a possibility. Backpack or the giant leaf shred vac machine are your best bets. I used to make a hell of a leaf pile for compost I could climb by end of fall. Back yard looked like I had slayed a dragon.

That might be the case here; in fall it really was a ton of leaves. Neither neighbor seemed to mulch, just pushed them back to the tree line behind each property.

A few options, riding bager for riding mower. Clean simple, still load of work.

Backpack blower will do magnatudes more work than any hand blower. I had my hand blower as it was a good vacuum shredder as well but still too little for a whole yard.

I would use a rake, hand blower, & those wolverine rake hands to load up several bins full of debris and move to my compost, leaf pile area. Worked well, honestly best method.

This was my dream machine! The Terminator of leaf cleanup. Good luck, I really don't miss my yard. It was weekends full and several nights of tree cleanup. I really got caught up on podcasts!
IMAGE(https://www.cyclonerake.com/assets/1/16/Generic-1280x800-Commander_Bundle.gif?188130)

Good luck hope you find a good system that works.

I just run over them with my lawn tractor into a regular bagger in the back.

I've used the big backpack blowers before. They're great for making you feel like you control the finger of god, and they'll definitely move leaves around. Where they're a big pain is if you're trying to do anything more precise than blow leaves from "here" to some general "there". If you can blow them into the woods behind the yard, great. If you need to move them around a fence or through a gate or into a pile, they're kind of a pain. They also work way less well if the leaves aren't dry, or if it's windy.

Also remember that if you blow them out the back and they wind up in a pile, those bastards are gonna take forever to decompose, and you might wind up with an ever-growing mound of half rotten leaves.

Mulching them is supposedly the best way to make sure they break down quickly and return nutrients to the lawn. Problem is that to do it "right", you're supposed to do it weekly at most, so that you don't create a mat of leaf bits that chokes the grass.

If you're lazy like me, you can either bravely ignore that and just do it as often as you can, or spend a little time with a rake and spread the leaves out across the lawn a bit more thinly and then mulch them.

The other thing you can do is take the bagger off and go over them once or twice to chop them up in to smaller bits, then put the bagger back on and go pick up the bits. You can fit way more chopped up leaves in the bag than full leaves.

I used hot composting in my pile. If you have something you can mulch them in that is great.Thankfully our winter would always compact them with the weight of snow. Went from 8ft tall pile down to 3 ft.

If compost is your goal go ahead and look into it. You may need a compost starter to help chew it through and it will take some playing with but turning it works well. Get a pitchfork, hoe, or ditch like pick axe to move it all around.

I've got a pile of pine needles, grass clippings, and chopped up leaves in my back woods that's getting really big and I should probably figure out how to make smaller.

I would use the big backpack blower from above and blow the big pile into a wider pile further back in the woods. That's my plan this year. It may require occasionally loosening it with a shovel or pitchfork.

Chaz wrote:

I've got a pile of pine needles, grass clippings, and chopped up leaves in my back woods that's getting really big and I should probably figure out how to make smaller.

One of untold methods on how to do it. It's pretty simple and just takes some dedication & TLC.

I should say I was turned on to this process from MWDowns here when he was a rice farmer in Japan. Huge throwback but helped out my leaf pile.

So now along the west side of my house it is just grass. Right where the grass hits the house it very slightly slopes down towards the house. Haven't had any water issues in the basement though. I wanted get some landscaping done along the edge of house to make the yard a little nicer. Maybe mulch and hostas? Do I need to make sure some sort of water shield is put down? Or just make sure the grading is even? I don't want to create a new problem.

Anyone replace a roof recently? It's .... not cheap. Not at all.

My favorite part of the whole estimate process so far is that the folks who have been poking around on our roof (a) all found the rotten spot above our porch and (b) expanded it to the point that a minor and easily-dealt-with drip is now a waterfall along the front edge of our house.

Now if one of you folks would get a crew over here and fix the damn thing ...

Enix wrote:

Anyone replace a roof recently? It's .... not cheap. Not at all.

My favorite part of the whole estimate process so far is that the folks who have been poking around on our roof (a) all found the rotten spot above our porch and (b) expanded it to the point that a minor and easily-dealt-with drip is now a waterfall along the front edge of our house.

Now if one of you folks would get a crew over here and fix the damn thing ...

Yeah, I got to experience the joy of Hurricane Sally. Prices for basically anything in terms of contracting is already double along the Gulf Coast, and got doubled-to-tripled again post-hurricane. Roof prices are insane, and the area was absolutely crawling with slightly dodgy roofing companies doing roofs for "insurance proceeds"

My wife's an architect, and says that the contractors her firm works with are saying that prices for building materials have doubled or tripled over the last year. Perfect storm of suppliers expected lower demand, so ramped down production, or had to reduce because of covid and staffing things, then demand went up because people had money to spend since they weren't going out or vacationing or whatever, so either built or remodeled.

I've been trying to get into woodworking as a hobby, and been pretty discouraged by the price of lumber for that.

I guess for reference 5 years ago I paid $9k for a totally basic (two pitches) 1800 square feet home tear off.

PoderOmega wrote:

I guess for reference 5 years ago I paid $9k for a totally basic (two pitches) 1800 square feet home tear off.

Wow. I think locally that work is in the region of $20-25k now, with significantly higher prices for better quality materials. I think metal roofs locally start in the $35k range and go up from there.

There is a random leak on the first floor of my two story house--it happens every time my wife flushes her toilet. So now I am going to have to pay a plumber (and I am guessing a contractor or two) to fix whatever the hell is going on with the plumbing in this lemon of a house.

The thing about my roof? It's at least 25 years old, maybe 30. It's obviously time -- a few shingles are c*ck-eyed, there are always shingle pellets in the gutters, they're faded, etc. We've been saving for a few years, and the stimulus money was a huge boost to our roof fund.

So far, we've been lucky on leaks. We had a small one on our front porch, but only when it poured, and then not very much.

Since the roofing estimators have been tromping around on our roof and poking at the rotten spot above the porch, the trickle has turned into a flood. During a good rainstorm I can fill two buckets about halfway. There's at least as much on the porch floor because it's leaking in more places than I have buckets.

It's a minor annoyance -- it's not an enclosed porch, and we haven't set it up for summer -- but thanks for wrecking my roof, y'all.

New flooring and baseboards done in the main bedroom, so we were able to put together the new furniture. It has been a lot of work.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/EuD0lVg.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/lGE92r8.jpg)

Can you get a piece of flashing or sheet metal? Maybe a tarp to go under the upper shingles and cover the leak hole?

Side note: my wife is letting me buy a new grill/smoker/griddle for my birthday. Any great combo recommendations? I have a big charcoal barrel now. Thoughts or best brands from folks?