This Old #%&@*$ House

I highly recommend getting a tester for starters.

https://amzn.to/3gNlbn9

It's hard to start troubleshooting without knowing where the issue is. The pen tester should be used ANY time you are working on electricity.

Electrician came and left. About an hour and $250 later I have a new main breaker and a fully electrical house!

The old one literally burnt out. I’ll post pics later, if I get a chance.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

Electrician came and left. About an hour and $250 later I have a new main breaker and a fully electrical house!

The old one literally burnt out. I’ll post pics later, if I get a chance.

I'm curious if that's my issue too - just something old finally kicking the bucket.

If the panel says Federal Pacific, replace the whole thing NOW. Those things will overheat, melt, and start a fire.

I had one in my previous house and the breaker for the dryer started going. I caught it before it started a fire, but there were signs of melting already.

I do have a good story! Last week I turned my pool pump off to clean the pump screen and it would not start back up. Just an electrical humming noise and then silence. Looked up some youtube vids and gave it a shot to replace the motor starter capacitor that takes 5 mins to remove. I got it from Amazon a day later for 7 bucks and everything started back up fine after the replacement!

We have officially refinanced our house and have a sizeable chunk of cash to put towards finishing our basement. We are planning to make a bedroom, a bathroom, a storage space, and have the rest of it be a combo kids play area and office area for me. The basement is below ground and has narrow windows at the top, which we are planning on having replaced with egress windows. For those of you who have done a similar project before, any suggestions/recommendations/things you love/things you wish you had thought of? I expect it might take a while for us to actually get this done--contractors are busy, of course--but we aren't in a rush, so we've got time to do it right, I hope.

mrlogical wrote:

We have officially refinanced our house and have a sizeable chunk of cash to put towards finishing our basement. We are planning to make a bedroom, a bathroom, a storage space, and have the rest of it be a combo kids play area and office area for me. The basement is below ground and has narrow windows at the top, which we are planning on having replaced with egress windows. For those of you who have done a similar project before, any suggestions/recommendations/things you love/things you wish you had thought of? I expect it might take a while for us to actually get this done--contractors are busy, of course--but we aren't in a rush, so we've got time to do it right, I hope.

Adequate heating. Basements on a concrete slab are COLD.

If i had the money, I'd do underfloor heating

If you need a sump pump, get a backup sump pump; we had a failure a few years ago and it became very expensive, so having a battery backup would have saved us significant money by not having to, oh, replace drywall, carpeting, and then have my wife decide we needed to upgrade everything.

Yes, have at least two sump pumps, one that runs on battery.

Make the ceiling as high as you can.

Don't cram the utility appliances into a tiny closet, give plenty of space to work around them for the inevitable repairs / maintenance / replacement.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

If the panel says Federal Pacific, replace the whole thing NOW. Those things will overheat, melt, and start a fire.

I had one in my previous house and the breaker for the dryer started going. I caught it before it started a fire, but there were signs of melting already.

While it's really rare to even find one, yes, you absolutely have to replace those out. The house we bought last year has a separate garage with a loft, and that was one of the things we found during the inspection. My brother is an electrician though so I bought him some pizza and some drinks to take back home, and he made the trek up here to swap it out for me. From what I was reading, those things had like a 40% failure rate. Our inspector wouldn't even activate the breaker to test it.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Make the ceiling as high as you can.

Underrated advice. I think we have one of the only useable basements because the family who renovated the house had the foresight to raise the entire first floor. Huge amount of space that we have now whereas everyone else has 5 ft ceilings that cant be used for much.

Vrikk wrote:

Soooo a storm rolled through and kicked the power out. When I flipped all the breakers back on the circuit that runs most of my house is not working right. Immediately triggers the first gfci and just shuts down. I had an electrician out and he diagnosed it that I have at least two outlets that are now not grounded right.

Does this make sense? Would a storm do that? I’m assuming that it’s something dealing with the fact that it’s old wiring. While the circuit holds a lot, I’ve never had an issue. No flickering of lights, nothing like that which would make me think it was overladen.

Update on this. It was bad grounding on two old outlets. The dickbags that flipped my house just pig-tailed some wires together to fool a tester into thinking it was grounded.

I love how my $400 emergency electrician call was useless since he said he could not find the problem, and recommended me call someone local.

I called my local guy, and he fixed it in 2 hours for $200.

What a waste of money the emergency call was.

Oh, also I could have died if I was in the bathtub when the power surge happened since the fake ground in the outlet was ON THE OTHER SIDE OF MY METAL BATHTUB.

Yikes. Glad it worked it worked out. When we moved into our house way back when me immediately needed to have the service upgraded. Our electrician went up the pole in our backyard, immediately came back down and told me the whole house wasn’t grounded! He even asked me if we were getting shocks in the shower!!!

I told him ‘no’ and asked him if it was dangerous and he just said, “better not to think it about it.”

Yeah that's why I can't believe people are skipping inspections in this crazy market this year. It's not worth the risk.

Almost finished with our kitchen remodel! The floors had 4 layers of linoleum, all the drawers had no guides/sliders, they'd just fall out when you opened them. The cabinets were poorly painted over with rough bumps everywhere. Lots of water damage, lots of wasted space. The ceiling was 3 different heights.

We had to move two structural beams but it's now all one height. We're still waiting for the hood to come in for the 36" range with griddle.

Before:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/DomYN3V.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/vP718Fo.jpg)

Ripped out:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/Hlt8K2K.jpg)

After:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/RMctcJ9.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/4y6Knxf.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/UuaAFI2.jpg)

Nice!!! Congrats!

So much nicer.

#%&@*$ing gorgeous!

mrwynd wrote:

Almost finished with our kitchen remodel!

There is sooo much WIN in this post. Bravo!

-BEP

Not really an old house story as I live in a brand new townhome community, but....

The HOA board all resigned at once after a general outcry by a huge group of homeowners regarding the dictatorial and hypocritical behavior of the architecture committee. Details include the rejection of decks, patios, fences, storm doors, and other additions that were promised to be allowed by the builder at the time of signing. Apparently, the board all decided to give up after one of the residents got a lawyer and pointed out how two members of the Arc committee had examples of storm doors, fences, and hot tubs that were rejected previously.

Anyway, one of the prior board members approached me a couple days ago to ask me if I would run for the new board. My response was as follows:

"What, in the two years that you have known me, would ever give you the impression I would invite that kind of drama into my life? I am an Asian man living in a predominantly white townhome community where the average home price is $800k and the average age of the homeowner is over 55. If you took a moment to think, it would become clear to you that I am allergic to rich, idle white folks with nothing better to do than complain about one another's hose reels."

Plus, being on the school board is already a big time sink.

Stele wrote:

Yeah that's why I can't believe people are skipping inspections in this crazy market this year. It's not worth the risk.

To be fair, most inspections are useless. Unless you get an actual electrician to come out and do a whole house inspection (which is nearly impossible to do right now), a regular home inspector won't see stuff like bad wiring. They are not even allowed to move furniture around in Maryland, so if someone is hiding like a pile of cocaine under a sofa, it won't be found.

Home inspections are more for a feeling of "peace of mind", and for pointing out obvious things that you may not know yourself.

Real estate is sometimes really stacked against a buyer.

Back in 2015 we got our fuse box upgraded, some other electrical work, and new shingles on our roof from the seller. I'd have to go back and find the PDF, but our inspector had pictures of everything that was even a little bit off, and we just picked a few critical things from the seller and fixed a few more ourselves. Was a really good experience at that time.

Vrikk wrote:

To be fair, most inspections are useless.

I'm going to disagree with this, and especially in the cases of a first time buyer or an older house.

There are lots of things that might be "obvious" to someone with more experience that a good inspector will identify.

I'm thinking of things like roofs and attics. I'm never going to get up on top of a roof to check for water issues or replacement/wear. I'm not going to invest the time to learn about what to look for in terms of water damage in an attic or basement. I'm not going to know if that crack in the foundation something to worry about or a minor cosmetic issue.

I'm not an experienced electrician so I'm not going to know if a breaker box is too old, or is under-provisioned for any future remodeling work.

There are a myriad of tiny details, like Stele pointed out, that you'd want to be aware of. An inspector can identify those issues either to help with negotiations, or to generate and triage a list of projects after you purchase.

Getting an independent (not recommended by your realtor) inspector can be a huge value.

Yeah, my inspector was anything but useless. He more than paid for himself too because we were able to use his report to get the sellers to replace the oven and a few windows.

Then you all are lucky, and I and my many friends were not. We all chose different inspectors that did not notice things that contractors said were obvious later on in our respective homes.

Guess I chose the short straw. I was a first-time buyer of an older home, and had to pay for the inspector's lack of detail in the tune of thousands upon thousands of dollars over the last three years.

Vrikk wrote:

Then you all are lucky, and I and my many friends were not. We all chose different inspectors that did not notice things that contractors said were obvious later on in our respective homes.

Guess I chose the short straw. I was a first-time buyer of an older home, and had to pay for the inspector's lack of detail in the tune of thousands upon thousands of dollars over the last three years.

Oof, that sucks. We got a great recommendation for our inspector who turned out to be a seller's worst nightmare with an eagle eye for structural issues. Ended up walking on two houses due to issues he found that the owners weren't willing to account for, and got a sizable amount of repair concessions where we landed due to his findings there.

When we bought our first house the inspector didn't find a lot of issues we discovered after moving in including water flooding the basement every time it rained and the oven not getting beyond 150F.

When we bought our second house in 2020 the inspector found so many issues we got $40k removed from the asking price - mostly water damage and a few electrical problems. He even walked us through every issue and pointed them out and estimated the costs for repair/replacement.

So I guess it really comes down to who your inspector is!

I wonder if the reason for that is regional, and/or related to licensing and certification?

T-Prime wrote:

I wonder if the reason for that is regional, and/or related to licensing and certification?

Possible. My local contractor who I trust implicitly has said that it's very easy to get a home inspector job in Maryland - so I assume it's country-wide too. It sounds like a side job for some people.