One of the app icons on the front page of my iPhone has disappeared. I can’t remember where it was or what it was. Now my icons aren’t lined up as I expect them to be. The muscle memory is strong. I opened the wrong app about three times in a row before I realized what was going on.
Don’t have the energy for that
When I was in Seattle nary a calendar month would go by when the heat didn’t come on. I’d go more than 30 days from maybe July 10 - August 20 or thereabouts, but certainly every calendar month it would come on at some point. And since I didn’t have air conditioning, yeah the thermostat was always on “heat”.
Now that I have both heat and A/C I do have to manually switch the thermostat from one to the other. I also spend 25 minutes closing most of the upstairs vents and opening most of the downstairs vents or vice versa.
I could probably buy a thermostat that would just allow me to input a range of acceptable temperatures and figure out on its own when to use heat and when to use A/C. But the one that came with the house doesn’t do that and it takes all of 5 seconds to change it, so the ROI on the time it would take to buy and install a new thermostat just isn’t there.
There are other nice use cases for a fancier thermostat though. Can change temperature from your phone. Good if you’re lazy, or if you go on vacation and forget to change the settings before you leave. They also have settings not found on many older stats, like the ability to run the fan for (say) 10 minutes every hour to circulate air when neither the heat nor the AC is on. And they will show you daily data on heat and AC run times in case you want to track your usage for whatever reason.
This anecdote may only apply to a particular brand/model of one of those fancy schmancy thermostats…BIL has one. He set it to “vacation mode” before leaving for a long trip. When he was n-minutes away from home he intended to turn vacation mode off and return to the normal settings. However, that was not an option via the app.
I hope you enjoyed my little story. If it made you ill I don’t have an antidote.
The upstairs toilet started running a little bit today. I took the lid off the tank to see what’s up, and the flapper has disintegrated where it attaches. Just don’t feel like dealing with that right now. I’ll make a trip to the hardware store tomorrow.
1 Like
That’s nice. My heat and AC are entirely separate systems, with thermostats in different rooms (and yes, once they both went on at the same time) but I do sometimes hit the “fan on” button on the AC thermostat. It would be nice to set it to automatically cycle just the fan, sometimes.
We used to have a swamp cooler and a boiler with separate thermostats and yeah, we did manage to run them both simultaneously on more than one occasion.
My thermostat is a Sensi. If I were buying today I think the Ecobee is a bit nicer, and it has the ‘run my fan every so often’ feature.
lost power, of course in the middle of printing something.
walked around checking to make sure all zones. Did see lights at a neighbor, across the street.
was checking laundry room we share with the downstairs apartment and that light worked. So first thought was only my apartment. until i turned around and saw lights on behind me.
Went back upstairs, and saw cable & internet was out. Rebooted the system and went to run an errand. Still out when got back.
Called company, area problem. Came back sooner than expected, but now bedroom remote doesnt work. nearest place is 45 minutes away
1 Like
Getting a tile contractor blows. There aren’t that many in my area to start with. It’s about 80 sq ft of floor tile plus another 80 sq ft in the shower. Usually you’re talking something like $12 per sq ft, though for a smaller job like this I can see paying a premium, so I was thinking $15 per ft, call it $2,500 labor and materials. Add waterproofing the shower to that, roughly $500 in parts and maybe a grand for labor feels generous. So I was ballparking $4k - this would cost more in a metro area but that felt about right for the midwest.
First bid came in yesterday, at $9.5k, oof. I have two other contractors coming out, one of them can’t do the work until next year, I really don’t want to keep dragging this out forever. There is a nontrivial chance I wind up just doing the tile myself. I’ve done about a thousand feet of tile, I’m no pro but I generally know how it all works, it’s not rocket science.
1 Like
just for tile? that’s gouging. I’m in the middle of a whole basement reno - remove cabinets, tile, shower, toilet, redo plumbing; install drywall, tile, paint, shower, vanity - and it’s going to be on the order of $7k - $8k.
Just for tile and the substrate (aka cement board and waterproof panels in the shower). It’s 80 hours tops and he’s quoting $6.5k for labor. $80+ per hour for this work is pretty insane.
Not these days I don’t think, at least around here. You can’t get a contractor come hell or high water. My son in law is billing himself out at $70/hour as a subcontractor on some jobs (so they’re billing him out higher), and when he quotes jobs I’m pretty sure he’s higher than that. He also has to pad it out for variability - like the time I helped him build a fence and it took an extra day just to dig the fence posts - because the ground was so hard we couldn’t even get the auger to dig.
The environment seems to be charge whatever they want, but make it high, and get rid of all the small jobs anyway.
I can’t see how you’d get a whole basement reno for $7-8k. that’s insanely cheap.
It’s a very busy market here. My carpenter chargers $40/hr, but I offered him $50/hr for this job since it’s small. My electrician charges $80/hr and he is one of the more expensive ones here but does stellar work.
Put another way, this estimate was over $40 per sq ft. And I already have the tile, that’s just install.
If you are willing to put up with perhaps too much attention, you might try Angi. I had a small project I needed done and got hit up by tons of contractors right away. You’ll also get some spam, which you can unsubscribe from once your job is finished.
ETA: I actually did it through Porch, which is a similar (but smaller outfit). Porch apparently sold my interest in home improvement to ANGI as well.
Relatedly, I recently used an app called Thumbtack to get a bunch of stuff done—electrical , hvac, pest control.
I had good results with it. User reviews are always suspect but I found them helpful.
We had mixed results with Thumbtack and… I want to say Handy or Handi, one of those apps. It’s a pretty small market here (population 100k, or 140k when college is in session) and most of the trades are still pretty old school.
I found one other shop willing to come out and quote it. I think $4k-ish is the ‘normal’ price, I’m fine paying $5k. Much more than that and I’ll just take a week off and tile it myself. I have a guy who would come be my gopher for $20/hr, he hasn’t ever tiled but I bet with him around I could knock it out pretty quickly for $1k in parts and $500 of his time.
2 Likes
Cause you say, “Hey, bud, go fer that hammer over there…”
2 Likes
Mission accomplished. I figured I might as well replace the handle/arm while I was at it, as that’s been a bit fussy lately.
WTF happened to this flapper though. Not only did both connections completely wear through, it looks like the dog chewed on it for a while.
that’s pretty rough looking. I am surprised you havn’t felt the need to replace it until now. Usually they leak well before they disintegrate into “pink used kleenex” status.
Do you use bleach or toilet tablets in the water tank? These can wreak havoc on the plastic parts in the tank. AS much as like the idea of auto cleaning the toilet bowl with every flush… these things
just aren’t worth the effort because they destroy the internal toilet parts
1 Like