If I was to guess that is the norm in the US South where termites are an issue, but I’ve not researched it. Do you have termites in your vicinity?
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The Home Improvement Q&A Thread
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No. We get nothing terrible here. No Earthquakes, volcanos, tornados or termites.
Well we do have to suffer from Boris Johnson!
Good luck with that!No. We get nothing terrible here. No Earthquakes, volcanos, tornados or termites.
Well we do have to suffer from Boris Johnson!
![13298386-0-image-a-65_1557414794403.jpg]()
Wouldn’t normal people remove their suit jacket first? ?You forgot to mention hurricanes/typhoons, I suppose not those either.
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Arrow charges $300 per year for my house for Termite and they guarantee it. They don't do any soil treatment. They just use bait stations.
The odd mild hurricane. No typhoons. A bit of flooding but that’s mostly because they keep building on flood plains. Probably the idiot on the wire!Good luck with that!
You forgot to mention hurricanes/typhoons, I suppose not those either.
New home and new construction purchased in July 2019. For an entire year, I have been battling with the warranty department, because the upstairs toilet will not flush properly, and consistently.
After months and months of the warranty department not taking us seriously, they came and replaced the toilet and checked the pipes. The issue still persisted.
A few days after replacing the toilet, to no avail, they sent someone with a camera, that could check all the piping, all the way to the side of the road, to the main sewer line.
Guess what?
In the concrete slab of the house, there was a wrought iron pipe, going through the PVC piping to the main sewer. Debris would get caught on said pipe, and that was why sometimes the toilet would flush just fine.
Short version:
In my main hallway, from my front door, hardwood flooring had to be removed
Concrete slab had to be sawed cut
Three foot hole had to be dug
Piping cut and replaced
Refill the hole, install cement and lay new hardwood flooring.
Talk about a mess. The sawing of the concrete, and the dust it created, had everything in our house covered with concrete dust. No joke. The Builder had to hire cleaners, to clean the entire house and all objects. It was awful.
In short, if something is not working as expected, persist to get it fixed. That would have cost us a fortune, to get it fixed ourselves...!
After months and months of the warranty department not taking us seriously, they came and replaced the toilet and checked the pipes. The issue still persisted.
A few days after replacing the toilet, to no avail, they sent someone with a camera, that could check all the piping, all the way to the side of the road, to the main sewer line.
Guess what?
In the concrete slab of the house, there was a wrought iron pipe, going through the PVC piping to the main sewer. Debris would get caught on said pipe, and that was why sometimes the toilet would flush just fine.
Short version:
In my main hallway, from my front door, hardwood flooring had to be removed
Concrete slab had to be sawed cut
Three foot hole had to be dug
Piping cut and replaced
Refill the hole, install cement and lay new hardwood flooring.
Talk about a mess. The sawing of the concrete, and the dust it created, had everything in our house covered with concrete dust. No joke. The Builder had to hire cleaners, to clean the entire house and all objects. It was awful.
In short, if something is not working as expected, persist to get it fixed. That would have cost us a fortune, to get it fixed ourselves...!
Glad you got there in the end. I hear you on the dust. Our project house generated tones of the stuff. Knocking through door ways, plastering, tilling. It’s been a very dusty process. Better now though.
The subdivision is built in blocks of two homes. There is a wall between homes, and there is rebar to reinforce the wall. And, that is what punctured the PVC pipe. Again, is was 4-5 feet down.
Then again, I am not a building contractor
Oh I think I understand - the pipe was buried, rebar is driven into the ground, foundation poured. Sorry - I thought it was a pipe set in the foundations (and thus presumably put in at similar time to the rebar).The subdivision is built in blocks of two homes. There is a wall between homes, and there is rebar to reinforce the wall. And, that is what punctured the PVC pipe. Again, is was 4-5 feet down.
Then again, I am not a building contractor
Re: dust: our house is essentially all concrete and brick - the walls are all rendered cement over blocks, internally, externally, interior walls; the structure of the house (Except the steel frame supporting the tile roof) is Poured concrete pillars and beams, and in the new lounge room even the “ceiling” is actually the bottom side of the preformed concrete panels that make up the floor above - so Practically anything DIY in or around the house invariably involves a hammer drill and a **** load of concrete dust.
the upside is, no need for a stud finder!
LOL at no need for a stud finder. And, at least when you hang something, there is virtually no fear of it falling...!
mostly. But it also means even lightweight stuff that comes with little pin-nail hooks that would just hang fine on regular plaster board (I think you call that drywall?) won't work, and requires a whole ordeal to hang.
What about if you need to add a plug socket or something? Must be a nightmare.
hold onto your hat.
so our house is actually quite unique, in houses I've seen here built like ours: the 'normal' thing here is to basically bash a hole in the wall where you want the light switch, socket, what have you, install a recessed box, run the wires out of it, onto the surface of the wall up to say the ceiling space, pin the wires (i.e. insulated pairs, because as I said before "what's that third wire for?"), pin it in place and then paint over it.
in our house the original builders actually put vertical conduits inside the blockwork where the sockets and light switches are, so the wiring for *them* is all inside the wall as per "normal" for.. the rest of the world.
adding new ones you can't do that, without destroying half the wall and re-rendering it, so small stuff (e.g. a single switch or the wiring to a single light) ends up in square surface mounted clip-together ducts, and anything with more than just a single set of wires, it ends up in white PVC conduit clipped to the wall.
If we build our own house (we didn't build this one) here, there are a number of things I'd make sure are done differently. For one, laying the walls as double-brick (or double block I guess, hardly anyone uses actual solid bricks here) walls, with a cavity between, would solve this exact problem. I imagine it would also help a lot with keeping the house cooler.
Our old house where we lived for 18 years was of modern construction. Internal walls were two layers of plasterboard sandwiching corrugated cardboard. Crap if you need to attach anything. Here most of the walls are breeze block with plasterboard. The new wall we put in is stud wall with plasterboard.
Finally got onto something other than “fix this broken ****”... although it’s still about solving a problem with the original house (zero storage space. Nada. Zip. Etc)
Built the first segment of a suspended storage area in the “shed”, and then spent a day getting it up there and installed. Will definitely do some things differently for the two other segments.
![3E049BC3-14C6-4385-B961-18975917C8BF.jpeg]( "3E049BC3-14C6-4385-B961-18975917C8BF.jpeg")
![BA401100-E4C7-4D2B-A33B-4F665D0BD27D.jpeg]( "BA401100-E4C7-4D2B-A33B-4F665D0BD27D.jpeg")
![E2E4A2F4-95E8-462D-8F27-17AA13102020.jpeg]( "E2E4A2F4-95E8-462D-8F27-17AA13102020.jpeg")
Built the first segment of a suspended storage area in the “shed”, and then spent a day getting it up there and installed. Will definitely do some things differently for the two other segments.
So, as they do, the gutter on the front of our carport gets leaves in it. Commercial gutter-guard doesn't really seem to exist here, so I'd fashioned the same type of solution using a couple of long narrow offcuts from a roll of plastic mesh.
It worked, except that the gutters are PVC, so they aren't super rigid, and between the brackets holding them up, they tend to expand outwards a little, and thus the mesh wouldn't hold up to the weight of leaves well.
I knew it needed to be re-done, with some supports under the mesh, but as you can imagine 'fix the gutters' is never the top of anyones TODO list.
2 days ago we had some of the heaviest rain I can remember, for a while... and.. well ****:
![IMG_0303.jpeg]( "IMG_0303.jpeg")
![IMG_0302.jpeg]( "IMG_0302.jpeg")
The gutters themselves I think only broke because of hitting the concrete. What actually gave way under the weight of the water, is the fascia board the builders thought it would be a good idea to attach them to.
Thankfully the chain hardware/homeware store here that actually has competent online ordering, now stocks gutters (they didn't a few years ago), and if their delivery tracking says it'll deliver tomorrow.
We happened to have a ~6m (19' 8") length of 100x50 mm steel box section left over from when (those same ****ing builders) built an extension at the side of the house for us. It's complete overkill, but it's what we've got, and there's zero chance it's gonna come down under the weight of rain water, and the 100mm height is quite handy to get a decent gradient from left to right without having to dick around angling the steel support.
I'll post some more photos as it goes up.
This situation, like so many other things that happen here, makes me think about my DIY progression. I'm sure many others started the same: wifey wants a shelf. wifey wants to hang a picture. It'd be nice to put that fan up on the wall. etc. In this place, probably more-so than where I've lived previously, that old adage about "if you want it done properly, do it yourself" is a constant factor in life.
It worked, except that the gutters are PVC, so they aren't super rigid, and between the brackets holding them up, they tend to expand outwards a little, and thus the mesh wouldn't hold up to the weight of leaves well.
I knew it needed to be re-done, with some supports under the mesh, but as you can imagine 'fix the gutters' is never the top of anyones TODO list.
2 days ago we had some of the heaviest rain I can remember, for a while... and.. well ****:
The gutters themselves I think only broke because of hitting the concrete. What actually gave way under the weight of the water, is the fascia board the builders thought it would be a good idea to attach them to.
Thankfully the chain hardware/homeware store here that actually has competent online ordering, now stocks gutters (they didn't a few years ago), and if their delivery tracking says it'll deliver tomorrow.
We happened to have a ~6m (19' 8") length of 100x50 mm steel box section left over from when (those same ****ing builders) built an extension at the side of the house for us. It's complete overkill, but it's what we've got, and there's zero chance it's gonna come down under the weight of rain water, and the 100mm height is quite handy to get a decent gradient from left to right without having to dick around angling the steel support.
I'll post some more photos as it goes up.
This situation, like so many other things that happen here, makes me think about my DIY progression. I'm sure many others started the same: wifey wants a shelf. wifey wants to hang a picture. It'd be nice to put that fan up on the wall. etc. In this place, probably more-so than where I've lived previously, that old adage about "if you want it done properly, do it yourself" is a constant factor in life.
It's one week later. Coincidentally I was woken up at ~6am for about 3 hours of rain probably as hard as what brought down the original gutter.
This afternoon I (mostly) finished putting up the replacement.
I say "mostly", because despite the new and old gutter being exactly the same size/shape, the downspout is way out of alignment.
Due to the old one being attached to the fascia boards, that were simply screwed to the metal frame at the top, and have the structural capabilities of cardboard, the entire gutter at least at the end with the downspout, was twisted out, away from the structure (i.e. so the normally-vertical fascia board was pushed out at the bottom), and thus the ~3" pipe has about 1" of overlap with the corresponding hole in the gutter above it.
Anyway. So as promised:
6m box section cut down to fit the spaces.
![IMG_0311.jpeg]( "IMG_0311.jpeg")
Drilling holes in the existing steel rail that the pieces of box section will be attached to. Smother-in-Law made her usual "just saying" comment to Wifey earlier in the day when I was out there in the sun... turns out it's no more pleasant at 9pm - it's just as humid and hot (really!), and it's either too dark or you're blinded by work lights.
![IMG_0314.jpeg]( "IMG_0314.jpeg")
Cut sections after painting. It was already coated in _something_ (it doesn't look like regular galvanising, but it also doesn't rust - I don't speak enough Thai to know what the coating actually is) but 'shiny' steel was never going to get approval from Wifey. Hard to tell from this pic but the paint is 'black' hammer finish, originally bought to re-do the uprights of that same carport, before they rust away, so it seemed logical to use it for this too.
![IMG_0313.jpeg]( "IMG_0313.jpeg")
Box section pieces all attached, using cut lengths of threaded rod.
![IMG_0319.jpeg]( "IMG_0319.jpeg")
![IMG_0321.jpeg]( "IMG_0321.jpeg")
Initial hangers attached, at 1.5m spacing. Somehow I didn't get a photo after this with all the intermediate hangers attached. Ended up being 15 hangers, over ~6.9m.
![IMG_0331.jpeg]( "IMG_0331.jpeg")
It's finally up! I guess I forgot to take any pics last night when joining the two pieces together. 7m of gutter is heavier than you'd think, even for PVC.
![IMG_0338.jpeg]( "IMG_0338.jpeg")
That gap tho! Will have to cut and adjust the down pipe in the next day or two. Also visible to the left: the same fascia material that the previous one had been attached to.
![IMG_0339.jpeg]( "IMG_0339.jpeg")
This afternoon I (mostly) finished putting up the replacement.
I say "mostly", because despite the new and old gutter being exactly the same size/shape, the downspout is way out of alignment.
Due to the old one being attached to the fascia boards, that were simply screwed to the metal frame at the top, and have the structural capabilities of cardboard, the entire gutter at least at the end with the downspout, was twisted out, away from the structure (i.e. so the normally-vertical fascia board was pushed out at the bottom), and thus the ~3" pipe has about 1" of overlap with the corresponding hole in the gutter above it.
Anyway. So as promised:
6m box section cut down to fit the spaces.
Drilling holes in the existing steel rail that the pieces of box section will be attached to. Smother-in-Law made her usual "just saying" comment to Wifey earlier in the day when I was out there in the sun... turns out it's no more pleasant at 9pm - it's just as humid and hot (really!), and it's either too dark or you're blinded by work lights.
Cut sections after painting. It was already coated in _something_ (it doesn't look like regular galvanising, but it also doesn't rust - I don't speak enough Thai to know what the coating actually is) but 'shiny' steel was never going to get approval from Wifey. Hard to tell from this pic but the paint is 'black' hammer finish, originally bought to re-do the uprights of that same carport, before they rust away, so it seemed logical to use it for this too.
Box section pieces all attached, using cut lengths of threaded rod.
Initial hangers attached, at 1.5m spacing. Somehow I didn't get a photo after this with all the intermediate hangers attached. Ended up being 15 hangers, over ~6.9m.
It's finally up! I guess I forgot to take any pics last night when joining the two pieces together. 7m of gutter is heavier than you'd think, even for PVC.
That gap tho! Will have to cut and adjust the down pipe in the next day or two. Also visible to the left: the same fascia material that the previous one had been attached to.
Or wait for a heavy storm to bring it down first! Half the job done for free!