Tom Raymond

There is a special dimmer for LEDs. There is an adjustment under the cover, dim the lights, then tune until the flicker stops. $30 at the Depot.

I have a 28' extension. I only carry it when I need it. My MT15 and MT22 get me just about everywhere I need to get.

Five gallons of gas and a box of matches.

Drum trap.

Don't buy a Coast light. Actually I like mine, when it works, but it is very unreliable. Been warrantied twice and the tail piece switch is glitchy again.

C'mon guys, the green fence makes it perfectly safe...

I say when replacements are no longer readily available. I was working on a 1995 Westinghouse panel two weeks ago and needed a breaker, nobody had them. Wholesale to Big Box Mart, nobody. Obsolete before the legal age.

There is plenty of room for pigtails to correct the double taps. The equipment is still 56. How old is too old for electrical equipment?

There is a ski resort near me with a dozen townhouses built between 68 and 71 laid out just like that. More than half of the water heaters are still under the original tops and cabinets.

Most likely not. Even if it could, your looking at $40 in parts and a $125 service call. A high quality new opener is less than $300 installed, a really nice one with battery back up is less than $500.

From that period they could also be counterfeit.

Your contractor is right about the vapor barrier in the crawl. Remove any debris, put 6 mil poly on the floor, lap seams a minimum of 6", extend the poly 6" up the walls and and columns. Now someone has to crawl over that fragile substrate in a tyvek suit dragging a 3" hose for the spray rig and a 1/2" line for his respirator. The variable you are not considering is the foam rig; a heated rig using foam components in 55 gallon drums will provide faster application, more consistent yields and a lower cost compared to the smaller 5 gallon component room temperature rigs. If your crawl is more than two feet high it will consume more than one set of room temp components adding down time to the job and increasing the cost. $6500 sounds about right for room temp foam. If you need the attic space for storage it makes sense to foam it, otherwise cellulose is a great value. At depths of about 16" it has comparable airsealing properties to open cell foam and it can be applied over whatever is already up there, and you get to retain whatever that original R-value was. Cells in the attic will be about half the cost of foam. As for your convection, conduction, radiation question, that's building science not building code. The code is prescriptive. It says you need R-19, you need R-19 regardless of what insulation you use to get it. 2" of closed cell foam is approximately R-7 and easily outperforms 5" of fiberglass at R-19. In an existing structure you get to do what you want, you only need to follow the prescriptive code if it is new, or substantially new, construction. Solar is an entirely different topic.

Around here the washer discharge gets hooked onto the utility basin. No standpipe if there is a sink.

They are trying to avoid this arrangement. Click to Enlarge 100.37 KB

I was a rep for a log home company in the 90s. We had an owner/builder wreck his house twice. First he hit the middle of the basement stem wall while back filling, after the log walls were up. Then after several weeks and several thousand dollars to put it back together he loaded all the roof shingles at the ridge. By morning the whole roof frame had collapsed taking out his freshly straightened log wall in the process.

When an "uh" and an "um" love each other very much...

The pan leaks and the framing is mush.

I see lots of PEX as replacement plumbing. Every instance is 1/2" tubing with fittings following the path of the original galvanized. The only manifold distribution I've seen was made of enough galvanized fittings to open a hardware and plumbed with vinyl beverage tubing.

If it's that clean after 40 years they must have gotten more right than wrong.

2800, plus a mostly finished basement, a walk up attic with over 9' to the collar ties, and a 24 x 40 pole barn with two gas space heaters and an FPE panel. Just shy of 3 hours. It was a nice place.

Yesterday's gig was full of firsts. The first 80s house that wasn't a complete POS. The most expensive place I've ever inspected. The first time I didn't have a ladder tall enough to view the chimney crown, my 28 was 12' too short. I got close enough to find a pretty good crack anyway. The first time the seller guided me through the house. He stuck around for the whole inspection, and was actually helpful the whole time. And the first time I was truly tested during an inspection; the seller is a retired custom home builder and my client is an HVAC technician at SUNY Buffalo. Except for the crazy weather it was a good day.

No. It's more than 16" from the door, more than 18" from the floor, and at the top of the stairs not the bottom.

I'll have whatever Morgan is having. There used to be a company called rustain that was pushing this process all over the East coast and Great Lakes. I tried to Google them to give you a link to the process...they have zero web presence, can't find them at all.

Do you know how to get a roofer to warranty that valley? Unique up on him.

I like radiant barriers. No need for a foil hat when one has a whole house solution. The usage devices are silly, if you have electric service you have a meter. Get off your arse and go read it.