The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[Sully]

Guess it depends on how well if a job they did on first coat, what color you pick, what sheen and what you're wanting out of your garage. Definitely don't go anything above flat paint cause it'll definitely look like ass and be a huge pain to sand if you change your mind later. Maybe try and do a light and to smooth everything out and paint over that.

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[JPolen01]

Don't waste your money on recessed lights in the garage. You're going to pay $60-80 just for the recessed cans. No one cares about recessed lights in a garage - just that there is enough light to do what needs to be done.

Gallamore - is tape and mudding not already done? Looks like it from your photos. All you need is a sanding block on a pole and it should be fairly quick work to sand it. Doesn't have to be perfect work since it's a garage, but it will make the paint look nicer.

[.RJ]

^ What he said. It wont take more than a beer or two to finish up, although no matter what you do I'm sure its going to look better than my walls. They were FUCKED after 35 years of never being painted and all kinds of stupid shelves and other shit hung from it, walls/water stains everywhere. I paid the guys that were doing the paint work in the house for the remodeling to come do the garage for cash/side work to clean up/prep the drywalls for paint. And it still took me a week, 2 gallons of primer and 2 gallons of paint to get it done and it still doesnt look great - but most of the walls are covered up by shelves/bikes/etc.

I also was not happy with the paint I used, I used the cheap paint and I regret it. The coverage sucked, the durability is already sucking and I'll have to repaint sooner than later but right now I got bikes to ride.

[davej]

I'm with Matt, give what you have a quick once over with a block, grab a flat paint and go to town. It'll look 100x better and you're not going for dining room nice.

I finally mounted up the wheel racks. The span in between the studs was a bit too far, think these racks were a 48" max, so I grabbed a grounding poll from the hardware store that fit inside the rack poles and cut it down to 3' sections to reinforce. I can't believe it took me this many years to get, they are super handy.

[Sijray21]

it's a garage, so it's up to you for the amount of work you want to put in. painting it a nice bright flat white will definitely help reflect any light and brighten up the place for work. my garage was dark and tough to work in initially and was just open studs. i then added insulation, drywall, added outlets, added overhead florescent bar-style lights, and painted it white and it's much better. Now i just need to thin out and better organize the place. i have too much stuff and i need to mount more things to walls.

i'm jealous of the high garage ceilings though...

[Apoc]

I dont plan on putting a car in there but its possible as long as its miata-sized in a pinch.  

An air cooled 911 would fit in there.

[JustinG]

The dry wall has tape and one layer of mud. I guess it just needs to be sanded vs doing multiple layers like an interior room.

I think ill just go for it. Hopefully after #2 has calmed down ill be able to knock it out during my paternity leave.

[JPolen01]

The prep work the builder did should be enough with some sanding to lay down a decent coat of paint. Expensive paint pays for itself when painting.

I replaced a pull chain light fixture above our washer/dryer yesterday. I guess the chain got messed up on the original unit so it stopped turning on. I turned off the circuit to the basement lights (left them on so I could see them go off since the breakers were not labeled) and went to work. Well, I guess that individual light was on a different circuit because I got zapped. Not too bad, felt a little spicy though. I think I'm ready to be an electrician now.

Good news is, the light now works again.

[Sully]

I wasn't going to do legit recessed cans. Either the shallow mount LEDs with the attached or semi attached junction and control box or I think they even have shallow LEDs with built in power box but I didn't get far enough in to see if they had a built in place for wire connections. Either way, we're talking $20 to $40 a light and way less work than a full old school recessed can... Which why the hell are they still installing those just to pop led bulbs in. Like why do they even make them anymore. Just go to the led recessed ones already.

But I'll probably just do the led tubes.

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[.RJ]

I have those new style LED cans in my house, still less light than the T8 LED fixtures, and you dont have to open up drywall to install them.

[D_Eclipse9916]

Been doing a ton of landscaping and projects around the house; but a notable one was installing the Rachio 3 today.

Our irrigation system was on a "dumb" controller while it supposedly had a rain sensor.  I would wake up some days and find it watering my lawn....while downpouring.  Since 1st, it is wasteful; and 2nd costly, I tried to stay on top of turning it off manually.  It was a pain.  My friend mentioned the Rachio and got me 40% off the new Rachio 3.  Think of it like a nest for your irrigation system.  It uses local weather forecasts to create a schedule of regular watering that will "hopefully" reduce my water bill and pay itself off within 3-4 months.  It also created a new schedule that is less frequent but deeper watering, and much earlier in the morning that I had it going.    Install was very simple, about 45 minutes to pull out all the old stuff, mount the new box, w ire it up and set it up on the phone.

https://www.rachio.com/rachio-3/

[.RJ]

I wrapped up the garage a few weeks back - pretty happy with how everything has turned out so far.  I think long term I'd like to build a shelf that sits above the garage door tracks for long shallow things, or maybe if I ever need a roof box.  

Before





And After







There's already been a lot of this happening in here, along with general bicycle fuckery, so its nice to have a space to work.  The print propped up against the wall, my wife found at a yard sale.  I dig it.

[JustinG]

What flooring did you go with

[.RJ]

https://www.bigfloors.com/shop/garagedeck-2/

they installed easy, look great, and they're holding up well so far.  good product.

[D_Eclipse9916]

Took the first bite out of our plan for the backyard. Built a firepit (my wife insisted she wanted one before baby was born). We used our wood fire in our old house extensively (2-3 times a week in winter, and a couple times at night during summer), so my wife was eager for this as our new house is a gas fireplace. Next up is designing our paver patio to sorround.

I probably went vast overkill on this and used clay fire-bricks to line the inside. Seems most builders and contractors do not; but reading forums of course led me down to the path that my "building stones" would get hot and explode haha. Happy with the way it turned out; although one or two bricks on top slid just a tad and it drives me nuts considering I really took the time to level everything correctly.

Its about a day job, but I took a couple weeks of setting up the bricks, resizing and deciding on how high and wide to go multiple times. Really glad we did as original intention was 3 bricks wide and 4 high, over 3 iterations we ended up 4 wide and 3 high. It was not an involved project.
Dig a couple inches down
Paver Base and tamp
Weed barrier
Thin Paver Base and Tamp
Thin sand and Tamp
Bricks
Landscaping adhesive between layers
Line fire bricks inside
2 inch thick sand layer and tamp inside
Lava Rock

[Kaan]

you are ahead of me... we stringed out the walkway in the front, from the front to the back, and then the paver stuff around the back. looks good! my back hurts just looking at it though.

[ScottyB]

looks awesome DJ. consider me jealous.

good call on the fire bricks. if not for exploding then the mortar/brick will simply corrode over time from all the hot/cold cycles and you'd be rebuilding it again anyway.

[JustinG]

I figured being in Nascar country a 55 gallon drum would be bougie enough.

[Steve85]

I guess it was a good weekend for some projects.

I finally went over to Lowe's and grabbed the following to build some steps.
3x 5-Step stringers
10 1x8 deck boards
3 "hidden" stringer mounts
Appropriate screws for treated lumber

Woke up my helper at 11AM and we got busy building steps off the sliding glass door to the back yard. 


Our neighbors that have done this mostly made the steps just the width of part of the door that opens but I thought it would look better and provide some extra seating by making the steps the full width of the door.

Process was pretty simple. We dry fit the stringers with a deck board and measured for how much we had to trim off the bottom of the stringers, which essentially made the bottom step half the height of the others.



With a dry fit of the stringer, we made marks on the header board below the door for the stringer brackets. This is where I had a brainfart though and instead of measuring for the middle, I put the the middle bracket at what looked like the middle of the door. It's not and so the middle stringer is offset but oh well, won't see it.

We turned to the step boards. I would have preferred to use the pre-fabbed step boards but they were only 48" wide and we needed 68". We measured out the boards and I taught the helper to use a chop saw. Not pictured as I was more concerned with making sure all ten fingers survived the lesson. We took the time to make sure as few imperfections in the wood were exposed (writing, small cracks, etc) and I'm glad we did.

I drew some faint lines and set the boy loose with the screw gun and T25 bit.



I used the torque setting to try and get the screws to similar depth but the wood hardness was really inconsistent. Some didn't go far enough in.



I had to go back with T25 bit in my impact to drive them in a bit deeper. It was weird, the screw gun could spin the screw all the through if I didn't stop, but couldn't start the screw once in.

Finished product, except for the step faces. Nothing fancy but love having easier access to the back yard to eat outside and it was a pretty straight forward father-son project.



Ideally, that little cove will be a small deck then have stairs down to a patio where the chairs are.

[JPolen01]

I agree that the steps should be the full width of the door. Looks good!