DIY Thread

ctenidae · Aug 13, 2007

Did some shopping this weekend to take advantage of the taxlessness.
990 sq ft of engineered wood floor "toffee Maple" for $1.99/sq ft, delivered
153 sq ft of travertine tile for $1.11/ sq ft (Home Depot mispriced it, we pounced)
90 sq ft of Italian ceramic wall tile for $1.50/sq ft (should be $5)

Don't know where any of the tile will go yet (probably bathroom, but who knows...), but it's hard to go wrong with travertine, and the ceramics give us a look we wanted but couldn't fit in the budget. Overall, we got about $5K worth of stuff for about $2,200. And paid no sales tax.

ckofer · Aug 14, 2007

tree_skier said:
you are not supposed to put radiant under solid wood flooring. You can put it under laminate put stay away from under solid wood.

You have to be thoughtful in this department. If you run the floor temps too high, bad things will happen to the wood. If you run the temps too low, you too will we cold. The laminates make sense here and look better each year.

My home has about half in-floor radiant and half traditional baseboard. Warm floors in the winter can be great (they even help to dry the mudroom area). I have had very good success with using programmable thermostats to control the heat. I never let the temp vary much but can have the heat running about an hour before the floors are used (early AM, after school for the kids).

ctenidae · Sep 10, 2007

Major recent projects:
Removed 11 feet of drywall/studs to expose brick, installed 4 recessed lights to shine on wall

Removed/replaced about 25 linear feet of drywall and insulation behind it due to moisture problem

Laid 150 sq ft of engineered wood floor with 3/4 underlayment and vapor barrier. I'm going to be picking glue off my skin for a month.

Enclosed a 2x11 bumpout to make a closet. Still have to hang the rods and doors.

Put down self-leveling cement in preparation for a 100 sq ft travertine tile floor. That stuff (the cement) is pretty cool.

Lots of painting.

This is since Memorial Day weekend. I'm tired.

2knees · Sep 10, 2007

i forgot about this thread. tore up my front steps a couple of weeks ago to replace them. much to my surprise, my porch is built over an old existing concrete porch. Very interesting carpentry work by the previous owner of the house. needless to say, when i was done, i dubbed my new porch Frankenporch. It has more shit hanging off of it to stabilize it then you could imagine.

GrilledSteezeSandwich · Sep 10, 2007

Wow you guys are amazing..I'm the least handy person I know..My greatest MacGuyver moment was fixing my mini-blinds with a Nastar sticker and I installed my air conditioning unit myself...but ideally I'd have a cleaning service clean my place and if I ever have a house..I'll hire somebody to cut the grass..

skijay · Sep 10, 2007

I had my driveway replaced and to save costs I did the fill behind the retaining curb that was installed. The complete cost of my driveway, sidewalk, and the tree removal was just about 1/2 the cost of the Scion that parks in it.

tree_skier · Sep 12, 2007

So far my summer projects have been

1. Travertine down in my kitchen, first floor bathroom and hallway.

2. New main entry way (porch) Which my neighbor the professional did, $1200 materials and 3800 labor.

3. Replaced the walkway and added a step out of bluestone and granite

ctenidae · Sep 12, 2007

tree_skier said:
So far my summer projects have been

1. Travertine down in my kitchen, first floor bathroom and hallway.

How'd the travertine work out? Did you seal it, adn if so, before or after putting it in?

tree_skier · Sep 12, 2007

worked out great. I sealed it after it was grouted. The travertine was walnut from home depot grout bone used 1/8' spacers. the one mistake was that i followed the directions and used fiberglass tape on the underlayment joints. This caused a couple of tiles to be high in places. My local pro told my they never do that as thats what happens. However it looks great it just bothers my wife a little.

2 coats of sealer out of the $69 container (1/2 gal maybe?)with some left over used new cheap mop to put it on, just poured on floor and spread.

ctenidae · Sep 12, 2007

We've got the same tile, 18 inch squares. Since we're on a concrete slab I put down a layer of self leveling cement, and we should be good to go. I also bought the $69 sealer.

tree_skier · Sep 12, 2007

Lay them all out before laying them as the vary in color significantly.

Kerovick · Sep 12, 2007

I replaced my fluids in my front and rear differentials last weekend. Trust me, this is a huge deal for me!!

bill2ski · Sep 12, 2007

A friends house has been the guinea pig for a long term project involving geothermal. We began 7 years ago. Six zones of radiant heat tubing were installed in the foundation floor as well as the slab for the attached garage. Each zone was connected to a corresponding 100 gal. hot water tank and filled with glycol. A propane on demand hot water heater supplied domestic hot water and was used to supply the air handler for heating with air while we worked the bugs out of the system. Thirteen 18 in. wells were drilled and into each titanium tubing was installed and backfilled with sand slurry to prevent abrasion.After creating a manifold to direct and control the flow the lines were ready to be connected to the compressors. The idea is to take liquid refrigerant compress it to a vapor, pump it down the wells and extract the difference by capturing the rate of change and heating the glycol in the tanks. Long story longer we were forced to abandon the glycol, tanks and the original compressor in favor of a newer compressor type that didn't require as much capacity for storage.In conclusion the system has just completed it's first full cooling season and is committing about 450000 BTU for use as air conditioning with domestic hot water as a byproduct. The guy has a hot water hose to wash his car with in the summer and it runs on about 65-90 $ a month in electricity to heat/cool his 3000 sq ft Bungalow, Oh you can walk on the garage floor in the dead of Feb. in your stocking feet and be toasty.

bvibert · Sep 12, 2007

bill2ski said:
A friends house has been the guinea pig for a long term project involving geothermal. We began 7 years ago. Six zones of radiant heat tubing were installed in the foundation floor as well as the slab for the attached garage. Each zone was connected to a corresponding 100 gal. hot water tank and filled with glycol. A propane on demand hot water heater supplied domestic hot water and was used to supply the air handler for heating with air while we worked the bugs out of the system. Thirteen 18 in. wells were drilled and into each titanium tubing was installed and backfilled with sand slurry to prevent abrasion.After creating a manifold to direct and control the flow the lines were ready to be connected to the compressors. The idea is to take liquid refrigerant compress it to a vapor, pump it down the wells and extract the difference by capturing the rate of change and heating the glycol in the tanks. Long story longer we were forced to abandon the glycol, tanks and the original compressor in favor of a newer compressor type that didn't require as much capacity for storage.In conclusion the system has just completed it's first full cooling season and is committing about 450000 BTU for use as air conditioning with domestic hot water as a byproduct. The guy has a hot water hose to wash his car with in the summer and it runs on about 65-90 $ a month in electricity to heat/cool his 3000 sq ft Bungalow, Oh you can walk on the garage floor in the dead of Feb. in your stocking feet and be toasty.

Sounds like one hell of a DIY project! You don't hear of too many people using geothermal to heat their homes. I've always thought it was a cool idea...

bill2ski · Sep 12, 2007

The next project is a wind turbine. 3 years from now and he's "off the grid" and petroleum free at home, however, this has been more about advancing the technology than anything. An oil burning FHW-FHA (traditional system) is still a lot cheaper to install than a complete geo setup. Unless you take into account the possibility that light sweet crude could be worth a fortune per gallon someday.
As with anything time will be the judge.
If you have a outdoor in ground pool it's worth looking into, considering the annual cost of heating one, a geo system starts looking pretty attractive especially to hotels,hospitals,university's etc...

ctenidae · Sep 17, 2007

Finished the wood floor in the bedroom, hung the new closet doors, and laid 150 sq feet of travertine. Grouting sometime this week. One project got bumped up the "To Do" list though, which is a good thing- installing new heaters in the bedroom. COME ON FALL!

Greg · Nov 7, 2007

Greg said:
I am going to be installing some retaining walls, steps and a walk in front of the house this spring. My plan is to use cinderblocks to build out the foundation and then use this product to face it:

http://www.connecticutstone.com/thinstone.asp

It's a stone veneer that's only 1.5" thick so it seems pretty easy to work with. Apply morter to the retaining wall and "stick" it on. I've seen some samples and to the untrained eye, it looks like professional stone masonry. I was considering then adding a coping of bluestone along the top of the walls and as steps, but I think I just might do that on the steps. Flat areas of the walkway will be blue stone.

Greg said:
This project is still in process. The retaining walls are built and veneered. The walkway steps are built (concrete block) and are awaiting the veneer. I applied 160 lbs of mortar to the sides and risers of my cast concrete front steps this weekend in order to eliminate the overhand on the treads. I will start veneering the top steps this week. This ThinStone is a pretty time consuming process. With natural stone, it's like having a jigsaw puzzle with no guarantees the piece will fit. This weekend, I also installed a nice light post along the new steps. I wired it to a mechanical timer box which will turn it on/off each night.

Well after almost 6 months of on and off work and several tons of material, this sucker is officially done:

By far, the largest, most back-breaking and most time-consuming DIY project I've ever done. This is what I started with:

:blink: Bring on the ski season!!!

BeanoNYC · Nov 7, 2007

Holy chit! Great job Greg. I'm impressed. You did this all by yourself? No day laborers?

Terry · Nov 7, 2007

That looks awesome Greg. Did you cut the stones to fit in the retaining walls or were they just shapes that you fit together? either way it looks nice!!

Greg · Nov 7, 2007

BeanoNYC said:
Holy chit! Great job Greg. I'm impressed. You did this all by yourself? No day laborers?

I had two day laborers: me and my father-in-law. I'm very lucky to have him to help me out. For a 60 year old guy, he has the energy of a 20 year old, and loves this kind of stuff. You should see some of the stuff he's done at his house. :-o He loved taking this one on as he's never done anything like it; nor have I.

BTW, this was all done by hand. No heavy equipment at all. All hand digging. I'm insane, I know... :roll:

Terry said:
That looks awesome Greg. Did you cut the stones to fit in the retaining walls or were they just shapes that you fit together? either way it looks nice!!

Thanks! It's actually a thin veneer over cinderblock. Here's some progress photos:

The stone veneer process took much longer than I expected. It's natural stone so there are no guarantees how things will fit. I discovered late in the process that you can use a cardboard template to score the backs of the stone with a diamond blade on a circular saw to be able to break the veneer into a shape you can use. It was amazing how little waste we ended up with and how accurate the measurements were.

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