Home Improvement

“I gotta seal my deck before the wet season gets here.....if it gets here.”

“Lol on that, DH. Dry as a bone around here. I want 6 or 7 rain barrels for Christmas, but my family didn't seem too keen on that idea for a gift. The deck now has that "wet look." I just hope it's not slick as heck, too.”

“I think this weekend I need to mow the grass (mulch the leaves in reality), seal the deck, and plant a few trees. I'm putting in 3 magnolias around the perimeter of the property to shield the neighobrs from the pool area. Hard to skinny dip when you can be seen.
last edited: 12/12/07 12:48:23 PM”

“True dat.”

“1/2 of bathroom done - need to get to 3/4 before my big festivus party next friday - wish me luck (it's mostly finishing/csulking/touch-up work) pics coming soon!”

“Hurry up, BB! Work faster!”

“hmmm where are you guys i haven't mowed my lawn for 2 or 3 months now and we just got like 6 inches of snow yesterday”

“The grass doesn't really need mowing, it's to mulch up all of the leaves. The last time we had 6" of snow here was 1993.”

“It does seem right to mow your lawn in the middle of December.”

“That right there tells me you're no southerner.

;)

Speaking of which, our lawn is looking shaggy and in need of a trim too.”

“I think I detect a hint.”

“Indeed you do my Dear.”

“My battery is dead on the mower so last weekend I bought a charger. I took the battery off and hooked it up. When I hit hte button to tell the charger what amperage I want it crashes. Weird. I bet the battery is done and I get to buy a battery too. Bummer”

“I think you are right about the done battery.”

“You gotta charge lead acid batteries at least once a month, and some need it twice a month. They have fairly large self-discharge rates, and the plates will be damaged if the battery becomes too discharged.

Best way to fight it is to put all unused batteries on 1-amp trickle chargers, but that leads to another maintenance item that's just as much of a pain - watering. If the plates become exposed to air for even a few hours they will be permanently damaged. If you use a trickle charger you have to check the water levels every few weeks as it gets boiled off from the charging process.

So either charge it up once or twice a month, or trickle charge and check the water levels once or twice a month. Either way, a pain over the winter.”

“It's about 3 years old. At the end of the summer I left the key on for a week and drained it. It was recharged and then I did it again just before we moved. The new house didn't get sod until mid Oct so I haven't even thought about the battery. Guess it's time for a new battery. Oh well.”

“Just ordered new windows. They'll be installed in January.

We're in the middle of a kitchen project. Sanded and painted the cabinets, repaired and painted walls, purchased new cabinet hardware to be installed this weekend. New countertop has been ordered. The new sink and new light are purchased and will get taken care of last. Should all be done before the folks get here for the Christmas holiday.”

“Coolness, Tarabull. Don't you love having the end of a project in sight?”

“Oh yes. I can't wait til I can put everything back in the kitchen and can finally negotiate around the rest of the house.”

“NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Al Gore, who was criticized for high electric bills at his Tennessee mansion, has completed a host of improvements to make the home more energy efficient, and a building-industry group has praised the house as one of the nation's most environmentally friendly.

The former vice president has installed solar panels, a rainwater-collection system and geothermal heating. He also replaced all incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or light-emitting diode bulbs.

"Short of tearing it down and staring anew, I don't know how it could have been rated any higher," said Kim Shinn of the U.S. Green Building Council, which gave the house its second-highest rating for sustainable design.”

“That snopes article comparing his house to Bush's probably prompted him to get off his ass.

Tara - congrats on the remodel, especially new windows. Replacement windows are big money.”

“Here's the house comparison between 43 and Gore

http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp”

“The window place was running a special: triple pane r9 for the price of the double pane r5. And, an addt'l 10% discount if we allowed for a Jan/Feb installation (they want to be able to keep their guys working throughout the winter). We are replacing about 2/3 of our windows so we weren't bearing the burden of that huge expense all at once. The rest will get done sometime next year.”

“r9 is huge for a window. They use U values instead of R for windows but it's just the inverse. A U of about 0.3 is considered really good and far exceeds energy star requirements, even where you are. 1/0.3 = an R of 3.333 so U of 1/9 = .111111111 is astronomical. It must have argon in both cavities. Awesome score.”

“The walls will now be the thermal weak spots.
You're gonna have to replace them now.
;)”

“lol @ hpm! would if we could. there's so many old layers of paint and old drips and knicks and cracks on the plaster that a tear-down would be the best way to go.

dh - the window website talked in terms of Rs not Us. Prolly so someone like me could better understand! And, it's not Argon...

It is triple pane assembly combining two panes of multilayered vacuum-deposition soft-coat Low-E insulating glass with an interior glass substrate which provides two insulating chambers of Krypton gas. The result is an insulated glass unit that is nearly 10 times more energy efficient than single glass. ”

“Well, actually you could replace the walls if you really wanted to. Treebaits folks had quite a few exterior walls replaced in their old house. Man that place was built like crap.”

“Don't tell Superman. ;)”

“lol, tree. i asked the window rep if having these windows not only kept out the heat from the summer sun, but also prevented superman from flying in.

hpm, by "would if we could" i was thinking more in terms of cost and time rather than ability.”

“You mean you guys aren't independently wealthy international persons of mystery and leisure like everyone else here?

I'm shocked and disheartened.”

“well, if by independently wealthy international persons of myster and leisure you mean overworked and underpaid persons of little mystery and practically no leisure... then... why, yes, we are!”

“ROCK ON!”

“Most folks are happy to reach into the pocket of a little-used jacket and find a long-forgotten $10 bill.

Multiply that feeling by 18,200 and you will understand how Lakewood home-improvement contractor Bob Kitts felt when he pulled a giant cache of Depression-era cash from the walls of an 83-year-old Cleveland home he was renovating.

As he was ripping plaster from bathroom-wall studs, Kitts found bundles of bills totaling $182,000 wrapped in pre-World War II Plain Dealer news pages and tucked into boxes. The money is in such good condition, and some of the bills are so rare and collectible, that one currency appraiser valued the treasure at up to $500,000, Kitts said.

But there's a hitch:

The walls from which Kitts pulled the money aren't his walls. The house isn't his house. Nobody knows for certain whose money it is.

Yet Kitts claims it as his own. He and his lawyer have dusted off an obscure, centuries-old legal doctrine called "treasure trove" - a common-law finders-keepers provision - that they believe gives him top claim to the wealth.

Kitts' lawyer has drafted a lawsuit that he hopes will force Amanda Reece to turn over the money she has kept, or at least share it.

Then again, he may not be a cent richer. Several court rulings have established precedent that undermines the applicability of the treasure-trove doctrine under these circumstances, said Reece's lawyer, John Chambers.

Reece would have accommodated Kitts, but the handyman got greedy, Chambers said. Now Reece has no intention of backing down in the face of what she considers a shakedown.

"In fact, I look forward to asserting our position," Chambers said in an interview last week.

It may be up to a judge to decide, said Heidi Robertson, a professor who teaches property law at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. And that judge may have a challenge.

"It's certainly not a slam-dunk," Robertson said.

Kitts and Reece, classmates at Bay High School back in the 1980s, celebrated together one morning in May 2006. He was in his second day of gutting her bathroom when he found a box below the medicine cabinet. Inside it was $25,200 in pristine bills.

"I almost passed out," Kitts recalled. "It was the ultimate contractor fantasy. I've ripped out walls in my house, and all I ever found was steak bones."

He called Reece. She rushed home. Flushed with excitement, they found another steel box in the wall, tied to the end of a wire nailed to a stud. In it was more than $100,000, Kitts said.

"It was insane," he remembered. "She was in shock - she was a wreck."

They found two more boxes, filled with a mix of money and religious memorabilia.

Kitts took some of the currency for an appraisal and learned that many of the $10 bills were rare 1929-series Cleveland Federal Reserve bank notes, worth about $85 each. There also were $500 bills and one $1,000 bill.

They traced the home's Depression-era ownership to a businessman named Peter Dunne, Kitts said. The money bundles had "P. Dunne" written on them, but no sign of its origin. Dunne apparently died unmarried and childless, leaving behind a mystery - a fortune thatwould be worth an inflation-adjusted $2.7 million in today's money.

But the joy, friendship and contractual bonds of the former classmates dissolved like melting snow amid the heat of all that money. Now Kitts and Reece speak to each other only through their lawyers.

Kitts accuses Reece of greedily reneging on a promise to give him a 10 percent finder's fee. Reece's lawyer says Kitts rejected that and returned with a demand - 40 percent or he would file a lawsuit.

"He's trying to extort funds from me by putting it in the public domain," said Reece.

Now she worries that thieves will take crowbars to her brick home's plaster in search of more loot. Kitts already did that to other parts of Reece's home without her permission and found nothing, Chambers said.

Ohio and most other states have no specific statute governing what happens when someone finds a once-hidden treasure, so common-law principles dating to pre-Revolutionary Great Britain come into play, said Cleveland-Marshall's Robertson.

That common law has a fairly definitive "finders-keepers" bent to it.

That's true even when the finding is done on someone else's property, as long as the finder had permission to be there, courts have established.

That doesn't mean Kitts is clearly the winner. Unless the two sides settle, a judge or jury will need to decide whether he found money that was, in a legal sense, "lost" or "mislaid," Robertson and other lawyers say.

Kitts asserts he found lost money, and court rulings in Ohio establish that treasure trove's "finders keepers" law does indeed apply to something that was lost, if there's no reason to believe any owner will reappear to claim it.

But if it was absentmindedly mislaid on private property rather than lost, the owner of the property on which the discovery was made becomes the safekeeper of the lost goods, according to case law and legal texts.

In either case, the holder must make a good-faith effort to find the original owner or heirs before cashing in.

Kitts said it would be unfair for him to take everything.

"I don't want to do that - I don't agree with the law," he said. "But you've got to start somewhere.

"For such a happy, exciting adventure," he added, "I can't believe it just went to [ruin] like this."

The Plains Dealer”

“I'm really starting to hate the living room paint project. We're up to 4 or 5 coats (I lost count) of what is supposed to be deep base dark red, but if you read the pigment label is a very translucent magenta that goes over tinted primer. I still need to build up the borders and edgings, which apparently either have fewer or thinner coats on them, with a brush. Argh.”

“After painting our first house and our current house, I hate it passionately. I feel your pain.”

“I usually enjoy painting rooms, but this is silly. We're looking at cork wallcoverings for another room, too. Lots of options out there, but dang it can get pricey quick.”

“Go for the rubber coating.”

“we just bought our first home - a Victorian Gem built somewhere between 1860 and 1880-ish... with an addition put on in 1891 (that date is confirmed because of a brick that has the original owner's name in it).

Here are the before photos... http://www.outdooradventurecanada.com/house

I'll add after pictures in tonight when I can get them off hubby's computer.

We took posession in late November and repainted the entire place - it took 7 days @ 18 hours a day... what an adventure that was. Some walls are plaster and others are drywall. We have to repaint and restore all the outside trim in the spring too.”

“We just moved into our house we built. It's very peaceful out in the woods.......except when we're shooting skeet off the back deck, that is....”

“very nice, wc”

“I love houses with character. Nice place, WC.”

“gorgeous house wc”

“nice wc! I like the history attached to it as well!”

“thanks! wait until you see the after pictures”

“WC - how is the foundation in the house? And, what part of Canada is the home located, and, do you know of any single, smart, good looking Candaian girls that I could court and marry to gain duel citizenship and get the hell out of Bushville?”

“the foundation is good - construction of the house is double brick - we have no must or mildew but there is a sump pump that runs periodically because the wine cellar has a dirt floor and there is some slight dampness (which the home inspector says can be easily taken care of with rerouting the downspout - which for some reason runs underground into the back yard).

apparently this slight dampness is really great for the hardwood floors - which are all original on the main floor

there is a beam that has been overspanned and a support post has been put in place - I guess the overspanning was typical in these older houses... the floor isn't perfectly level - no big deal (doesn't bother me).

we need to have the chimney repointed too. The porch roof needs replaced but the rest of the roof is less than 3 years old... just minor stuff to do really”

“I've added some after photos to...

http://www.outdooradventurecanada.com/house

we painted over the green on the main floor and got rid of the gawdy purple on the second storey”

“I'm painting right now, with tinted primer. Man, this stuff stinks!”

“i love painting - really i do - if i were close enough I'd come and help”