The Joys of a DIYer

Waste and it’s generation is where my attention is focused presently. Then what happens to this waste. We are a throw away culture. Things are not produced to last very long. The length of time a manufacturer will stand behind a product is getting shorter, and the support for repairing products is getting more and more expensive. Companies are creating proprietary products that essentially state if you want this you will have to buy it from us, and if you want it repaired you will have to buy the repairs from us. This isn’t new, it has been taking place for a hundred years. As example I own a home that was built in 1886. Recently we decided to replace the wall to wall carpeting in three rooms of the house. What happens to the old carpet each time this is done? It ends up in a landfill as waste. We had gotten quotes to have the work done, and the estimate was ridiculously high and as part of the cost we were paying for someone else’s lifestyle that was certainly higher then our own. And each of these quotes involved just throwing the old materials away, and adding ever increasingly expensive new ones in their place. Replace your windows, they bring in a dumpster and throw the old windows in it. Replace your roof, and they bring in a dumpster and the the old shingles in it. Update a kitchen and they bring in a dumpster and throw the old counters and sinks and cabinets in it.

I decided to do some of the work myself. I am a rather handy guy to have around. So I pulled up the carpeting cutting it into 3 foot strips to be laid in the garden next year as mulch. The carpet pad had deteriorated badly and there was nothing I came of with to repurposed it, and no one was recycling it. And now it is resting three feet down in the landfill. I could find no other option. What we found below the carpet was a maple hardwood floor in rather bad shape, but in not too bad a shape where I thought I could repair it. We had replaced the carpet once before but had hired someone else to do the work so we were unaware of what was below it. We guessed from some of the evidence present, the wall to wall carpet was first installed in the 1950’s to cover up old problems, that was about the time frame wall to wall carpeting had become inexpensive enough to be afforded by the average home owner. The house originally had an oil furnace in it and there were wood burning stoves to supplement the heating on the second floor. The way homes were constructed back then didn’t allow for much duct work in the walls.

When the house was converted to natural gas all of the venting was replaced but it didn’t match the holes in the flooring so they filled in the gaps with scrap wood and carpeted it over. There was a channel found where some one had chiseled a groove to accommodate an old 75 ohm antenna wire for tv reception into the front room of the house. The floor was very squeaky and to repair that the flooring had to be taken up. I had planned to use some of the flooring from one room to replace the damage in another and then find some scraps on the reclaimed market to repair the floor in the second room and that is where I got stuck.

I had to do considerable modification to get the tongue and groove flooring in one room to match the tongue and grooves in the other room. During the repair of the front room I had to pull up a few boards and found newspaper had been placed between the sub-floor and the hardwood to act as a moisture barrier to stabilize moisture transfer between the basement below and the hardwood above. On one of the scraps of newspaper we found a date, Feb. 29, 1929. and on the back of one of the boards pulled up was a stamp from the mill that manufactured the flooring. Holt Lumber, Oconto Wi.

After a little research that company went out of business in the 1950. We also found a stamp on the wood from the other room. CJK Meyer’s Wisconsin Land & Lumber Co. that was originally located in a town just 40 miles away. I found documentation on line that when the native forests in this area had been cleared the owner of that company bought some land in Upper Michigan and in 1898 the mill was moved there and the facility near us was shut down. That company had developed milling machinery that had a tapered tongue and groove. That company shut down in 1913. Holt lumber used different milling machinery. It’s boards were slightly thinner and rather then tapered tongue and grooves used squared milling tongue and groove.

After talking with several experts in the floor restoration field, they felt it was extremely unlikely I would find any reclaimed wood from the Wisconsin Land & Lumber mill, that would mate with the floor from that period in time. So here I sit, the front room is repaired and waiting for refinishing. The second room has the squeaky floor repaired but the hardwood floor remains ripped up. Plans A, B, C, have been exhausted. I’m trying to come up with a plan D.

As a consequence of the reclaimed flooring industry when a home is dismantled the floor is sold off as a lot. It usually comes from old farm houses, old schools and gymnasiums that are being taken down, and the square footage is in the 600 to 1000 square foot range. Usually it is sold to a new home contractor to be included in the construction of a new home. The remainder of unused wood eventually makes it into the second hand market and you’ll find lots of it in the 75-100 square foot range or maybe only a few boards from a mill at a time.

The room I’m trying to repair is only 160 square feet. Too large for the secondary market and too small for the primary market. It has been suggested that I am being held for ransom because of the unlikelihood I will ever find wood to repair the floor, to repair it currently would require just 25 linear feet, but I can’t find that anywhere in the secondary market. After a month of searching we found a supply of Holt lumber wood that had just gone on the market but was 360 square feet. During the process of negotiation weather I could buy just half of the supply, a builder came in and bought the whole lot. Since then I have found another supply of maple hardwood but no specifics of the dimensions or the mill were provided in the advertising. I’m in contact with the owner over craigslist, to get more information. He has 600 square feet, is located 90 miles away, and I have yet to hear back from him regarding the details of the woods origin and whether I can buy just 180 square feet. It’s been recommended that I buy 25% more then I need because there is always that much waste in reclaimed wood. Splits, broken tongues and grooves and the like.

I’m getting rather frustrated the project is taking this long. But feel it’s the right path, and will in the end, reduce waste that ends up in the landfill and restore one old house to a more original condition. Besides that, we love the look of maple. The kitchen we remodeled has maple cabinetry, the office furniture we bought has a maple finish and it would be too cool to have maple hardwood floors again. It would bring the house back together.

It’s the business practices of each company involved that create proprietary products that don’t work at all with each other that is behind the problem of a wasteful society. This notion of style and how it is constantly manipulated by advertising, dupes the consumer into buying that latest current style. Who knows how long a company will stay in business to support the proprietary products it sells, and they are constantly coming up with new products to replace last years models and it seems you can’t find a part to repair an appliance that is over 7 years old. It would be impossible to keep all the parts in inventory for repair when the products are changing this rapidly. This has little to do with what is good for a society, and everything to do with a companies bottom line and moving the profits up the supply chain to increase some individuals standard of living.

In the town we sail out of their is a property on a small island, that had a beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright style home on it. Someone purchased that property and built a 8,000 square foot home next to the original house, last year the FLW style home was demolished. The property sold for 6,000,000,000 dollars, and is inhabited by a single person. What is our society turning itself into? It is an age of excess, beyond anything imaginable, all the while the number of homeless is rising. Mental heath is deteriorating. The numbers committing suicide are staggering across all age ranges. And the amount of waste we create has become a staggering amount. We are trashing our rivers and oceans, making the air unfit to breath and the water unfit to drink. And our solution? Shorten the life cycle of products, make it too costly to repair them. Create such an unrealistic financial load on it’s population that no one has the time to do it themselves. Hire someone else and pay their bosses far more then it costs to do the job. Dig a hole and dump all the waste in it. And when the cost of land becomes too high here, ship our trash to third world countries where they are ill equipped to deal with it and it ends up in thier rivers and then in our oceans.

Our minds are being kidnapped and our livelihoods held for an exorbitant ransom with great cost to the planet. There is not such a thing as waste in nature, everything is recycled. How did man get itself in this predicament? It is time to change our practices. It is making us sick, mentally, physically and intellectually. Where are we heading and what can be done to change the course we are on?

Good observe. Number one waste is meat. The carnage in the meat processing industry is awful. Not only does it pollute to the extreme alongside burning coal and oil, but a lot of meat is wasted, thrown away as people forget to refridge them and they are thrown away like garbage. The new idea of recycling garbage food is becoming more and more attractive.

Not to mention pre planned obsolescence shortening product’s life cycle!

Good luck with Your project, I am doing something incredibly difficult to my house, will write it here somewhere along the line.

do you absolutely insist on getting maple hardwood, or do you reckon you’ll settle for something else once you’ve exhausted yourself trying to find matching stuff? because good luck with that, man. you’re gonna have to hunt for that shit. building material supply stores sell standard hardwood and have been for decades now.

what i’d do is lay another layer of subflooring over top of the existing subfloor, and then choose a thin laminate flooring material. you’d have to do this if the old hardwood was thicker than 1/2 inch because you need to bring the floor level up to the bottom of the base and door jambs (as you know). so how thick was the old hardwood? what you can do next depends entirely on this.

nuthin. we’ll never reduce the amount of wastes we create, so what we need to do is start shooting it up into space. but as long as capitalism still reigns, the landfills are our only option. nobody’s gonna put the money up to mass produce trash rockets except the government… and the government won’t be able to afford something like that with all the bills it has to pay already. military budgets especially. and as long as capitalism/imperialism exists, muthafuckers are gonna spend most of their stacks on getting their guns right to defend their turf, nah mean?

meno: don’t fuckin believe a word of what a contractor tells you and check with me first before you sign anything.

At least meat you can throw back at nature and the critters and micro-organisms can deal with it. That isn’t really a waste, all though economically it has a great cost, as well as environmentally, as a result of the feed that is required, the land that is required, the mono-culture that takes place as well as improperly disposing of all the waste generated by the concentration and confinement of animals in such tight quarters involved. I’ll admit that rotting meat smells pretty foul but we compost vegetable waste separate from animal waste. But big city populations can’t do that. The larger the concentration of inhabitants the greater the amount of waste that results. Storm sewers overflow into sewage treatment facilities and pretty soon you’ve got a heck of a mess on your hands, and it all flows down streams to contaminate the streams, rivers, lakes and oceans, along with all the other agricultural runoff. But that type of waste can be dealt with naturally if we’d only get our act together with regard to our practices. Nature is just not equipped to deal with all of our manufactured wastes and it has to end up somewhere.

The only reason I point to meat is, that it is in the top polluting agent, and am cross referencing to Your earlier post, that delved.into dietary habits. In addition, garbage utilization is increasing, the latest nation to study feasibility is a Great Britain.

Hey Prom, I noticed you were I DIYer yourself. You probably should have found a way to get some flashing up under your siding before you replaced that trim. I don’t think caulk is going to be sufficient to hold the rain out and run it away as you had planned. You’re going to have to be up there checking and re-caulking after ever change of season or you’ll get water penetration under the siding, that will start to rot your walls.

I’ve never done a project like this before, I’ve never done a lot of the projects I’ve tackled before. Learning all that you need to know as result of your ignorance is always going to take the most time. Once I get going I usually do alright. I found some maple that was close to matching at a reclaimed wood products warehouse. He was going to give me what I needed if I could find something that matched. Well I’m smart enough and a skilled enough craftsmen that I can make some thing that doesn’t match, match. It’s just going to take me more time. I’m going back and get the 3" boards that didn’t match and mill them down myself to match the 2 1/4 " I need. It’s only 25 feet of make up and I can get started this week end. One room is already done and this is an adjacent room and it sure would look nice if it all looked the same. Half the problems I encountered is the result of previous owners who were such craftsmen.

It’s really kind of odd. When we did the kitchen we hired an electrician and a cabinet maker. When we pulled the old cabinets out we found a stamp on one of them, it turned out to be the uncle of the guy we hired who had installed the cabinets back in the 60’s we found a copy of a magazine that had on it’s cover page the news of JFK’s assassination. The date on the cover was Nov. 1963. I had been cooking on a stove that was that old, it was a built in and I just could find parts any more to keep it going and nothing available today was going to fit in that opening. That sort of precipitated the whole kitchen remodel project. Counters and Cabinets would have to be cut out, and once their the project rather snowballed from replacing a stove to replacing the whole kitchen. DIYer project creep.

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“meno: don’t fuckin believe a word of what a contractor tells you and check with me first before you sign anything”

I’m in a money pit kind of situation whwren discovering one thing leads to another worse thing, pretty soon you kind of wonder trying to do it yourself is worth holding on to the title

It all started when my son in law flushed baby wipes down and it stuck in the worn pipes .
The rest involved systemic problems that befuddled the imagination, least of.which was getting stung by at.least.100+ mosquitos .

No non contractual person or handyman like me can take to court a summons which has a dozen signatures attested to it as written on the health department citation. I heard the judge rules discriminatory oh according to How the weather effects. her judgement.

Got to be a straight shooter with her.

Don’t dare not rely on at least a few examples of competitive bidding.

Otherwise she’d take me for something I’m not.

no no, i’m good. there’s four inch step flashing already there. the original stuff. my cut line is below the top of that flashing… so unless water goes up (stranger things have happened), the roof is sealed tight, sir. wink

and that caulk is the good shit, not the cheap-ass ‘dap’ from home depot. sherwinn williams, babe. 60 year power max. it is the will-to-caulking incarnate.

meno:

i see. well if you get contractors in there giving free estimates and shit, they’re gonna tell you shit needs to be fixed that doesn’t (to raise the price), over-charge you for shit that does need to be fixed (to make his free profit after he’s paid some of the money his workers have made, back to them), and allow his workers to do a shitty job (to lower costs). i know, cuz i’ve been in this shit up to my neck for decades. let me put it this way; i wouldn’t hire the guy i work for to build me a dog house… well unless i was the one he assigned to build it, of course.

lol no i have to post this song.

"the toilet went crazy yesterday afternoon. the plumber he said ‘never flush a tampoon’.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Izxkm-e7s[/youtube]

Well, I’ve had my share of troubles in court and out , one time had this good old trailer up at the lake to compensate for the 10000 lakes left.behind in good old minnesnota, and went great until the great recession when he sends a notice to sell it at a lien sale, so o go up there and tell him that it is worth more then one month’s rent on the few square yards, he says he can’t make up the difference, then I get mad and he takes a shotgun off the wall and says w"well that’s the way its Got to be, and I go, the me of the place was.whisky flats, and I go it needn’t go that way; not figuring ahead of.time wjat I was up against, I tell him …I don’t think I told him anything after that, wished I had my .22 kept in house with me, though.

Leaving belittled. but served me well, depending on the economy, would still have an escape hatch
The name of.the place fitted the environment all unemployed boomers boozers on welfare , it sure changed, though.

And going through it , found what real law of the land is not much changed from the gold rush days when everybody was his own law.

Since then I only contract by referral from those I know well, and on whom I can push culpability in the event of a screw up.

Meno, Minnesota, If you’re still there we’re neighbors. I’d drive a few miles to talk with you in person, heck I’d take time off to do it.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news butbi left the twin cities in my rearview mirror a long time ago.

My big adventure was going back in one of my new cars, there were 2 in my lifetime, and wanted to make timenamd it was a full moon at Provo, and slammed on the brakes to get off the old I think it was 66, and I totaled it.
I did get back about ten years ago, which was the Minnesota that is unrecognizable.

Hope to disappoint, would be great, are you from nearby states to there?
Just ‘curious’- as Your other forum’s title goes.

Guess not.

In a word: BUSINESS.

Business rules the world. Science is in the pocket of business. Politics is in the pocket of business etc, etc. I was watching the film “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” just the other day. Unintentionally (I imagine) it beautifully illustrates the lunatic, self-destructive way people behave in the pursuit of money. Business has so much power that it has people eating out of its hand. Take the internet. People say that the internet is “free”. Tosh. We pay for the internet, for example, through advertising. How else do we have the likes of YouTube? A financially successful site such as YouTube makes its money from advertising. It attracts advertisers by getting people through its doors. We, the ordinary people, pay for all this advertising indirectly through inflated prices. The cost of living would be less than half of what it is now were it not for business. Business is not benign. Business is an out-of-control monster.

Where we are heading: Destruction? Armageddon?

You correctly say that our minds are being kidnapped, it is all making people very, very sick indeed. However, I do think sometimes that people connive with business, albeit unwittingly. They have allowed business to get away with doing a whitewash job on itself such as to, in effect, disable people’s critical faculties. The disabling of these critical faculties enables people to wrongly claim that e.g. the internet is free.

well now wait a minute. is business bad de facto, or only certain kinds of business?

what is business? we know what money is; the solution to the double coincidence of wants dilemma. perfectly necessary. it must be the particular kind of exchanges that are, for you, suspect here. and rightly so.

lemme try something. tell me how this fact strikes you immediately. don’t think about it. i mean don’t start trying to ‘rationalize’ it. just go with the immediate feeling.

wage/salary earners are paid less than the value of what they produce when it is sold.

sounds fishy, duddint it? you’re like ‘okay wait… why is that?’ forget about ‘why’ it is… just worry about that it is, and more importantly ask, does it have to be that way. is there another way? you bet your ass there is, but it would involve the excision of an entire class of people in our western society.

for two points, name that class.

Business is bad. Full stop.

What is business? Business is slavery. That the less powerful in this country do not know that they are slaves, and even pride themselves on being citizens of a free nation, is down to the cunning of the slave owners.

Money is merely another means used by business to control the slaves. In the times when slaves were still called slaves, they were “paid” in bed, board, food, clothing etc., However, with the advent of money, the slaves were given their “freedom”, and instead of working for bed and board etc, worked for money. This money was, of course, merelyreturned to the slave owners in payment for bought goods i.e. bed, board, food clothing. The modern word for slave is “employee”. That we do not equate the words “slave” and “employee” is down to the cunning of the slave owners i.e. business.

Business is also a drug pusher. Hear any business/consumer programme on tv or radio and you will likely hear business people or their representatives discussing how to make their products more addictive. They use this word addictive and no one challenges it, no one challenges what is really and truly meant by selling addictive products. In the 60s, in the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, it is even remarked that the business of business is to “lie and cheat and steal from folks every day”. In the 60s, people apparently knew the character of business. But it has done such an effective whitewash job on itself these last decades, that people appear to have lost sight of the unpleasant truth about business.

slow down a minute and think about what business essentially is. an agreement between two or more people involving an exchange of some kind of product or service. you have a chicken and i want one. i have some leather and you want some. i give you some leather and you give me a chicken. we just conducted a business transaction. now what’s wrong with that? nuthin.

what you mean - and this is something you can sense is sketchy without really knowing how and why - is that our particular kind of business in our particular kind of society has got some issues. but i’d not call it ‘slavery’, although the phrase ‘wage slavery’ is quite popular among centrists and leftists. the reason why it’s not technically slavery is because a wage earner can choose to deny a job. however, there are consequences for denying the job that if critically examined, reveal a whole nuther set of problems. check out the somewhat short-lived popular idea/movement among anarchists/leftists long ago called ‘refusal of work’.

so here’s some problems that would result from that… problems that cut through issues that are made trivial by comparison. they’re really meaty existential problems that say something about the very essence of society and bring the very foundation of ‘rights’ into question.

think about this. first, you didn’t ask to be born. next, you’re expected to follow the rules of your society and become either a wage worker or a capitalist. if you do neither, you go broke. your options then are to rely solely on social welfare assistance or become self sufficient in some way that doesn’t involve you participating in a legitimate job of some kind. your options are now narrowed down to two; hike out into the woods somewhere and become a grizzly adams or begin some kind of criminal activity to make money.

with the former, you’ll inevitably end up breaking the law; you can’t just plop down on a piece of land wherever you want because somebody owns it. with the latter, you’re willingly breaking the law.

now think about how absurd this situation really is. you don’t owe anybody anything, and yet if you don’t participate in a society you fundamentally disagree with (its business, i mean), you become a homeless bum or a criminal. so now where is your ‘right’ to refuse to participate here? oh you still have it, but to exercise it you have to forfeit all your dignity or become a renegade.

see what i mean by existential? one of those little nooks in human reality that everybody overlooks because they’re… well, they’re either a capitalist parasite or a working class dipshit.

so as you can see this refusal of work gig is a pretty radical and dangerous commitment, and yet it is essentially no violation of a civil contract. there is no contract, see, unless you sign it. otherwise, it’s coercive, and if it’s coercive, it’s instigating a state of war between you and the state. the state becomes your enemy, and you become a criminal anarchist, or a homeless bum, or a coward with a job, or a parasite with a company.

how many people have ever looked this far down into the real nooks and crannies of the civil contract? what was it rousseau said… born free, but everywhere in chains?

And who would one be engaged in business with? Certainly not the same sort they find in the same circumstance. Time is their only resource and they have no leverage on its value. Sounds to me like you agree with PLD.

PLD did. And you’re like hold on now.

PLD did, may have even gone a little deeper.

call it like it is.

Leave me alone, mowk. I’m in no mood.