What are your next major purchases?

[TheMix]

Also, if it makes you feel better, we were at a friend's house a couple weeks ago, and I saw they had one of those. I asked him if it worked, and he said it doesn't. Useless. Not worth it.

Edit: Of course that would be a top-of-page post. Oh well.

[stessier]

$2500K

I bet they did!

That's was my first thought too. 2.5 million goes a long way!!

[Isgrimnur]

If Hitman has taught me anything, you can easily use a wrench to turn it into a bomb to assassinate him.

[Exodor]

My wife's car has been throwing a series of errors and warnings when started. Looks like $2k to replace "the camera" and possibly more if they find more problems when they start working on it. It's a 2017 Honda Accord with ~40,000 miles on it so it's worth putting in two grand but the additional repairs may be an additional $4k which would probably put us in the market for a replacement.

Annoying since the last payment is due in November. I was kind of looking forward to getting down to just one car payment.

$4k repairs? I would strongly consider selling it.

$2K and it's fixed. More than we wanted to spend but it's been a reliable car with low miles so we're keeping it for awhile.

[Carpet_pissr]

$2500K

I bet they did!

Well, it included large, name brand stuff in good condition, so we did ok. Dining room table and chairs, outdoor furniture, playroom sofas and daybed, etc.

[Default]

Wife wants to replace our hardwood floor and all of the carpet in the house with laminate. It would be easier to care for, especially with baby pets. I'm not convinced it's the way to go for the staircase and upstairs bedrooms, though.

Highly recommend LVP if you haven’t considered it. Will probably be next kind of flooring I get. Currently have engineered wood flooring and I hate it.

Thank you! I was unaware of this, but it seems to be the way to go.

No. Just no.
I put that in my last house, and it has a microscopically thin top layer. Pull a chair or table the wrong way, and you are looking at ugly monochrome scars that can't be touched up. I'll take hardwood all day long over vinyl plank. Hardwood is more durable by far, carpet isn't that big of a deal, unless you are going to be an urban pigfarmer.

[Carpet_pissr]

Wife wants to replace our hardwood floor and all of the carpet in the house with laminate. It would be easier to care for, especially with baby pets. I'm not convinced it's the way to go for the staircase and upstairs bedrooms, though.

Highly recommend LVP if you haven’t considered it. Will probably be next kind of flooring I get. Currently have engineered wood flooring and I hate it.

Thank you! I was unaware of this, but it seems to be the way to go.

No. Just no.
I put that in my last house, and it has a microscopically thin top layer. Pull a chair or table the wrong way, and you are looking at ugly monochrome scars that can't be touched up. I'll take hardwood all day long over vinyl plank. Hardwood is more durable by far, carpet isn't that big of a deal, unless you are going to be an urban pigfarmer.

I’m guessing you put down something with a 12 mil layer? If not, I’d be curious to know what it was.

“The wear layer is made of clear vinyl and is measured in mils (thousands of an inch). The most common residential wear layer is 12 mils or 20 mils. A thicker wear-layer is recommended for high-traffic commercial spaces or areas in your home, and a 20 mil wear-layer or higher is ideal for maximum protection.”

[Daehawk]

I grew up in the 80s...carpet it all!! hahah...my dad and step mom even carpeted the bathrooms. Weird. Id love to carpet my home. My little old dog slips and can fall on the bare hardwood or linoleum on top that mimics hardwood under it. shrug they did it not me. Id love to have a bedroom of shag carpeting like the 70s I remember. But that shit is too hard to care for ..forget vacuuming you had to use a special rake on it.

EDIT: To add I miss full house carpeting. Always soft on the feet and not cold or slippery.

[Carpet_pissr]

I grew up in the 80s...carpet it all!! hahah...my dad and step mom even carpeted the bathrooms. Weird. Id love to carpet my home. My little old dog slips and can fall on the bare hardwood or linoleum on top that mimics hardwood under it. shrug they did it not me. Id love to have a bedroom of shag carpeting like the 70s I remember. But that shit is too hard to care for ..forget vacuuming you had to use a special rake on it.

EDIT: To add I miss full house carpeting. Always soft on the feet and not cold or slippery.

Carpeted bathrooms is just gross unless the house is full of women. Or men that pee sitting down I guess.

Kitchens also…the grease, spills, etc all over that carpet?! Ugh.

[Default]

Wife wants to replace our hardwood floor and all of the carpet in the house with laminate. It would be easier to care for, especially with baby pets. I'm not convinced it's the way to go for the staircase and upstairs bedrooms, though.

Highly recommend LVP if you haven’t considered it. Will probably be next kind of flooring I get. Currently have engineered wood flooring and I hate it.

Thank you! I was unaware of this, but it seems to be the way to go.

No. Just no.
I put that in my last house, and it has a microscopically thin top layer. Pull a chair or table the wrong way, and you are looking at ugly monochrome scars that can't be touched up. I'll take hardwood all day long over vinyl plank. Hardwood is more durable by far, carpet isn't that big of a deal, unless you are going to be an urban pigfarmer.

I’m guessing you put down something with a 12 mil layer? If not, I’d be curious to know what it was.

“The wear layer is made of clear vinyl and is measured in mils (thousands of an inch). The most common residential wear layer is 12 mils or 20 mils. A thicker wear-layer is recommended for high-traffic commercial spaces or areas in your home, and a 20 mil wear-layer or higher is ideal for maximum protection.”

It is in my ex's house, but I wouldn't touch that stuff again. If I was dealing with a high moisture environment, like you wanted to start keeping horses indoors, then I would consider vinyl sheet flooring. That stuff seems to hold up better, but the vinyl plank stuff, I'm sorry, it's junk. It's good if you're only going to have pedestrian traffic, it's cheap, and you can put it down yourself. But if you're going to have furniture on top of it or use it in a laundry area every time you move something unless you pick it up straight up into the air, you have a very high risk of scarring the floor. There's no repairing that, and you will see that for the rest of your existence. It doesn't really add anything to the resale value of the house and it even looks cheap.
Maybe think of it as a temporary flooring solution, or if the Mrs is going to start a hairdressing business in your basement, then I think it would be okay. I would never use it in the kitchen because if you ever needed to clean under the fridge, just moving it would wreck the floor.

[Carpet_pissr]

We put it down at work and it looked great, but it all depends on how thick that top layer is. Most of the cheaper stuff on the market has a thin layer, and has the issues that you described. All LVP is not created equal.

[Daehawk]

Kitchens also…the grease, spills, etc all over that carpet?! Ugh.

The kitchen was not carpeted.

[Kraken]

We have a new closing date: Aug. 29, the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. Our P&S was signed on May 26, which was Memorial Day weekend. Good bookends for the summer, methinks.

For personal/professional scheduling reasons we need to move before the end of September, which doesn't give us very long to complete the work we want done before we move in -- replace carpets, refinish wood floors, paint several rooms, install a mailbox, and (ideally) screen in the front porch. We can't interview and hire contractors until we can actually get into the house on Labor Day weekend, so September's going to be a wild month. I think we're going to split duties with me living (camping) in the new house, hiring and organizing workers and setting up services, while Wife stays behind to take care of the cats and organize the move (or vice versa).

[ImLawBoy]

We did LVP flooring in much of the basement. We went higher end, and we definitely don't have any issues with easy scuffing/marring of the finish. It's durable and it looks nice enough. Hardwood scuffs more easily in my experience.

That said, I don't think I'd like the LVP on our main floor, which is currently hardwood. Hardwood has a better look/feel overall and my personal preference is for that.

[Unagi]

We did LVP flooring in much of the basement.

We did this too. We have LVP 'wood' planks that are layed out at an angle, and the basement looks really great. Been 5+ years and it still looks great.

That said, I don't think I'd like the LVP on our main floor, which is currently hardwood. Hardwood has a better look/feel overall and my personal preference is for that.

Absolutely. It's feel and finish make it more of a basement solution, IMO.

[Jeff V]

Hardwood is more durable by far, carpet isn't that big of a deal, unless you are going to be an urban pigfarmer.

We have lots of pets now (3 cats, 2 dogs, 1 turtle). One of the dogs is a puppy, the other an incontinent centurion in dog years. Wife explicitly wants the carpet to be gone, we have some hardwood but it has deep scratches and is difficult to keep looking nice. At least with a laminate a damaged strip could be cheaply replaced?

[em2nought]

I couldn't give up my cold & durable tile floor even though I have to clean the grout occasionally. Oven cleaner from the Dollar Tree and an old toothbrush, but don't inhale.

[Elifuldn]

Really odd spam.

[Unagi]

Yeah, Jeff.

[Kraken]

Lots of major purchases coming up.

First (?) is wood floor refinishing. Approx. 500 sq ft need sanding and sealing plus some minor repair work. Stairway needs sealing. Wife wants the unfinished stairs to the basement included. Only one out of three contacted contractors responded; he quoted $3,600 for the core job, $5,000 if we include those basement stairs. He can do the work before we move in, so will probably win by default. I’ll try to wheedle a “senior citizens discount” out of him before we hire him -- can probably get the price down by a few hundred bucks.

I have a couple of guys coming to quote me a price for installing a mailbox. I’ll buy the box and decorative post from Home Depot. I need contractor to dig a post hole, fix a 4x4 base post in concrete, and make sure the finished product meets USPS specs for height and distance from the road. The only real challenge is that we’re 0.2 mile from the road, so can’t run a hose to mix the concrete. The box + post combo I like is about $150 and I figure about as much to install. This doesn’t qualify as a major purchases except inasmuch as it’s one of many minor purchases.

Wife has a cleaning service coming Wednesday morning that will do a deep clean for just $180. That’s what we paid for routine cleaning every month at our much smaller old house, and these folks include cleaning the oven and interior windows, making it quite the bargain.

Having an unexpectedly difficult time finding a carpet installer. The easiest and cheapest route is to go through Home Depot, but lots of reviews say that’s not a great idea. Will default to HD if I can’t find a better option, but in any case it’s very unlikely to get done before we move in.

[The Meal]

That’s a fun reminder of a job I held the two summers before my first two years of college. I worked for the county road commission, painting bridges, filling pot holes, removing road kill, holding stop/slow signs, emptying park trash cans, and replacing road signs. My partner and I had a new street name sign we were putting up. This was a hoity-toity neighborhood adjacent to Lake Michigan, so they had special painted iron 3” diameter, 14’ long poles which required using a post-hole digger and a few bags of quikrete (rather than the more traditional thin corrugated sign posts which you could drive into the ground with brute force). Sure enough, we hadn’t really considered all the logistics when we left the shop that morning, so while we had the concrete powder, post hole digger, sign post, and road name sign, we ended up needing to use the crusty old five gallon bucket which had been kicking around the back of our flat bed Ford truck all summer long.

And wouldn’t you know it, it had a decent sized gash in the bottom of it. So we got the sign stuck mostly vertical in the dry quikrete powder, then with Mike driving, down at the beach I’d scoop as much water as I could get in the bucket, quickly hop in the flatbed, and he’d head through the fancy neighborhood like a bat out of hell, arriving back at our new sign with what was left in the bucket. Took us three round trips to finally get enough water in that hole to keep the sign basically straight up and down.

I’d offer to do your mailbox for a mere $50+ expenses, but I’m not sure you’d like my travel costs.

[em2nought]

6 to 8 inches in from the road, bottom of the door the postman opens 41 to 45 inches above the surface of the road. Post 24 inches deep. I just installed a new secure box at my cousin's house, and also figured out how to set amazon up to deliver to a pack N ship store.

[Kraken]

Our long weekend in the new house is nearly over, and we’ve accomplished most of our agenda. Internet is up and humming. All of the floors will be refinished/replaced before we move in (expected cost ~$10,000, actual $11,350). Mailbox will be installed today or tomorrow. UPS Store box will be contracted this afternoon. Deep cleaning (which we didn't expect to need until we saw what slobs the previous owners were) is tomorrow morning. Painting is the only major item on our punch list that we didn’t address, and we'll arrange for that when we come out again at the end of the month. That can be done after we’ve moved in. Locksmith will do his thing after contractors are done coming and going. We’re changing the types of locks on several doors so I’m glad I didn’t try to do that myself -- the final result will be logically coherent and stylistically consistent.

Oh, they took the washer & dryer, too, so we’re going to need new those. They’re in a glorified closet so we need front-loaders, and the dryer has to be electric. Anybody got recommendations/warnings? We don't want anything smart or internet-connected, just basic reliable machines.

[LordMortis]

We don't want anything smart or internet-connected, just basic reliable machines.

[hepcat]

Have you set up the Hepcat shrine room yet? I sent over some ideas via PM earlier.

[Isgrimnur]

https://speedqueen.com/

[gilraen]

I like my Electrolux washer that I got 3 years ago (to replace a GE which was probably about 20 years old when the control board finally died). I have the EFLW427UIW model, which is now discontinued but it looks to be similar to their current 300 series.

[naednek]

If you haven't moved in yet and looks like the floors are not happening right away, I'd be painting first so you don't have to move furniture later or ruin new floors.

[em2nought]

Whirlpool stack for apartment complexes with old school knobs and pull start push stop, come in two widths 22 & 26 i think so be sure to measure if they can slide in

[em2nought]

They might have changed the whirpools recently, GE stack looks more proper with the correct knobs and features

[em2nought]

Don't get anything digital. My mother's whirlpool stack outlasted her and it was there when she moved in twelve years ago.

[Jeff V]

We have a guy coming in 2 days to give an estimate on replacing all of our flooring with laminate.

The project after that might include replacing and/or refinishing kitchen cabinets. At a local faire a few weeks ago, there was a vendor hawking such a thing, with a raffle for a freebee. I decided to enter the raffle, and, as expected, all it got me was about a half-dozen calls a day asking when they can come quote the job (even after I told them that would be in the future, after the floors are done).

[Kraken]

The Honda's exhaust system sprang a leak, which moves trading it for a new car up the priority list. Gonna try to close the deal on a '24 Santa Cruz next week. The '25s are almost here and the Santa Cruz isn't a hot vehicle in the first place, so I like my negotiating position. The salesman made a tactical mistake by telling me that a deal for the car we've targeted just fell through. He's trying to scare me that I could lose the car. Instead he told me they have that much more reason to want to move it. They want to sell the car more than I need to buy it.

Once I insisted on negotiating by email, this became fun. I won't set foot in their dealership again until I've nailed down the terms.

[Unagi]

Gonna try to close the deal on a '24 Santa Cruz next week.

You sir, are a steely-eyed deal closer!

[Kraken]

Gonna try to close the deal on a '24 Santa Cruz next week.

You sir, are a steely-eyed deal closer!

Having worked as a buyer for 10 years, I learned how to get to Yes when that's where both parties want to go. I'm ruthless but reasonable in writing. I can hold my own F2F, but not on their turf. They very much want me to come on in and talk it out because the dealership process is all about wearing you down. There would surely be free coffee, but I'll only drink it when we're signing the deal I work out online.

[Carpet_pissr]

Make sure you are asking them to quote the out the door price via email or you might be surprised when you go to sign.

[Unagi]

This is Kraken.

[Carpet_pissr]

This, is CNN.

RIP JEJ

[Isgrimnur]

Make sure you are asking them to quote the out the door price via email or you might be surprised when you go to sign.

I refuse to negotiate any other way.

[Anonymous Bosch]

The Honda's exhaust system sprang a leak, which moves trading it for a new car up the priority list. Gonna try to close the deal on a '24 Santa Cruz next week. The '25s are almost here and the Santa Cruz isn't a hot vehicle in the first place, so I like my negotiating position. The salesman made a tactical mistake by telling me that a deal for the car we've targeted just fell through. He's trying to scare me that I could lose the car. Instead he told me they have that much more reason to want to move it. They want to sell the car more than I need to buy it.

Once I insisted on negotiating by email, this became fun. I won't set foot in their dealership again until I've nailed down the terms.

Gonna try to close the deal on a '24 Santa Cruz next week.

You sir, are a steely-eyed deal closer!

Having worked as a buyer for 10 years, I learned how to get to Yes when that's where both parties want to go. I'm ruthless but reasonable in writing. I can hold my own F2F, but not on their turf. They very much want me to come on in and talk it out because the dealership process is all about wearing you down. There would surely be free coffee, but I'll only drink it when we're signing the deal I work out online.