terrawombat

Looks like the CL ad is dead now, but I did catch it yesterday. My old truck looked pretty darn good, but I could still pick out a handful of issues that had not been addressed. The exterior looked a lot better than when I had it, but the interior was virtually unchanged. She was a great truck, but the mileage was much higher than was stated. The PO before me swapped in a full gauge cluster and didn't update the odometer to match true mileage. When I sold it I estimated it had around 250K miles on her and the engine was noticeably tired. Regardless, happy to see it's still kicking around.

As soon as I get to 0.5%, 3 more things get added to the final checklist and bring it right back to 1%... Will it ever end?

Our kitchen project is slowly wrapping up. I think I said it was 99% complete a couple months ago....that 1% seems to take a long time. We have some trim to finish and other random odds and ends that are being addressed as we have time. The warmer weather is moving in so we have been spending a lot more time outside. While my wife and I were sitting around our fire pit we looked over at an otherwise unused area of our house and decided to build an outdoor bar. My wife got some really nice hardwood slabs from work (she works for a company that manufacturers high end guitars that use very nice lumber). Their quality control is so strict that they wind up throwing a lot of it away so my wife intercepted it before it got to the dumpster. We plan on sanding them down and using them as the bar tops. We also scored a sweet old school sink from my parent's farm. It's a giant cast iron kitchen sink from the 1920's that must weigh 250lbs. We're still early in the conceptual phase, but I think it's going to turn out to be pretty sweet.

Older houses like mine are strange. I have tiny bathrooms and the bedroom closets are laughably small, but our kitchen and living room are MASSIVE. Different priorities back then, I suppose.

Kitchen contractors are 99% complete. They owe us a new drawer face and it should be coming in within a week or two. Once they get that installed I'll stroke them their final payment check and be done with them forever. We still have some work to do before we can call it complete - door and window trim, molding, floating shelves and other odds and ends. The kitchen is currently 100% useable and has become the most heavily used room in the house when the family is awake. I think it turned out great and the finishing touches will be icing on the cake.

Thank you, Sir. Our contractors were very skeptical of the color at first, but once they got the cabinets installed they started taking a bunch of pictures to use for their own ads on social media....I guess they liked it?

So we're almost done with the kitchen contractors other than the final punch list items which should be addressed in the next two weeks. They dropped our range hood and dented the corner when installing the back splash so they ordered a brand new one to replace it. They also forgot to order the drawers for the island cabinet they also forgot to order and they also messed up on drilling the holes for the hardware on another drawer so they just ordered a whole new one. Everything on order is supposed to be in late next week so I hope they'll get it all installed the week of Feb 15 so I can be done with them. In the meantime we've basically moved everything into the new kitchen. My wife and I finished the flooring in the dining room area this past weekend so we just have trim and lighting left to do in order to complete that. I expect we'll have that done by the end of Feb since we are both working full time and not from home - basically just have the weekends to get stuff done. Overall it's a huge improvement and although it was very expensive and we hit a lot of bumps along the way this new space is going to be the central point of the home. A functional kitchen and gathering spot where we can easily entertain family and friends for years to come.

Turns out I still have the original tailgate on my '86 Diesel...

The original tailgate still had the dealer nameplate on it.

We have a traditional fireplace that had a wood stove insert when we first moved in. I remember filling that up right before bed and you're not kidding...had to open the windows in the bedroom to regulate the temp. I loved it. My wife, not so much. We sold the insert a few years back and haven't really used the fireplace since. I miss it.

The farmhouse I grew up in (built in the 1850's) also had them. When we were looking for houses to buy back in 2011-2012 we must have toured at least 50 different places. Our house was the only one we looked at that had the old cast iron radiators in every room. I knew then we had found our house. Bonus was that the PO had just upgraded the boiler system to a high efficiency gas unit. Unfortunately it just doesn't get that cold anymore to really need to use them. We also have two heat pumps that are able to deal with 95% of the winter days in MD. I think we use the radiant heat maybe 3-6 times/year, but it heats the house up in a hurry and they are great instant drying racks for wet clothes.

It's beginning to look a lot like a kitchen.

We negotiated some out-of-scope work to make up for the oversight and additional delays. I now have a fancy new door that goes into my laundry room!

A combination of factors. The original portion of the house is 80 years old and has experienced decades of foundation settling. The now-kitchen area was part of two separate home additions over the last 40-50 years and they were poorly done. To be honest, I'm not sure if the floor was even level when it was brand new. Cabinets were delivered this morning and some were installed. Unfortunately the kitchen contractors have had the cabinets in their shop for two weeks and never bothered to do a full inventory check. We're missing an entire section of our island so that had to be reordered and won't be in for another two weeks, so more delays. The bigger problem is that my wife doesn't like the stain color that was used on the island cabinets as it's much lighter than the sample we selected from. More drama, but at least the wall cabinets are to her liking so we can get all of those in for now and actually get a sink, dishwasher and oven back in service and be somewhat functional again.

Well, the tile floor that we pulled up was installed on top of 3/4" subfloor that was shimmed to all hell so it was relatively level to begin with, but once we tore down the floor to the original joists we found the floor to be1-1/2" out of level. We fixed it as best we could without ripping out the joists and starting from scratch...

Geez that's a deal at twice the price! You could actually buy this with the latest stimulus check. Good score!

So my wife and her father worked Friday night and all weekend to get our kitchen floor as level as we could. There was a lot of cursing, a couple arguments and a threat of my father-in-law walking off the job (he's doing all this work for free so I wouldn't have blamed him if he did), but we got it done. The floor is as level as we could get it. There is a 3/8" deviation from one end of where the cabinets will be to the other, but that is a huge improvement over the 1-1/2" it was before we started! The contractors I am actually paying will be at my house every day this coming week installing the cabinets and our quartz counter tops. If all goes well the electrician will be back Friday or Monday to finalize all of the appliance connections so that those can all be installed next week. After that, it's backsplash, flooring and trim. We're getting closer to having a kitchen!

This. It's a Toyota so it has a tendency to stick around for a while. They have a die hard following so even if it turns out to be a poor fit you shouldn't have a hard time unloading it. My buddy had a 90-something model for a few years. His biggest complaint was that it was a turd in terms of performance. It's a big, heavy vehicle with an underpowered engine. It's not bad for offroad use, but stinks as a daily driver with poor fuel economy. Regardless, I wouldn't mind owning one! Good score!

The 4 1987-1992 MJs that have been through my ownership had gray interiors. The 2 1986 MJs were both red interiors.

As Sir Sam said, it'll probably happen if the Wrangler is getting it. That kind of info is probably a well guarded secret within the walls of Jeep. I know a guy from college who used to work in the Mopar performance division as a development engineer (I think he's with GM now) and I would always try to get insider info out of him every time we would chat. He wouldn't give up anything he knew. It was in his contract that he couldn't talk about anything he was working on or knew of as a result of working for the company. Not that I blame him or the company. If the car journals get a whiff of that insider info and report it incorrectly it can really screw up the marketing and launch of the product. I can imagine that if an individual is determined to be the information leaker than that person's job probably gets a little more challenging, if they're allowed to keep the job at all.

Very nice! I wish the "professionals" we hired for my kitchen cared enough and took their time to measure out all of the drywall cutouts like that. Instead I've got drywall cutouts that look like they used their teeth, fist or a combination of both. I've complained about it in two e-mails and once while the guys were working and they promised to fix it each time. Still nothing, but my wife kept telling me they're probably going to get to it eventually so I backed off. Well we came home today and my wife found they just screwed something else up and she got very angry and has been on the phone with them for the past hour. I wish them the best of luck with her...they woke up a sleeping bear.

A former co-worker of mine is an extremely talented artist and does a lot of random "art stuff" on the side and makes decent cash doing it. His style of art is certainly not well suited for a children's book, but since he's in the art world he collaborates with a lot of other people on random projects. I still keep in touch with him and could reach out to him to see if he knows of anyone looking for some extra work. I don't know what your budgets are, but I doubt anyone in his circle is doing anything for under $100. I had my old co-worker make a fairly elaborate illustration for me for shirts that I got for a group of friends that get together once a year for Memorial Day Weekend. He charged me $150 for a single illustration, but I was a nit-picky PITA and made him change it 9 or 10 times, but the final product came out perfect.

We turned our open side porch/patio area into a fully enclosed four seasons room. I think the work began spring of 2018 and we just completed it summer of 2020. When you don't need a room you can certainly take your time! Funny thing is that four seasons room is now the most used room in the house!

Well, we did hire a Kitchen remodeling contractor to handle most of the work since my wife and I are back in the office full-time and have two toddlers - not exactly a great recipe for getting the work done in a hurry. The contractor we hired painted a perfect picture of how he would complete all of the necessary work to our upmost satisfaction. Good salesman, I suppose, because we bought it. Early into the project we realized that, despite past promises and clear line items in the scope of work, they were not going to properly address some ceiling joist sagging issues as well as issues with a very unlevel floor. The proposed methods of correction during the quotation phase did not match the actual work that was performed. Angry phone calls were made and follow-up emails were sent to create a documented paper trail. Eventually an agreement was made where they would only handle the kitchen stuff and my wife and I would find the proper people to handle the structural stuff. Luckily my father-in-law has been a home remodeling contractor for longer than I have lived and is now retired so he has been doing all of the work that the "Kitchen guys" could not. Not that it's all the original contractor's fault. He saw the space with the ceiling and walls ripped out, but he never got to see what was under the tile floor since we did not have that torn up when they came to quote the job. We all assumed it was just some tile over subfloor and it would need some leveling here and there, but nothing major. Once we tore it up, we found a freakin' mess. Basically decades of poorly-constructed additions on top of multiple layers of flooring that was all covered up by floor leveler and tile. Once we pulled all of that out we knew this was a lot more than any of us bargained for. So, we hired a guy last week to come in an fix the sagging ceiling joists so that's one thing we can check off the list. My father-in-law has spent the last couple days trying to address the floor. He has maybe a day left and I think we'll be at a point where we can use minimal floor leveler to get everything perfect. It kind of all worked out in the end since our cabinets delivery has been delayed by an additional two weeks (seems par for the course for building materials in 2020) so it opened up some time to get some of these items addressed properly. Hoping that work can restart next week for project completion by the end of January. It sucks not having a kitchen...

I suppose the point I was trying to make was that if that guy could get something "published", anyone can do it. After reading the abominiation that is the Celestial Prophecies, it would seem that the Amazon Kindle store doesn't have very many rules or high standards for publishing. Not to say that you wouldn't put out a good product, just pointing out that Amazon's Kindle store might be an easy path to get to your end goal. If I were to publish a book - and believe me, no one would ever want to read any garbage I put in print - I would most certainly have someone who is skilled in the English language or has book-publishing experience proofread the text before submission. It sounds like you have that base covered. After I published my masterpiece, I would promote it on every available social media platform. The only way you're going to gain anything from it (monetarily) is for people to purchase it. Whatever platform you choose to publish it (I assume it will be online) will likely bury it so far down their search table that no one will ever find it. You need to market it and pump it up with views. Those are my 2 cents, which is probably about what Amazon will pay you in royalties for each copy sold.