Got my bill last week. $2100 Fun

8/20/2009 11:59:59 AM

tax rate amount paid

Harris County 0.38923 $607.60
Harris County Flood Control Dist 0.03086 $48.17
Port of Houston Authority 0.01773 $27.68
Harris County Hospital District 0.19216 $299.97
Harris County Dept. of Education 0.00584 $9.12
Lone Star College System 0.1101 $171.87
City of Houston 0.63875 $997.11
Total 2008 Taxes Due by January 31, 2009

$2,161.52

8/20/2009 1:21:37 PM

i will trade you. pennsylvania property taxes suck so badly... $6k per year for us.

[Edited on August 20, 2009 at 11:40 PM. Reason : add the mad face]

8/20/2009 11:40:03 PM

The previous inhabitant of my townhome was a carolina fan.

Their Carolina magazine still gets delivered to my home

8/21/2009 4:42:49 PM

anyone have experiences with applying garage floor sealant/coating they can share?

8/24/2009 9:17:13 PM

my property taxes went up approx 31% this year.

not reassessed, but rather, just a flat tax rate hike.


good thing the house hasnt been assessed since 1983.

8/24/2009 10:00:05 PM

^^ My dad did a spray on stain, but he was less than impressed with the results.

I will ask him what he used tomorrow.

8/24/2009 10:04:10 PM

^^^

I will be doing this in the next couple of months.

Unlike paint, garage floor sealants absorb into the concrete, so if you fuck it up, there's no unringing that bell.

so avoid the garbage they sell in home depot and lowes.

I bought my stuff from http://www.ucoatit.com

but have yet to apply it. I'm kinda being a little bitch about it. I've been putting it off for a year now.

8/24/2009 10:11:50 PM

So I did the math and I have ~$700 for food,gas, savings, and fun after paying all my bills.

This is more of a "budgeting" woe than a home ownership woe though.

8/24/2009 11:07:17 PM

I've seen a lot of garage floor coatings that started popping up within a matter of months. All of the people claimed they cleaned the floor properly prior to putting the sealant down. Better find a good industrial quality one if you're going to do it.

8/25/2009 10:38:55 AM

whatever it is we coat the plant floor with here at work would probably work. that shit has lasted for years and gets paint thinner/acetone/blah blah blah spilt all over it all day everyday

8/25/2009 10:53:06 AM

My father coated his garage floor with this plastic-feeling epoxy stuff. It looks nice.

8/25/2009 1:28:02 PM

^5

what did you spend on that if you don't mind sharing - ballpark?

8/25/2009 1:57:14 PM

IIRC around $400

so far a waste b/c it's still sitting in the shipping boxes in my garage.

but my wife's gonna be pissed if i still don't let her park her car in the garage come winter. So that might motivate me to do it this fall sometime.

[Edited on August 25, 2009 at 10:49 PM. Reason : af]

8/25/2009 10:48:32 PM

Ok - you have a two car garage?

I used their calculator to estimate the cost and that was similar. I have been planning to do the same so I may go ahead and order. Are you going to do the flakes? Looks nice but I'm worried about spreading that mess evenly.

8/26/2009 10:07:50 AM

yep, 2 car garage, which has never had a car parked in it to date.

I did end up getting the flakes, mostly to help keep the floor from being slippery, but yeah, i'm sure i'll also have uneven flakes, but i don't think that'll bother me too much.

8/26/2009 12:27:13 PM

ATTN Nutgrass:


FUCK YOU

9/1/2009 2:56:57 PM

checking out our steam system in prep for this winter and found a leak... below the floor in our sunroom. and no crawl space access. of course it is a concrete floor (used to be part of wrap around porch). if we can't figure out how to replace via the little bit of access we have through the basement, we get to jackhammer the floor. YAY. fux.

9/1/2009 4:42:25 PM

Can any of you recommend someone to grade my yard? I need to just tear it all up basically and smooth it out a bit. I have already removed all of the grass and bushes. I need the front and back done and its just a bit too much for me and a tiller.

9/1/2009 8:49:11 PM

Home ownership woe:

Going on vacation, but not able to mow your grass the days before due to heavy rain. Get back and Bill has dumped even more rain. All told, you're looking at a jungle of a yard that hasn't been touched in 2.5 weeks.

Angry HOA letter in the mailbox saying mow your yard NOW.

I go to mow, the mower is broken.

I'm forced to weed-eat the entire front yard in the pouring rain until I can fix the mower and finish the back.

SUCKS.

9/3/2009 6:04:03 AM

Stupid neighbor that doesn't know where my lawn ends and hers begins. I would gleefully mow her section if she hadn't sent the HOA letters about my lawn when it got long when my wife had our child and we were a tad bit busy/tired. Fucking recluse has nothing better to sit at home all day and report us for shit.

Oh, and masonite siding......

9/3/2009 8:56:36 AM

One of my buddies had the nut bag from across the street in his yard/mulch area around a tree pulling weeds one time. He walked out of his house and there she was, ass over head in his yard. A quick GTFO did the trick.

The weeds weren't even bad. Her yard, however, looks like a plant nursery blew up. You couldn't even walk in her yard if you wanted to for all the shitty plants she had everywhere.

9/3/2009 1:06:07 PM

Yay for new windows!

Boo for discontinued siding color forcing us to buy new siding!

9/8/2009 4:21:31 PM

Discontinued siding color?

I presume you have a plastic house?

9/9/2009 2:10:00 AM

....vinyl put on about 10 years ago....

....over the course of that 10 years, the color was discontinued....

....new windows significantly shorter than previous windows and therefore need additional siding to cover vacant areas....no color matches up, so therefore we have to put on new vinyl siding. which part didn't make sense?

9/9/2009 9:02:03 AM

vinyl colors are always being discontinued and they are always fading, so impossible to match back anyway.

9/9/2009 9:54:16 AM

I've got to put up 8 squares of HardiePlank in the next two weeks. I have the foam insulation board as my sheathing and I want to pull all that off and put up plywood so I have a solid surface to nail the siding to.

What would you guys do?

9/9/2009 10:49:20 AM

I wouldn't bother with the plywood sheathing.

Leave the foam board there and nail the hardiboard to the studs. Be careful to not drive a nail into the wiring though.

9/9/2009 11:38:12 AM

Yeah - would save some serious time. I think I might go that route.

Also - I need to have my yard graded/tilled up so I can put some seed down. Can anyone recommend anyone to do this?

9/10/2009 11:42:46 AM

^ Did you get my PM?

9/11/2009 8:45:51 PM

Quote :

"The previous inhabitant of my townhome was a carolina fan. Their Carolina magazine still gets delivered to my home "

The people who lived here before us were Jewish. We got a box full of mennorahs last November.

They also planted a HUGE herb garden in the backyard, and let it go to hell. We couldn't mow it down because they also made wooden signs delineating where things were supposed to be planted, and we had to cut the triffids back to find the signs and take them out. They clearly put a big effort into making this garden (boxing off areas, making the signs, putting wood chips down between the boxes for a walking path), and then apparently lost interest in it with the quickness.

They had kids. They had kids that wrote on EVERYTHING. It's minor stuff, really, we could just paint the doors, but sometimes we find marks on the most random places (inside the place where the a/c unit is). They also turned the doorknobs around on the kids' rooms so they locked from the outside, which we thought was a little weird...

9/12/2009 12:02:22 PM

Quote :

"They also turned the doorknobs around on the kids' rooms so they locked from the outside, which we thought was a little weird..."

that just gave me inspiration for a prank.

9/12/2009 1:56:40 PM

^^ That's a little disturbing. My parents never had to forcibly lock me into my room to get me to stay in my room.

They must've been pretty awful parents.

9/12/2009 2:10:53 PM

that's great and all until there's a fire and the kids are locked in their damn room to burn to death

9/12/2009 3:17:58 PM

oh come on, the less kids in this world the better

LET THEM BUUUUUUUURN

9/12/2009 3:22:55 PM

When we moved into our house and I went to paint everything, there was obvious bolt holes on two doors in the pattern of those locks you swing the metal plate over the eye thingy then put the padlock through, like this:



Anyone who has installed one or removed one knows the screw hole pattern and intention left by the mount, its unmistakeable.

The two locations were on the master closet (presumably to keep the kids out of the closet), and the other was on the out side of the oldest kids bedroom, presumably to lock him in.

I guess this is more common than i thought.

9/12/2009 3:37:10 PM

i just spent the last 1.5 hours reading this entire thread. I'm finally closing on a place this coming thursday. It was built in 1940 and the sellers have lived there since 1965. (the furniture still had the old school clear plastic slip covers on it when i went to view it!) All of the major things have been recently replaced: brand new water heater, new dual zone hvac including new gas furnace (well, the the a/c is probably 5-7 years old, so i'm not sure how much life is left in that), plumbing and electrical was redone with copper in '06, and a brand new roof (it was installed the day of my inspection).

It needs a lot of lipstick and mascara, but overall its it great shape. I've got two months of to get out of my apartment, so I'm going to take that time to take on a couple projects:
-clean! clean! clean! the elderly do what they can but aren't the best housekeepers.
-paint the downstairs walls
-replace a couple of broken window panes
-redo the living room floor. right now there's 20 year old carpet, i'm hoping there's hardwood underneath.
-spraydown the crawlspace with mildewcide and put down a vapor barrier. also open up some vent holes for the crawl space. I had it inspected for mold, and i'm good to go one that, but there is a lot of surface mildew apparently from lack of proper ventilation.
-replace a gfi in the kitchen that is keeping 3 outlets offline.
-install a chinmey cap to keep the critters out. for now that might end up being a piece of plywood.

once i get in and settled i've got all sorts of things i would like to do. its going to keep me busy for quite a while. for those that have done major renovations, how do you handle the financing?

[Edited on September 12, 2009 at 11:42 PM. Reason : ]

9/12/2009 11:40:36 PM

Quote :

"They also turned the doorknobs around on the kids' rooms so they locked from the outside, which we thought was a little weird..."

Not strange at all. Some kids sleep walk, don't sleep and mess around, etc...

I've heard of kids almost walking out the front door, still asleep. That isn't cool. Easy solution.

9/13/2009 12:13:11 AM

Anyone ever bought flooring from lumber liquidators? Some of their prices are really outstanding for unfinished flooring.

9/16/2009 3:56:31 PM

Quote :

"They also turned the doorknobs around on the kids' rooms so they locked from the outside, which we thought was a little weird..."

They may have turned the locks around so that the kids couldn't lock themselves in there.

9/17/2009 10:48:07 AM

one of my skylights decided to start leaking this morning

9/17/2009 1:04:47 PM

Quote :

"Anyone ever bought flooring from lumber liquidators? Some of their prices are really outstanding for unfinished flooring."

My friend that just built a house did. Looks great. I think he was very happy.

9/17/2009 1:12:37 PM

I bought about 1600ft from them for my old house. Worked fine for me and was the best price 2 years ago that I could find.

9/17/2009 6:32:43 PM

Yeah, some of it is less than $2/sqft which is lower than anywhere else I'm looking...need about 1000 sqft

9/17/2009 6:57:05 PM

only thing I did notice with their unfinished oak flooring is that it was real knotty.

9/17/2009 10:15:48 PM

replacing steam system piping today underneath sunroom, no crawl space, only acces is through 1 ft space between floor joists from basement. argh.

next project, finishing drywall on 3rd floor (at least this is going to be "extra" space so it doesn't interfere with main areas of the house - can take our time). i freaking hate mudding and taping.

9/20/2009 11:54:50 AM

finishing drywall is the worst and can look really bad if you dont know what you are doing.

9/21/2009 3:58:43 PM

It's the bane of my existence.

9/21/2009 6:19:22 PM

Would hardwood stairs and carpeted rooms/hallways look stupid in a townhouse?

9/22/2009 9:28:46 AM

Just carpet the rooms but make the hallways and stairs hardwood - We did that in our old house. Looked good if you ask me.

9/22/2009 10:04:52 AM