What home improvement work did you do today?

Just because I love a wood barn, doesn't mean I'd turn this puppy down! You two are killing me, I'd love some storage that wasn't a connex box.

 

Made a lot of progress but slacking on updating here.

 

Upgraded to a king sized bed.

 

Not personally, but we had a bunch of that done on our office building tilt-up concrete panels for reinforcing when they remodeled it and cut in a bunch of windows.

 

So it sounds like a legitimate fix then? Not snake oil.

 

Hey whats with the dead duck avatar everyone is using. Did ya'll kill a couple jeep wranglers or something?

 

toyomafia drop was yesterday!

https://www.toyomafia.com

 

Added some shelving and moved stuff around. Ammo cans seem to be just the right size to pack full of odd ends that don’t have a place in a drawer and keeps me more organized than just having stuff in boxes

 

I like that a lot for the garage!

This was my inside solution for now

 

Clear is definitely the way to go. Makes it a lot easier to see what’s in there. Recently switched the majority of my Home Depot 27gal bins over to clear

 

When I get my side barn built, I am going to go with the black and yellows, but it will be for lower use stuff. Plus paint pens make it quick for me.

Inside when I am always moving stuff, i could not imagine not having clear!

 

This is what I went with for the really little stuff I have. So three levels. Large (go in 27gal), medium (ammo cans), small (20 bin part organizers). Can fit 20 of these organizers in this rack. Ten front, ten back. Future goal is to number each organizer and put the contents in a spreadsheet so will be easy to find exactly what I need.

 

I am glad to see I am not the only one with this level of insanity.... I have spent several hours over the last couple of weeks going through all of my tackle bins full of misc things....

 

Replaced & added a few solar lights along the back yard fence. They were still bright this morning.

 

First quote is $4,000.

 

I honestly don't think that is a HORRIBLE price. It isn't pocket money by any means, but foundation work isn't cheap from what I have heard. A fix like this could save 20k down the road. Is it for the entire area, or just the sections in the garage that seem to be marked near the "lower" section of the outline. 4 strips 4k.

Thanks for sharing!

 

Correct. Just that 27' section of my garage where they made marks. The scary part is that if I'm having issues on any other part of the front foundation I can't tell, because it's all finished basement. I would have to open up sheetrock to check. My house is built into a hill and the grading could have been better. I think builders have learned more since my house was built in 91. Or maybe they are worse..

I agree, $4,000 isn't bad. Peace of mind for this section.

This is the retaining wall they have identified. It has also failed. Previous owners had it rebuilt when we bought the house in 2021. They paid some rednecks to do the work who did a piss poor job. They put faux drains at the bottom so I recently added the PVC drains shown.

I've been researching how to patch the crack myself to make it less of an eye sore. Hoping to buy myself a few years knowing I may have to get it rebuilt.

 

where did you get this rack?

 

Here’s my write up on it. It’s just a modified bun/sheet pan rack and Stanley/harbor freight organizers
https://www.tundras.com/threads/tow-mater.65982/page-12#post-3866475

 

Not a major home improvement but one I am happy with... MIL bought me a rando safe from a garage sale. She boke the key in it so I fixed it, added patch velcro and now have an ammo safe to help keep the kid away from fun....

 

Late to the party on this one, but some advice, if you're not already in the know:

• Synology is great, I've had more luck with QNAP products
• When buying your drives, drives made in the same batch often see similar longevity and/or are prone to the same manufacturing defects which could cause back-to-back failures; it's OK to stick with the same brands/models, but consider varying where you buy them to avoid consecutive serial numbers (indicative of same batch)
• Always use NAS-ready (or NVR-/Surveillance-ready) drives
• Install the NAS somewhere breathable where temps tend to stay under 85°F
• Use RAID5/RAID6 or similar one-or-more-disks-can-fail arrays for data
• RAID is not a replacement for backups; I usually keep one huge-TB disk in one of my slots to incrementally backup my array data on the other disks
• Ensure you've got alerts setup for your NAS to email you when a disk goes down and needs to be hot-swapped

 

All amazing advice!

I purchased the drives all at the same time on Amazon and am seeing similar issues across multiple drives. I am still working on a local and remote back up.

All in all, love this and will research Qnap.

 

Yeah, when populating new NASes, either for myself or for customers, I'll usually recommend grabbing a disk or two off scAmazon, one or two off NewEgg, one or two at Microcenter, from CDW, or whatever. If you buy from high-volume dealers, you're liable to get same-batch. When I used to help with datacenter buildout at work, we would specifically request from HP (whose SANs we normally used) they send disks in batches with non-consecutive serials.

RE: QNAP, here's what I'll say:

• If you won't be doing any virtualization, really as long as it'll run QTS or QuTS, you can buy anything they sell
• The following, if you want to virtualize (Containers, or full-VM)...
• The AMD-based units are great. The Intel XEON/i5/i7-based units are great. I'd avoid the i3, Celeron, Atom, and similar small-chip based units. You will pay $$ for one of the "great" options.
• I'd be sure to get something that supports NVMe disks, just note that QNAP is a bit more stringent with their HCL than Synology, for stability reasons, so always check compatibility before ordering disks
• If you need to do transcoding ... like, you intend to remotely stream your video collection while outside of your home ... add a SFF/low-profile GPU to handle transcoding in Plex, but verify it will actually work ... some units have limitations on the PCI-E 'CPU' slot / 1st slot where some have the TB3 card installed
• I've installed a number of the TS-x72 and TS-x73 and TS-x73A modelse (where "X" is the # of disk slots) in my own home and at customer sites and they're just generall badass, overpowered, and do everything you can imagine
• You have a choice during initial setup: Use QuTS Hero or QTS, one important note: QuTS is better for data safety, but it locks down 40% of your RAM, but QTS doesn't; I typically use QuTS for customers ... but point being:
• If you intend to do any virtualization OR you intend to use QuTS Hero, you'll want to upgrade the RAM; most modern units support up to 64GB, and you can pick up compatible 2x32GB kits for around $90-110 = Crucial, Kingston, Mushkin, Samsung, and Hynix are almost always compatible, IMPE

If you ever have any questions about QNAP hardware or Ubiquiti hardware, don't hesitate to give me a shout. After difficulty (ageism is real, my friends) trying to find a job after my layoff last March, I finally bit the bullet and started my own small business focused on restaurant/small business Ubiquiti buildouts which typically include a QNAP NAS, Unifi network/wifi, Unifi Talk telephony, cameras, access control, and low voltage/structured cabling (plus some e-recycling/hardware refurb). I've spent my career doing all of this stuff, so it just made sense, since nobody wants to hire someone half a century old with oodles of experience, why not just do my own thing?

 

Stitched an emergency exit zipper into the loft. I figure everything that uses gas is by the door so having another way out probably isn't a bad idea. This exits out to the roof of the truck

 

Excellent download!

I am pretty handy in Unifi/Ubiquiti. When I stumble I have some smarter friends but I will definitely let you know. I love that for you too and hope you find great success in it! These systems are great and I really like my buildout. Only issue is $$$ limiting my scalability as desired... so we will see how things play out in the near future.

 

It definitely is spendy.

But you know what I hear from 100% of the customers I've installed Ubiquiti systems for in the last 5-6 years, typically within the first 6-12 months?

"I cannot believe how much money I wasted on service calls and replacing hardware before I got this stuff. It's paid for itself, maybe two or three times over already..."

Doesn't matter if it's primarily network equipment, or the most recent buildout I did which has a shitload of Unifi door access and telephony, which they absolutely love, being able to see who is at the door and buzz them in using a $75 used Unifi Talk phone off fleaBay and their new door intercom. Everyone loves it.

And the best part is, most of them are tech savvy enough that once I get their setup planned out, and get the base config in place, they can take the rest from there. Sucks for me, but so far I've gotten at least one or two leads out of every customer, and it's resulted in a number of call-outs to come help with more difficult problems, which is what I really prefer doing anyway.

I really dunno if the business will go anywhere, I've only been able to bill out about $5k in work since February as of this weekend. If I can manage to get that closer to $6k-8k/mo in billables, I think I can make it work. I'd ultimately prefer to get to a subscription model where I'm charging out monthly for X# hours of support/install time on a couple dozen customers. If I could do that and juggle 1-2 new builds per month, I'd be in a really good place.

 

I understand and love all of that. When I did my install about a year ago, my only issue was when I switched from Starlink to Fiber. There was a router thing that I had to work out with the to get my system to operate correctly. Now I love it. Other than that, i ignorantly bought the stupid ATT backup but was able to sell it off on the flea site so I am much happier now.

These things are great!

And for the record, I hope you can scale! That would be awesome!

 

Again, fingers crossed!

On the ATT backup - I've seen some interesting feedback on that, and some cool hacks you can get away with to drive pricing down on the service. What I've been using for failover is cheap 4G modems that can utilize external antennae with T-Mo sims. T-Mo's data rates are pretty solid. It'll suck when 4G goes down because the same units in 5G are painfully priced. But for now, it's been working alright.

 

Threw together a little cedar planter box for the front steps.

 

"Ditto."

Seriously though...literally the only time I've EVER had to reboot has been when an update required it.

Nice side effect - previously, anytime I'd call the ISP, they'd blame it on the router. Now they ask what I have and sort of say "oh..." and immediately start troubleshooting THEIR equipment.