What home improvement work did you do today?

Are you caulking between the baseboard and floor or is that a trim piece? Or neither and I'm seeing things?

 

Both tops and bottoms of baseboard are caulked.

 

bottom too ??? Never seen that before

 

Thanks to work handing out Costco gift cards for Christmas, I just ordered a Bosch 300 series dishwasher from Costco to replace the POS Samsung that crapped out on us a few months ago. It'll be nice not to wash dishes by hand like a peasant.

 

I'm surprised; I thought Samsung appliances were supposed to be pretty good. When our shitty Brick brand oven died, the Samsung got the best reviews and was the cheapest of the good options so that's what we bought. Similar story when the keypad on our Sears brand microwave stopped working.

What I don't get is this: my house was built in 2007. It looks like these appliances were installed in about 2011. Therefore, it looks like whoever was living here at that time replaced the original appliances with cheap knockoffs when the originals were less than 5 years old.

 

Everyone I've heard from that has had Samsung appliances says stay away. They die quickly (few years) and can't get replacement parts. Maybe the older versions were more reliable?

I'll stick to using Samsung for phones and hard drives, have had good luck with those.

 

My parents only buy Samsung or LG now. They bought a GE fridge about 15 years ago and it was after the compressor died (about a week into owning it) that they discovered that every brand other than LG (Samsung wasn't selling fridges in Canada at that time) used Amana compressors and they were all failing so they were back ordered. Ever try living a couple weeks without a fridge?

The repair guy was also condescending to my mother, trying to explain to her that she couldn't possibly know how the compressor is supposed to work, despite her mechanical engineering degree and her experience designing and maintaining them for the chemicals industry.

 

I had started the baseboard project with one style of baseboard .75” shorter and almost twice as wide as what I’m currently using. The flooring was laid with that baseboard dimension in mind. When HD no longer offered that dimension of trim in the multi-packs, I changed baseboard stock, primarily for cost efficiency since I was replacing boards through the whole house. Fortunately, I only got through a couple of closets and both bathrooms before making that change.

With the thinner baseboard, some of the floor planks were juuuuuust under the thinner baseboard and caulking the bottoms seemed like a good idea due to the close tolerances. Also I caulked in places where there may be incidental water splashing, like where the dogs’ feeding/watering mat is, bathrooms, etc.

There are also a couple of places where there were some small (<1/8”) gaps btw the trim and floor in places that my OCD couldn’t handle, so I caulked those too. After seeing where there was caulk in some places and not in others, I decided to make it standard throughout.

With the amount of dirt and dog hair production in this house (2 shepherds), it also keeps dirt and hair from finding the gap between floor and trim.

I’m “Harry Homeowner”-ing my way through this thing, so please don’t take my way of doing things as *any* sort of example.

 

I am not one to go on and on about appliances good or bad, but let me go on and on about how badass Bosch dishwashers are...

So very impressed with both of my experiences with them. I think you’ll be happy with it.

 

@Cpl_Punishment, I've heard some people have luck with Samsung appliances but that seems to be the exception not the rule. Almost everyone I know who has Samsung appliances has issues. My friend's wife worked in an appliance repair shop and 60% of their call outs were for Samsung units. Multiple repair guys we've had and talked to over the years have confirmed this as well. Samsung is generally regarded as the worst appliance manufacturer out there. LG isn't much better.

Take our fridge for example. It was icing up completely to the point I would have to shut it down and de-ice it every three weeks. I have a thread here somewhere with pictures. After much research, it turned out to be a T shaped piece of sheet metal that extends into the drain port from a heater coil to keep the port from freezing. Samsung made the piece 1" too small, so it doesn't extend deep enough to work. There was actually a class action lawsuit in the US about it, yet Samsung never bothered to fix the design. I bought a 2 pack of replacement pieces for $5 on Amazon and it's hasn't iced over since. It's this kind of crap that's common with Samsung. Little design flaws, usually in the electrical system, that they don't bother to update or fix and which cause massive headaches.

Our dishwasher wouldn't finish a cycle and wouldn't fully drain. We threw $300 in parts at it and the repair guy came out 4 times trying to sort it out. No go. Even the Samsung tech our guy called basically shrugged and said "That sucks. Too bad it's out of warranty".

My parents have had a Samsung fridge, washer and dryer all fail on them with in 4 years of purchase. Each time, they got told "You got 4 years out this? Wow. You got a bonus year!". Needless to say, they don't buy Samsung either.

Our range and microwave are GE and problem free. When the fridge craps out, it'll be replaced with GE or Whirlpool. When the Samsung washer and dryer die (the screen on the dryer is alredy kaput), they'll be replaced with all mechanical Speed Queen units.

 

Glad to hear it. I haven't heard a bad thing about Bosch yet, even their low end models.

 

Me either, that's why I asked haha

@1UPPER are there any reasons for or against caulking the joint between baseboard and flooring? I have never seen it done but I guess it wouldn't matter either way outside of time and material to do...

 

Can't speak to reliability of it other than the fact that I lived there for 4 years but I really liked that the Samsung dryer I had in my condo would actually get my clothes dry. The dryers all think your clothes are dry when they're in fact just warm. After my Samsung was done running, it would keep sensing while it cooled off and start back up once it realized the clothes were still wet. With the LG in my wife's condo and the Whirlpool in our house, I have to just keep running the longest cycle at the hottest temperature I can find over and over again until my clothes finally dry a day later.

 

That's weird. Our Samsung dryer has problems getting our clothes dry. Even when put to the hottest temp and longest cycle, half the time we have to to put them in for another cycle.

 

I suspect the one I had was original to the condo, which would have made it 2004 vintage. Maybe the new ones suck.

 

If they were builder grade, that might be why. Our first-house was brand new and loaded with GE crap. Everything started dying literally the day after the warranty expired. We went to Lowes to get replacements and they recommended GE. Told them there's no way we'd buy their stuff because of what happened. Lowes said it was "builder-grade" appliances. Cheap shit they toss in the houses. Why anybody would expect me to run out and rebuy their products after their "builder-grade" version dies is beyond me.

We had a Samsung washer and dryer set that was amazing and a Samsung microwave. I think it all kind of goes in cycles though - when we moved here, LG seemed to be putting out the good stuff so that's what we have now. Except the dishwasher - Bosch made the best one at the time.

 

We’re ready to move/upgrade so I might have installed something better. It’s a Danze Jasper on sale in Canada for $98, reg $299. It seems decent quality though.

I also replaced a crusty chrome one in our guest bathroom with this farmer’s contemporary Pfister. I don’t know if black is a new thing but they look cool.

 

I finally got around to descaling our ice maker today. Yuck.

I also replaced the under sink filter in the little bar sink (that feeds the ice maker). When we bought this house, I paid for a whole-home water filter. The guy took all day to install it and comes walking up to me all sheepishly when he was done and started telling me that some of the toilets will have filtered water but some of the sinks won't. What did I want to do? I asked him what he'd do if it was his house. His response was "I was afraid you'd ask that." He came back the next day and "fixed" it.

About a year later, we buy this kick ass little Skotsman Icemaker. My wife loves ice and I got sick of buying 5lb bags of it. So, I bought it for our anniversary and it's amazing, makes little pellet ice (the same that you get at a Sonic). I'm cheap when I can be, so I installed it myself. The ice kept tasting weird so I thought it needed to run through and clean itself out. After a day or two, I start researching and Skotsman's don't do that, they just come "clean". I end up getting a glass of water out of the bar sink and it tasted the same. So that's when it clicked that the idiot never fixed it. Don't know why he didn't tie into the water line coming into the house, but he didn't.

Anyways, I call the plumber and tell them that I don't believe he ever fixed my whole-home water filter. They come out, climb under the house and say "Yep, it's not connected. It'll be $300 to fix it." I said "Nope." and they charged me $40 for coming out to tell me that they didn't do their job correctly the first time. There's more to it after that (the owner saying I was ungrateful for being mad they we're going to charge me to fix their mistake) but I'm tired of typing and you're tired of reading at this point.

So now I have a Woder undersink filter that I have to change out every 3 years or so under my bar for my bar sink and my ice maker. The moral of the story is not to blindly trust a small town plumber to do what's right.

 

On our LG, there's some settings that don't use the temp sensor. I usually will put it on that or I'll put the sensor on maximum dry level.

 

Yeah, I use the timed dry but it won't let me run it for more than 100 minutes at a time. I usually need 2 of those cycles to get everything dry.

 

That's no good. I think it may be because of all of the layers of clothes you all wear up there.

 

I had a 2016/7-vintage LG when I was in national park (rental) housing. I had this same issue within a year of the park installing them. Turns out there were 2-3 heating coils in the model I had and 1-2 had burned out. Replacing them returned it to normal.

 

In my region of Texas it’s very common to see caulking at the bottom of the baseboards to the flooring. However you should never see caulking at the bottom of baseboards if you have a free floating floor. Free floating flooring is an engineered floor that is not glued or nailed to the subfloor. Free floating flooring typically has shoe mold or quarter molding at the bottom of the baseboards. This is very important as the floor needs to have the ability to move under the baseboards for expansion and contraction. Growing up in the Midwest I didn’t see caulking at the bottom of the baseboards very much.

 

Just another reason I actually want my socks to be dry when I put them on.

 

Just a suggestion for people on the topic of dryers and them not working so well at the moment. Make sure you clean out your dryer vent of lint build up. This is a cheap tool I got on Amazon. It’s crazy how much lint builds up in the dryer vent over time.

 

I tried sucking mine out from the outside with a shop vac but I'm not sure how effective it actually was.

 

The lint tends to stick to the sides of the dryer walls. So the shop vacuum can only remove a limited amount.

 

I was blown away how much this pulls out... have a shop vac ready to suck up everything you pull from the vent line