The ultimate money killer is the dripping bathtub faucet. Seriously, save yourself $400. Cut off your water supply at the source, Pop the tap caps, unscrew the hardware with a screwdriver, take them to Lowe's and replace the $2 O-Rings. Simple. It's rarely EVER the faucet, but an on-call plumber WILL rake you if he smells ignorance.
Since you brought it up. . . That's one of the advantages of the Marathon water heater that I mentioned before. No anode rod. There's no metal to protect, hence the lifetime warranty. I have hard water from my well, so my rods went out in 3 years, then had to replace the water heaters after 8.
Another one is if your heat ever doesn't kick on, especially if it's the first time you've had to use it when the weather starts to change. Most people have no idea what a heat flame sensor is and that it needs to be cleaned periodically due to carbon buildup. Had mine act up this past winter. Flame would kick on for about 3 seconds then just cut right out. 5 minutes and a little cleaning with some sandpaper and I was back in business. Had I called a technician I probably would've been out a few hundred dollars.
What pisses me off is how the management company that owns our rental house tries to be strict about requiring their halfass handymen and contractors to handle all of the fixes and general repair work. This usually means waiting a week or two after calling several times for some guy to show up and do the bare minimum job and they still haven't fixed a number of things I've pointed out that need to be done, i.e. leaking gutters that lead to ice everywhere around the house. Yeah I quit bothering them for the most part after a month or so because I realized they don't know any difference if I just take care of it. I credit my dad for teaching me a lot as I grew up about being self reliant and resourceful. I might have thought he was an asshole at the time for having my brother and I help him with painting the house, fixing stuff, building porches, roofing, etc. and doing the grunt work at the time but I learned a thing or two from it. It's nice not having to wait around for someone and ultimately I am cheap and like saving money when possible. Except electricity. Fuck that shit. An electrician is pretty high on the list of professionals I'll call first over doing it myself.
So much this. I've been bit quite a few times and anymore it's worth it just to pay someone who really knows what they're doing. That and gas lines. Anything else I can and have done plenty of times, it absolutely amazes me how many people...even people I've lived around in the country...don't know even the basic of home ownership. One of my favorites was a call when I was with the fire department - Their smoke alarms were chirping. Of course I made sure the fire truck came in full lights and siren.
Home repair is not an intuition my family possesses. My dad is a brilliant man and a perfectionist. When I was a kid we lived in a 1970s style home with carpet in the kitchen. Bad trend right? My dad decided he'd like hardwood floors so he'll do it himself, how hard can it be right? He eventually figured it out, eventually. He also decided to retile the bathroom because linoleum sucks right? Another fun project he took on. We learned when dad was doing home repair we stayed the fuck out of his way. My dad is also a very determined hard working man. We lived on a hill growing up, the front was flat, the back sloped down and out, he wanted the basement to be a walk out basement. So he dug, with some buddies, out a hillside that was roughly 15ft tall x 20ft wide x 10ft deep. He then had someone help him build the deck. I have no desire to do home repair. This last week I switched out some door handles in my bedroom at my parents house. My mom has no respect for privacy and rules, and has stolen some of my Rx's in the past so I needed a door with key locks on them. Simple enough job, I've done it once before a while ago. Because I didn't read instructions it ended up taking me 3 hours to take out 2 handles and install 2 more. What took the most time was one of the tumblers got jammed or something and wouldn't lock so I spent a while just sitting there messing around with it before saying screw it, going to home depot and buying a new one.
My father did a fair amount of diy electrical work on the house when I was a kid. He knew just enough to get things to work, but I am surprised that house never burned down. The light switch in the storm cellar also turns off half the outlets in the living room, so he leaves it on and unscrews the bulb. The entire upstairs, bathroom, and the outlet the microwave is plugged into are all on the same breaker. The porch light works when it wants to.
My contractor/carpenter knew some electric. Que all of my 3 way switches only working 2 ways. He did manage to ground the outlets though. Oh, yeah, not one of my outlets were grounded. Surprise! I was raised by my mom, no other adult male was around, in a house that was falling apart a year after it was "built." The only way I learned anything was by watching a pro. By "pro" I mean half assed charlatans and crooks showing me what not to do. My buddy the carpenter taught me a great deal even if his services were lacking otherwise. If I learn how to do basic carpentry I could do some pretty decent work. I can sand, drywall, spackle, paint, demo like a mother fucker, but I'm not touching anything with a current.
Dashcam captures drunk passenger falling off bridge into creek http://fox2now.com/2016/03/01/dashcam-captures-drunk-passenger-falling-off-bridge-into-creek/
I completely rewired a 36' sailboat, both 110v and 12v systems, after reading a book. The 30 amp 110v system ran the air conditioning, batter charger, inverter and water heater, along with about a half dozen outlets. 12 volt system ran the refrigeration, all the nav instruments and lighting, interior lighting, multiple pumps and started the engine. A complicated system, for sure. Home wiring still freaks me out and I triple check to be sure I'm not going to get electrocuted.
I should have added to my post that both of my parents grew up in big, dirt poor farm families where they had no other options but to do about everything themselves, so that mentality stuck in a lot of ways. So... while there's no money to inherit I still gained a lot of positives from that. To quote my grandpa, "there ain't a snowball's chance in hell" you'd see me doing that.
So Friday night is a busy night at the bar, it was jam packed and loud with a lot of baseball people in town and there is a girl named Kim who has started frequenting our bar, she drinks Miller Lite and Fireball. Kim showed up about 9pm and was up to her usual routine of talking to older men, they love her for some reason and she was on fire, she usually starts a tab but the old guys were buying her drinks and she had 4 beers and 3 shots by 10:30 then I did not see her again the rest of the night. It could have been I was not paying attention because I had to physically remove a 50 year old lady who thought it was funny to sit on girls laps and lick their face, because yeah drugs are good for you especially when topped off with vodka. We close at 2am, so we did our usual closing routine of restocking, cleaning and counting money and as we were getting ready to set the alarm we thought we heard someone in the bathroom but after checking no one was there, so we looked one more place, we have an alarmed fire exit on the side of the bar that goes into an alley between the building next to us and a door at the end of the alley opens to the street. After opening the door we find Kim standing in the pitch black alley trying to find the exit door, she had been passed out in there for over 3 hours. We got her out on the street and tried to talk to her but she was not coherent I am not sure if she was taking drugs, was drugged or a combination of drinking and drugs, the door guy told me she lived close so we told her she was going to get a ride home with one of us, she refused and instead elected to go to the bathroom and puke for 10 minutes, following the puking session I called a cab for her but she stumbled off into the night. Two of drove around for a while looking for her but could not find her. I had a hard time sleeping because it would not have been good if she spent the night in that alley and she did not need to be stumbling around drunk on the busy roads. Saturday night at 6:30 pm Kim comes rolling into the bar like nothing happened and got after it again.
I thought this was going to be one of those "Faces of Death" or "some footage may be disturbing" videos. That's hilarious. "Come on out." "Nah, man, I'm good." "Good my ass."
Electricity cannot be self-taught. Period. You learn from a pro, get CERTIFIED by a pro, or you stay away from it. There is way too much causes for error and absolutely no room for error. You fuck up you start a fire, wreck something expensive or die. You can learn how to drywall out of a book. You can learn to paint simply by being alive. Electricity? Call the professionals, people. There is WAY too much math, theory and rules to follow by winging it.
And here's how you say Fuck You to Mr. Death: 90-year-old woman opts for epic road trip over cancer treatment http://fox2now.com/2016/03/01/90-year-old-woman-opts-for-epic-road-trip-over-cancer-treatment/ EDIT: Mom arrested after 3-year-old tells Texas cop, "I need a beer" http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mom-arrested-after-3-year-old-tells-texas-cop-i-need-a-beer/
I will not touch gas lines and that is about it. My father in law is an electrician, so I picked up a few things. Only thing electrical I will not do is hook up to the breaker panel. When I completely redid my basement, I built a sub wall inside the existing wall because I wanted drywall down to the floor(my foundation was 6.5" wide with a 2x6(5.5" wide) on top of that with a 2x4(3.5" wide)). I didn't want to lose 4" on all the outside walls, so I custom cut each 2x4. I put a 2x4 on end so I only ate up 2" instead of 4" and each 2x4 and to be custom cut so it would fit. I ran all the wire, did all the lights, plugs, and most the switch. I boarded the walls, but paid someone to mud. I added a bathroom so I had to knock out part of the floor for the drain for the shower and the toilet, I paid a plumber to connect to my old cast iron line, but I did the rest of the plumbing. I also I like fine wood working, making cabinets, custom trim pieces, think my next project will to be make custom solid wood doors.
The new Nancy Drew TV show sounds like a horrible disaster. Sarah Shahi (go on, I'm interested) plays the sleuth all grown up, now an NYPD detective (seems reasonable) in her 30's (well, yeah, late 30s, okay) and her father is played by Anthony Edwards (wait, what? You mean, Goose? Dr. Mark Green?) He's 17 years older than Shahi. Plausible, I guess, but he must've had an affair with a hot Spanish / Iranian princess or something . . . okay, Hollywood. Good luck with that.
There has to be some people on here who've fucked with electricity as a kid. I was a senior in high school and I took a paper clip, unwound it, put it through the eraser end of the pencil (we weren't stupid right?) and decided to stick that pronged thing in the outlet. It ended up shorting out the lights in the room briefly. We did this while the teacher was out, when she came back in we took the pencil out except the eraser was stuck in the socket. So since I was the dumb one who did it, I had to pull it out. And because I was rushed and stupid ended up grabbing the paper clip instead of the eraser and got a nice burn. That has to be tame by most peoples standards.