I just spent the day rewiring the kitchen in my rental. Yes, my rental. I figure what the hell, I'm going to be living here for a couple of years, why not make shit the way I want it to be so I can get enjoyment out of it. It started off with me installing a range hood (what kind of a place doesn't have one, never mind for natural gas appliances?), and having to run the electrical for that. Then, once I had the electrical exposed, there were some problems... so I fixed them. And while I had everything apart, I thought, "why not just put outlets where they should be to be useful", so I moved a few of them around. (I mean, who the fuck puts an electrical outlet right behind the burner on a gas stove?) Then I noticed that there was next to no real power to the kitchen... it was all running on a single 15a circuit (stove, fridge, counter top outlets). Next thing you know I'm installing a new 2-pole breaker and running some wiring. All in all, it's been 3 trips to Home Depot, about $150 in supplies, and about 8 hours of work. It was almost like that episode of Frasier (am I dating myself here?) where he noticed a scratch in the floor the day that his prestigious wine club was showing up, and the next thing you know the place is full of tarps and contractors and scaffolding. Worth it. FOCUS: What home renovation jobs or DIY projects have you done? Did they snowball out of control? Did they go as planned? What new job are you contemplating? ALT-FOCUS: What jobs were over your head, and made you immediately think "I should not have done that." Ever lose a finger or other appendage?
Rebuilt the staircase on the barn at my parents house. The first real carpentry-related job I did and it came out really well. Made me feel like a million bucks. The one that got out of control was a fire pit I built. I went to the dump and go an old 6 foot wife iron ring from some bullshit or whatever and buried it about 6 inches deep so it would be half submerged in the ground then dug out the middle. The kicker was, I also built a flue off to the side of it leading to the bottom of the pit with some iron pipe just big enough to fit the end a leaf blower into. So when we had our first fire, I decided to kick it up with the leaf blower. Little did I realize that the sponge bob doll I was crucifying/burning was full of styrofoam and almost burned down the forest and the barn. My dad made me dismantle the flue after that.
A couple of friends and I reclaim old tanks (commercial water tanks, home oil/propane tanks) and refurbish them into industrial sized smokers. So far we've completed work on 3 tanks with a 4th one currently in the early parts of fabrication. Luckily for us it's pretty much a no-cost hobby, as people have been willing to just give us the tanks as long as we come and haul them away and my one buddy is the director of maintenance at the local university so we can use his shop for any tools and materials we need (Your kids tuition dollars are being well spent!). At this point, after the completion of this next tank, the plan is to keep building the tanks, but instead of keeping them for our own use, hopefully we can find some sort of market to sell them and try to make a little cash on the side. Here are a few pictures I have of some of our work. (I'm at work so have limited access. If anyone is really interested in seeing more, I can send some when I get back to my laptop at home.)
That is awesome. I follow a number of YouTube channels that feature fabrication, and one of my favourites is ChuckE2009. He's a young kid who went to welding school and has dedicated a lot of time and energy into sharing his adventures in welding with the world. It's awesome, because he's not the best welder in the world, but he's having a blast, and isn't shy about sharing his successes and failures. He doesn't take himself seriously, at all. "Well, ladies and gentlemen of YouTube, that didn't turn out like I was thinking" is a common refrain. One of his build playlists features him building a custom smoker out of an old air compressor tank, and it's serious motivation to me. I now have a 100 gallon air compressor tank in the back yard beside the shed waiting to be transformed into a side-box smoker. If you're interested, here it is: First video: Playlist link: <a class="postlink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV-41cqp2k&list=PL_P7k0CDx5cXbaYgUngz65wp36B8tlZks" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV-41c ... p36B8tlZks</a> EDIT: Wrong build... this is the one with a tank BBQ on a trailer.
How do you make sure those tanks didn't have anything nasty in them that could get into the meat while smoking? I'd be worried about some rogue chemicals doing some shit.
Burn the fuck out of them... high temp for long time. I'd also tend to stick to old air compressor tanks.
Remember how I said my buddy is the director of maintenance for the university? That's what the student workers are for. But yes, as Nett said, pretty much burn the shit out of them. We run them a couple of times without anything in them to make sure we burn off anything that might have been leftover as well as to properly 'season' them before we cook anything in them.
I have learned from my building projects over the years, that I can ghetto rig almost anything. But I am utterly terrible at doing a workman like job of anything serious and people who are competent will take tools away from me for everyone's safety. That said? Never any injuries to me or anyone else other that bruising my own thumb with a hammer once or twice. Next project I want to try is a mix of pyromania and nerd. I want to put a fine mesh wire cage around a rotating platform with a brazier on it. I've seen similar builds where when you get the speed up to a pretty easy 15-20 rpm, you can get a sweet sweet fire tornado because of the air vortex from the wire cage. Because the cage contains the vortex and it collapses once it spills out of the vortex, the fire won't go beyond the cage, but it looks cool as shit.
Currently I'm refurbishing a giant electrical wire spool into a respectable table. It's a project that's been on the go for a few months and had had a few setbacks (ie I'm busy sometimes) but it'll look pretty slick once I'm all done with it.
Our house was mostly finished when we bought it, the laundry room was exclusively the two machines and a rat-ass sink. I replaced the sink and did the drywall, installed doors and put in a tiled floor myself. Installed the trim, did everything old fashioned: hand saws, angle guides and screwdrivers, only needed a hammer drill on the cement wall. I used a DIY book to do the drywalling as I never attempted it before and it worked perfect with no visible seams. The floor was easy and now the basement has a finished laundry room. I was actually proud, it turned out well for my first DIY project but it probably helped being good with tools. The guy who owned the house before me and installed the suspended/drop ceiling was NOT a handy person. Get this: I had to detach the drop ceiling from the wall braces to fit the sheet rock behind it when drywalling the laundry room. Now, keep in mind I remove ONE SCREW from the drop ceiling brace-- as it turns out, this was the one and only screw in that entire corner of the room holding up the drop ceiling. I pull it, the entire ceiling- tiles and steel rain down on my skull. It took me days to precision-hammer the steel back into place just to make it SORT OF straight enough to fit the ceiling tiles again. It was a fucking nightmare. What retard would use a single screw to hold up 36 square feet of tiles?
My sister wanted new lights in her bathrooms for Christmas. So I bought the lights along with the caveat that I would install them. Easy job no problem....except when I took down the old lights there was no octagonal box for mounting the new lights, the lamp was mounted with drywall screws, and a wire pulled through a hole in the dry wall. How the hell did this pass inspection? The job ended up involving cutting a hole in the dry wall, and building a support for the new box off of the existing stud to centre the light over the sink, mounting and terminating the light, patching the drywall, and painting. She's in a condo and one of the lights was on an exterior wall against the hallway so the dry wall was doubled up to meet the burn rating for fire code. All in all a 1 hour job tops ended up taking around 8hrs by the time all the mucking around was done. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, didn't even look like there was a problem.
Me and my Dad had the "pleasure" of putting together a new BBQ a few months back. To put it simply me and my Dad have no handyman/construction skills at all. As such he decided to get the simplest BBQ to assemble possible and purchased one that was very similar to our previous one, which just kind of snapped together...despite looking the same and being from the same company this was not simple at all. Construction started at approx. 1030 AM. By 11 we are arguing over what parts are what and there are screws all over the floor. 1130 - Dad to me "Just go. You're not helping you're impeding." 1200 - Me: "Let's just put it back in the box and return it and buy a different one." At this point it becomes a pride thing for my dad to build it. Even though we barely have the base put together. 1215 - Me: "Listen, let's just call sears and pay for them to put it together they do that." Dad: "No. We started this and we are going to finish this." Me: "Even if it takes us 5 hours?" Dad: "I don't care how long it takes." 1230 - The base of the BBQ is sort of put together. Me: "Aren't your workers renovating the house right around the corner? Just call them over and have them put this together." Dad: "I'm not looking like an idiot and asking them to help me." Me: "I'll ask." Dad: "No. We are doing this. If you don't want to help just fucking go." 100 - We break for lunch. I go get lunch, he goes back to Sears to look at the assembled model and take pictures for reference. 200 - We reconvene and go back to assembling the actual BBQ part. Process begins to move somewhat faster now that we have pictures 245 - Mom comes out of the house asking what is taking so long. We both proceed to yell at her. She doesn't check on us for the rest of the day. 300 - We realize we put something on backwards, more cursing commences as we break it down and put it on right. 345 - We have a shortage of screws... 405 - We give up on searching for the missing screws and get rusted 30+ year old screws from the garage. 445 - We did something wrong and the hose for the propane tank doesn't reach the tank. 515 - We prop the propane tank in a precarious position that it doesn't belong and plug it in. 520 - The BBQ doesn't work. We start playing with various parts of it to see if something is wrong. 545 - We get the BBQ working. 600 - We go inside and order takeout food because we are too tired to barbeque anything.
I started a homebuilding company. First project is a flip house: - Level the structure. It was down 5-1/2" at its lowest point. Yes, for those of you wondering, that is a fucking significant amount. - SURPRISE! Turns out the whole thing was wired knob and tube. Huge no-no. Lawsuit pending. $10k fix (with taxes). - Gut the main floor, except the bathroom. - Gut the exterior. All new landscaping. - Gut the basement. Reframed frost walls with vapour barrier and insulation. - Brand new kitchen. - Refinish fireplace. - New paint, electrical fixtures, stain throughout. Basically it needed everything. This is my fourth renovation, my second major one. I was born for residential construction.
I decided two years ago to build my daughter a playhouse. Not buy one and have it delivered, not buy one and assemble it, not use a set of plans , but just buy lumber and start hammering it together. You can see where this is going. I've attached a picture below for reference. It also has larger windows on either side. It looks ok, if you don't get too close. But due to my lack of planning and carpentry skills, and since I believe every DIY job should be accompanied by beer, there isn't a right angle on the whole fucking thing, and if anything is level it was purely an accident. This made putting on the roof, and the exterior cover and the inside walls a bitch. It's built like a brick shithouse, what with a couple of hundred nails and screws, some metal plates I found in the garage, and a 4x4 I sank 3 feet into cement behind it, then bolted the structure onto that (so it cant slide down the slope you can't se in that picture and to give the whole thing support). Next time . . . . screw it. there won't be a next time.
Within a week of buying our last house my wife decided we had to close in the laundry, I did not want to do it all in brick as the cost would have been very high and I am not very good at brick laying, I may be but I have never done it so I am assuming I am not. I had no idea how much it would cost to do close it in but I had 3,000.00 budgeted to do the job and I ended up spending about 2k. Door and window came from a store that sells salvaged parts, I bought the corrugated metal that would rust, that was the most expensive part. I did the whole thing by myself and it was very enjoyable except for the insulation, in 100 plus degree temps it sucks. If you ever do drywall on the ceiling rent a drywall lift, it is worth the $50.00 per day rental, I would have paid 5 times that much. Alt-Focus when standing on a step ladder trying to screw in 3 inch screws the bone in your finger will stop the screw tip from going all the way through and little chunks of flesh will be left in the screw tip.
One time at work, I was asked to cut a sofa in half with an axe so it would fit into a dumpster. Good times.