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drt

Certifiably Surly
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Posts posted by drt

  1. On 10/21/2022 at 3:23 PM, Bevo said:

    Why were the french drains so expensive? That seems way overpriced.

    Labor is expensive.

     

    Solve for bulk water first.  Gutters, grading, etc.  Then french drains and the like.

    Finally, the option of closed cell foam on the underside of the foundation and subfloor, and/or making the crawlspace "conditioned" are both common and work well.

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  2. 12 hours ago, bonnieblue said:

    …but I think even someone with means has to be a little freaked out for their wanted pregnancies right now. I certainly am. There are a lot of things that can go wrong for the whole length of pregnancy. Once you start miscarrying / have an ectopic, do you have enough time to grab a flight to denver? What about in your last month? You’re not supposed to fly. Will your doctor prioritize your life? Do you need to have your delivery in another state? Some scary scary stuff that money can’t necessarily protect you from.

    This is where my wife is. We had a rough go of it after our 2nd and had both finally come up for air enough to talk about a third. That conversation is done, barring we move or the laws change. 
     

    We are both doing well at work, but actively talking about leaving if we can find the right situation. Austin always felt like home. Fucking assholes. 

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  3. 2 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

    Ugh the real scary part

    Yep just the same when we were kids. 

    Yeah I saw that. Didn’t post it because…whatever. 
     

    But I’m pretty sure my kids are just going to have a different experience than I did. 

  4. 14 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

    All joking aside, it takes several weeks of training for crews and support personnel as well, so it sounds like it’s a complex process to scale quickly. I did see one Ukrainian official tweeting an ammo dump strike and exclaiming they had “passed the test”, so was curious if there’s an effort by the Ukrainians to pressure the US to speed things up. 

    Don’t forget it also takes really good operational security to communicate all those moving parts to meeting on the move for resupply.  The Russians would like nothing more than to know where they could knock out the launchers and their ammo trucks at the same time. 

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  5. Yes, people used to use them that way.  Stanco was proposing modern day upgrades to another poster (adding blown in cellulose, which is cheap and relatively easy).  Someone thought recycled paper was a bad idea from a fire standpoint.  My point was that modern cellulose added to homes is treated to mitigate that danger.

  6. Back in 2018 we pulled a permit for adding a bath and rearranging interior walls to fit (no new sq ft).  They said it qualified as a major remodel, removed our homestead cap, and upgraded our condition on the house to being the same as all the new construction in the neighborhood.  The resulting tax bill was based on a valuation at least a hundred thousand above the cost of the remodel even if I hadn't done the vast majority of the work.  That made our taxes almost more than our mortgage.  All for a little 1300 sq ft starter house.

    I didn't know the tax code above so we just got fucked until we moved (to a new house where our homestead started higher...yay!).  Its definitely a strategy and they're deliberately going after money they shouldn't, hoping they don't get called out on it.

    Now if they'd just value commercial halfway intelligently, they wouldn't have to do any of this shit.   As it stands this is just one of the reasons Austin is un-fucking-affordable.

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  7. Yeah, you pull a permit with any decent amount of work, TCAD generally says fuck you, pay me. (ie your house is now PRACTICALLY NEW!…except it’s not)

    This is why people don’t pull permits. At some point someone is going to die because of shitty work directly related to this practice. I don’t know if the lawsuits will make it all the way back to TCAD, but they should.

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