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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Well, hubby and I got one more thing done today that hadn't been done for years: cleaning the ceiling fan/light fixture over the kitchen table. Thanks to his height he was able to reach up and remove the blades, LEDs, and bells for me to wash/ wipe, and then he put them up again. Tomorrow I'm going to get out the stepstool and finish cleaning. It was gross. I'm so glad it's done!

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fished mounting the other drawer box, today and making tweaks to both of them. They slide perfectly now, and are mounted flush so when I make the face plates for them they're going to work great.

My neighbor didn't have the right bits for the profile I need to make. I'm going to have to watch some youtube videos to figure out the easiest way to match the profile I need so I'm not blowing a bunch of money on bits I don't need. No hurry on that. I'm just happy I finally have a drawer big enough to put my flatware caddy in. First time in 12 years it wasn't out in the open on the countertop.

I took the drawer out by the fridge since I'd have to pull the fridge back out to get it out. I'm going to paint the drawers and put my contact paper on them. I don't need to have the face to do all of that. Once I finally get these things finished I can finally put the drawer pulls on all 4 drawers and the false drawer under the sink. I've had those things in my possession for about 3 years now.



I cleaned up the garage real good. Then I tested out my snowblower and generator. Everything started right up and is running great.

Finally I topped off all my fluids on my car and filled the tires.

It was a long day. I'm exhausted.

Going to sleep well tonight.


Looks like it's going to be COLD. Probably won't have another day like today until mid-March.

:(

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Fished mounting the other drawer box, today and making tweaks to both of them. They slide perfectly now, and are mounted flush so when I make the face plates for them they're going to work great.

My neighbor didn't have the right bits for the profile I need to make. I'm going to have to watch some youtube videos to figure out the easiest way to match the profile I need so I'm not blowing a bunch of money on bits I don't need. No hurry on that. I'm just happy I finally have a drawer big enough to put my flatware caddy in. First time in 12 years it wasn't out in the open on the countertop.

I took the drawer out by the fridge since I'd have to pull the fridge back out to get it out. I'm going to paint the drawers and put my contact paper on them. I don't need to have the face to do all of that. Once I finally get these things finished I can finally put the drawer pulls on all 4 drawers and the false drawer under the sink. I've had those things in my possession for about 3 years now.



I cleaned up the garage real good. Then I tested out my snowblower and generator. Everything started right up and is running great.

Finally I topped off all my fluids on my car and filled the tires.

It was a long day. I'm exhausted.

Going to sleep well tonight.


Looks like it's going to be COLD. Probably won't have another day like today until mid-March.

:(

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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In a way, it sounds like you're getting buttoned up for the winter?

Say, OOC, what size generator do you have? Does it run on gasoline?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Over here, trying to learn everything I can about irrigation bc I have some areas that don't have any and some that need re-doing. I thought I'd have to do drip, but I found some Rainbird high efficiency nozzles that'll work fine for the space that I have. There's an online tutorial that details the pressure and linear velocity limitations and design requirements... I have listened to the same 10 minutes 5 times over bc hubby keeps interrupting me, but one of these days I'll get thru it!

Gonna need several distinct zones: one for watering once a week, one for every two weeks, and one for once a month, plus a separate one for a patch on the other side of the driveway which has a beautiful Canary Island pine and Cape honeysuckle "shrub" that's grown into a tree.

But I want to replace all of the electrically actuated valves with just gate valves bc some leak and some are frozen and all are really, really old. Plus I need a pressure -reducing valve. I don't mind putting in the PVC pipe and risers.. done repair and mods before... but not about to do plumbing.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I checked sis's 10-day. She's due for 42F on Wednesday. Is that about what your weather will be doing tomorrow?

It's great that you finished those drawers SIX! I hope you get a little charge out of them whenever you use them! At least, for the first couple of months, and then it'll be routine.


Hey, everything you never wanted to know about irrigation for waterwise So Cal landscaping. A lot is all about saving water, but there are general design principles, references to parts, and installation pix. I haven't QUITE made my way thru the whole thing, but I did pick up a bunch of handy tips.


This is what I got out of it:

Your sprinkler coverage should be head-to-head. That is, the radius of one sprinkler should reach the head of the next sprinkler.

It's best to use underground PVC pipes and sprinklers for lawns. Save drip irrigation for small oddly shaped garden areas. I have some planted areas that are marginal for sprinklers, but I'm going to try them first, given the complications of drip irrigation.

1/2" PVC lines can carry about 4 gallons per minute. Above that, the water linear velocity exceeds about 5 feet per second and you may get "water hammer". For me and the sprinkler heads I plan to use, that means an absolute maximum of 10 heads per line, 8-9 more conservatively.

Most people's water pressure is TOO HIGH. A pressure reducing valve (and inline filter) will protect your system from damage and clogging.

Spray heads are supposed to be attached to the main line with "swing lines" which will protect the line from being broken if someone steps on a head, and also allows you to move or add heads without having to splice it into a hard line.

Rainbird and Toro are good brands, the Rainbird catalog is here:


Enough info for me to plan out where and how I need to modify/add to my irrigation system.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Back and done.

On the flip side it looks like my phone may have died. I hate my life.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Back and done.

On the flip side it looks like my phone may have died. I hate my life.

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You mean cell phone?

Mine has died... well, locked up, anyway... twice. Wouldn't run, couldn't be shut down. Just a blank black screen. I had to let the battery run down to zero, then start charging it to restart it. Maybe that might work for you?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Got an afternoon mah jong game in because I went and checked what was happening at the senior's centre. Also got battery replaced in phone and its still not working. Will have to look into that tomorrow.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Got an afternoon mah jong game in because I went and checked what was happening at the senior's centre. Also got battery replaced in phone and its still not working. Will have to look into that tomorrow.

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Boy, quality control just isn't what it used to be.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh wow SIX! You battled bureaucracy to (an almost) standstill! That's as much as anyone can expect to do!!!

I'm impressed. As, as someone who used to be a bureaucrat, it takes a helluva lot to impress me!

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh wow SIX! You battled bureaucracy to (an almost) standstill! That's as much as anyone can expect to do!!!
I'm impressed. As, as someone who used to be a bureaucrat, it takes a helluva lot to impress me!



SIX:


Yeah. I'm sure I really got under their skin too since I was copying everybody in the chain with the emails, sometimes at 10:00PM when I felt like being saucy.


A few years back I made the silly "mistake" of being one of about 1,000 people in our township to vote us out of the township because of how we were being screwed. But even though that saved a few hundred a year for a few years I realize the potential of what I'd just done was that I'd have to start from scratch on this one day, and had a pretty good feeling this was coming.

So yeah... all that devaluing I had done and all of those contacts I'd made with our old township years ago went to waste, and wouldn't you know it... even though I got somebody from the old township to tell me on 3 separate occasions that they forwarded all of my old info to the new outfit, that must have been "lost in the mail". So when the computerized statewide reassessment happened, all that work had been erased and they nearly doubled my property taxes overnight.

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My property was flagged as "grossly undervalued", and in order to get it up to what they wanted they bastardized values all over my property tax card including the Effective Age, Effective Year and Condition, while also removing the Influence and Obsolescence Factors.

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After about 6-7 months of us going back and forth I did exactly what I didn't want to do and pushed them so hard I'd backed myself into a corner. They were going to pay to have an appraisal done.

I'm not exactly a fan of inviting strangers into my house to look at everything and take pictures of everything (and honestly, I was worried that if I didn't get the point across to the appraiser about the issues with the house, they might very well appraise it at what the reassessment this year started at... or more). But I knew that if I refused them at that point, they'd just tell me they were going with the original reassessment rather than what I'd already argued them down to so it had to be done.

I'm glad we did it in retrospect. I still got what I'd argued them down to, but instead of adding another $25k to my property value next year like they informed me they were going to, it's only being raised about $6k next year while everybody else gets up to another 30% increase off of this years massive increase. That right there is over $200 in additional savings every year going forward, and now we have a much lower base to work off of in the future even though the two highest yearly increases in property values in the housing market are behind us.

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Unless we find out the economy is so screwed up that house prices never drop and then they skyrocket again when the FED lowers the interest rates, I can't imagine that I'm going to have much more than negligible yearly increases going forward. I also have new contacts, and a whole lot of information in their system (and a ton of emails saved on my end to shove in their faces if they every decide to try anything funny).

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Oh wow SIX! You battled bureaucracy to (an almost) standstill! That's as much as anyone can expect to do!!!
I'm impressed. As, as someone who used to be a bureaucrat, it takes a helluva lot to impress me!



SIX:


Yeah. I'm sure I really got under their skin too since I was copying everybody in the chain with the emails, sometimes at 10:00PM when I felt like being saucy.


A few years back I made the silly "mistake" of being one of about 1,000 people in our township to vote us out of the township because of how we were being screwed. But even though that saved a few hundred a year for a few years I realize the potential of what I'd just done was that I'd have to start from scratch on this one day, and had a pretty good feeling this was coming.

So yeah... all that devaluing I had done and all of those contacts I'd made with our old township years ago went to waste, and wouldn't you know it... even though I got somebody from the old township to tell me on 3 separate occasions that they forwarded all of my old info to the new outfit, that must have been "lost in the mail". So when the computerized statewide reassessment happened, all that work had been erased and they nearly doubled my property taxes overnight.

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Wow!
But since this seems to have been a statewide program, I doubt whether your old township records would have survived. That's the point of a these programs.. to wipe out all the old adjustments.

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Well... I could see how they would reset values on the property tax card, but I had a huge file on hand with the old township of things I spent half a year gathering that nobody at the new outfit could locate (or so they say, anyhow). Fortunately, I still had almost all of it myself, and what I didn't I remembered how to get. There was some new stuff that I added this time that took a long time to figure out though.

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My property was flagged as "grossly undervalued", and in order to get it up to what they wanted they bastardized values all over my property tax card including the Effective Age, Effective Year and Condition, while also removing the Influence and Obsolescence Factors.

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I have no idea what this means. Maybe I should look into what's behind our assessment.

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It's all new to me. I learned a LOT this time around.

You have a Constructed Year, Constructed Age, Effective Year and Effective Age. The first two, obviously, are the year the house was built and the age of the house. The Effective Year signifies that some significant work was done to the house to fix and/or update it, and the Effective age reflects when that work was done. For the purposes of a tax assessment, that Effective Age is essentially your house being born again as brand new and any obsolescence factors you had in place as well as negative influence factors for normal/abnormal depreciation are either removed altogether or cut down drastically.

My house was built in 1959 and up until last year my property tax card's Constructed Age and Effective Age were both 1959. When they did the mass appraisal before I appealed it, they changed the Effective Year to 1990, basically cutting the age of my house in half.

Now I'm not going to lie to myself and say that nothing was ever done to this place. There was very obviously a new roof put on not long before I bought it. There were also double pane windows installed during the mid 90's as well because that's the date that was on some stickers on some of the windows. (But two of those already broke their seal and have a bunch of grimy build up that you can't clean between the panels).

When they put the new shingles on though, they didn't remove the old one, so I've got two layers of shingles on my house and garage. They put vinyl siding up over asbestos siding without taking that down first too, and when I was repairing and caulking the aluminum flashing on the ground level before repainting it a few years back I noticed that it was covering rotted out wood (when they replaced the windows, they must have done it from the inside without taking any of that rotted stuff off outside, knowing they were just going to cover it all up). So it's all pretty much just lipstick on a pig.

There are variables on the tax card that are supposed to be used to change the value of the house such as the Market and Neighborhood Multipliers. They are not supposed to change the age and the condition of the house at their whim to get the value that they want.

It's still "newer" on the Effective age than 1959 now, but I believe they have the Effective Age now listed at 1975 instead of 1990. And I also got them to add back the obsolescence reduction for the basement, I got them to re-remove the basement level as livable space and I got them to add back the negative influence factor on the land for the floodplain, which was about -40%. This is a good thing because I have an obscenely larger than normal plot here and the biggest increase to my taxes after the assessment was the land itself, and not the house believe it or not.

They were going to try telling me that this bullshit floodplain land that can't be built on and you could snap your ankle in half mowing because of all the mole tunnels alone was worth $20k more than I paid for the whole place when I bought it.

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After about 6-7 months of us going back and forth I did exactly what I didn't want to do and pushed them so hard I'd backed myself into a corner. They were going to pay to have an appraisal done.

I'm not exactly a fan of inviting strangers into my house to look at everything and take pictures of everything (and honestly, I was worried that if I didn't get the point across to the appraiser about the issues with the house, they might very well appraise it at what the reassessment this year started at... or more). But I knew that if I refused them at that point, they'd just tell me they were going with the original reassessment rather than what I'd already argued them down to so it had to be done.

I'm glad we did it in retrospect. I still got what I'd argued them down to, but instead of adding another $25k to my property value next year like they informed me they were going to, it's only being raised about $6k next year while everybody else gets up to another 30% increase off of this years massive increase. That right there is over $200 in additional savings every year going forward, and now we have a much lower base to work off of in the future even though the two highest yearly increases in property values in the housing market are behind us.

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So... you pointed out some of the major work still to be done? Like the floating house/sinking porch?Altho, at this point, I can't recall any else that you might have mentioned that still needs work. You must have been very persuasive!

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Yeah. Those things were key. And there's also 2 separate duct systems in the house as well. The only one that exists anymore is the one that goes to the 1960's upflow furnace in the attic that pushes down heat from 3 ceiling registers on the 1st and 2nd floor. The one in the basement is missing all the ductwork that should be in the crawlspace as well as the furnace. It must have all been taken out after a flood (I'm guessing the previous owners scrapped all of it along with the gutters they ripped off the house when they were getting foreclosed on).

So there's no heat coming from the 3 floor registers on the first floor, and there is no heat at all to the basement. Since it's a tri-level, that basement is open wide to the rest of the house. Along with that ancient furnace and the completely inefficient way they put that ductwork together, and the fact that the cold unheated basement is wide open it is quite expensive to heat this place. That's why I had the thermostat at only 52 degrees all winter last year with the insane gas prices. The only time I ever turned it higher than that was when it got so cold I was worried the pipes in the crawl might freeze.

Yeah... I kind of hit it off with the appraiser and he knew where I was coming from. I was actually under the impression when he left that he was going to appraise it lower than the appeal, but he came in a little bit higher. I wasn't too happy about that when I found it out, but the assessor worked with me and they're going to honor what they originally lowered it to for this year, and they're going to use the appraiser's number, which was supposed to be for January of 2022, for January of 2023 instead of raising my property another $25k next year like they previously indicated they would.

At the end of the day I still think that I'm overvalued, but this could have gone much, much worse and this is what negotiation is all about. I'm back down to the lowest assessment on the block when I was the highest not too long ago.

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Unless we find out the economy is so screwed up that house prices never drop and then they skyrocket again when the FED lowers the interest rates, I can't imagine that I'm going to have much more than negligible yearly increases going forward. I also have new contacts, and a whole lot of information in their system (and a ton of emails saved on my end to shove in their faces if they every decide to try anything funny).

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Well played, SIX!
There's nothing that a bureaucrat hates more than someone who saves all their paoerwiand correspondence! Excellent for any future legal proceedings if it should get that far.
:thumbs up:

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Yeah. And this time I'm going to make sure I file everything together so I don't ever have to go looking around in 10 different places for it. I'm just glad I kept all that old stuff and didn't just assume it was a one and done thing, or this would have been even more work than it already was.



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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Long-range forecasts aren't very accurate, but the latest forecast predicts a strong El Nino winter and spring.

For you, BRENDA, that could mean a lot less snow than usual (except the highest Coast Ranges.)

For you, SIX that means somewhat less snow than usual.

For us, we could get another banner winter rainfall in the Sierras.



Of course, the El Nino effect only works half the time, so maybe it'll be weather as usual.




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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Long-range forecasts aren't very accurate, but the latest forecast predicts a strong El Nino winter and spring.

For you, BRENDA, that could mean a lot less snow than usual (except the highest Coast Ranges.)

For you, SIX that means somewhat less snow than usual.

For us, we could get another banner winter rainfall in the Sierras.



Of course, the El Nino effect only works half the time, so maybe it'll be weather as usual.




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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Originally posted by Brenda:
Well, the new phone I bought and plugged in last night won't let me dial out. Oh, I can get a dial tone and I can hear it dialing but then nothing happens.

I hate telephones right now.

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