peejman

Finding a local fabricator who's willing to help is probably the best option. YouTube stuff can help as well. There's also folks here who might be able to answer questions...

Instead of 35 deg and rain 6 days out of 7, I'll take snow every time.

We're right on the edge of where heat pumps work acceptably in the winter. A well insulated house with good windows and a relatively new heat pump will be fine during a normal winter. When the polar vortex hits, heat pumps struggle so gas is the way to go. All else being equal, I'd choose gas heat. But newer dual fuel units are worth a thorough look.

My parents have a dual fuel heat pump. The emergency heat is propane, they have an in-ground tank. Another point to note, most HVAC units will benefit from switching the air handler to "on" rather than auto. The HVAC works by moving air through the house, but a lot of units "on" time isn't enough to fully circulate the air. It can take several minutes for the unit to get the air moving, so short cycle times leave warm and cool spots in the house and the extra cycles increase wear on the system. You might think running the fan 24/7 will use more electricity, but our electric bill went down $40/mo in the summer due to more efficient operation. You also get cleaner interior air. Newer systems usually have 2 speed fans so the low speed runs all the time and it switches to high speed when heating or cooling.

Let the emergency heat cycle on its own. Leaving the emergency on will wear out the bearings in your electric meter. Heat pumps are outside because they're noisy and you don't want the refrigerant in the house if it leaks. They do recirculate the interior air, but its trying to draw heat from the cold outside air.

I got my wife one of those tabletop seed starter boxes for Christmas. She started a bunch of seeds today. Hopefully they'll sprout and the weather will cooperate when its time to move the seedlings outside.

Perpendicular would be normal. Just because I'm the nerdy engineer type, I'd put some blocking between the joists about 4ft from the wall at a minimum. I put cross braces with 4x4's on concrete bases under my aquarium. A water bed has a footprint at least 4x bigger than a typical safe. That makes a big difference.

Depends on which way the joists run, what kind of joists they are, how they're attached, and how much the safes weigh.

We planted 3 or 4 hazelnut bushes a few years ago. From my perspective, they're useless. They're big, they spread like crazy, they don't have pretty flowers, and they don't make enough nuts to bother with. I dont really like hazelnuts anyway. The song birds like to nest in them, but that's their only redeeming quality. YMMV.

Do the math and make sure it makes sense. There's plenty of online loan calculators available to help. Consider the investment value of the cash you have to put down 30 years from now. It depends a lot on how far into your loan you are, and is the idea of starting over with 30 years to go ok? How old will you be when the loan is done? Make sure the terms of the new loan are to your liking. Bankers can try to slip something past you thats to their benefit.

Nutsy didn't make it out of his truck alive. No one else was hurt.

What do you mean by bad?

Then just say the same "limited statement" over and over..... "They broke the door down, they had guns, I shot this one and the other 2 ran. I called 911. " Its important to be the first one to call it in. The first caller is the default victim. It can be difficult to reverse that notion once its in the officers' minds. A friend of mine was involved in a shooting fairly recently. A nut job thought my friend was seeing his girl. Threats had occurred. Nutsy finally lost it, assaulted the girl and texted my friend saying he was coming to kill him and his family. My friend called 911 and was trying to bug out with his family when nutsy got there. The shootout happened in the driveway. The cops got there 2 minutes later. My friend never even got cuffed.

You absolutely should have, we're all glad you did. You don't have to bear this burden alone, everyone needs help sometimes.

Double tap.

Same here. Eyes aren't replaceable yet.

Unfortunately everyone has a breaking point. I suspect he had more than annoying neighbors on his plate.

I just put tires on the minivan again. The prior 2 sets of 80k rated Coopers didn't make it to 50k. They got rotated every 5k and never dropped more than about 3psi below the set point. Time will tell if these Continentals fair any better. Some cars are much harder on tires than others. Depends on the factory alignment, how much time you spend driving around parking lots, front/rear weight bias, air pressure, rotations, lots of things...

I have a 10 yr old. Prayers for your family. I can't imagine how hard that is. We'll help in any way we can.

Oil prices may go up but demand has gone down. People drive a lot less miles with so many working from home. Though once the world reopens, I expect vacations to get booked up fast.

The Toyota guys don't seem to break stuff with the same level of enthusiasm and wanton disregard as the jeep guys. You gotta raise your game.

You realize this is a public forum, right?

Windrock and Royal Blue north of Knoxville. That's where the jeep guys go to break stuff.

Mostly because of having installed a bunch of can lights in my parents' house. Frequently they're not installed correctly, crooked, wired wrong, etc. It takes a bunch of them to light a room, so they're very inefficient energy wise. I also like good natural light that's relatively bright. I just prefer more earth tones than stark white. Too sterile for me, but easy to paint over. And white walls and kids don't mix.

You can defend yourself and your loved ones from risk of overwhelming and imminent bodily harm. You're not obligated to retreat. You're not permitted to prevent theft of property with deadly force. IANAL.