Projects/Home Improvement Thread

[Irish#1]

Im just an ol hillbilly that'll try anything once..lol. Had my old man come help me since hes done it before....I’ll try and fix anything myself before I call someone. I just hope my back can handle doing my roof this fall

I’ll try most home repairs at least once, but after that neighbor, replacing those springs is one thing I won’t try.

 

[ND87]

Garage door spring broke today. Can’t even get my car out. Lol

How much is this going to cost me?

2026 has been a bitch so far…

…fridge, AC, washing machine, and now garage door have all broken and needed replaced. In addition to my neighbor’s tree clogging my damn sewage pipe and needing to install a clean out to fix it. $$$

How old us the house? Seems maybe a maintenance cascade...

 

[zelezo vlk]

I’ll try most home repairs at least once, but after that neighbor, replacing those springs is one thing I won’t try.

Thanks for sharing. We don’t know the danger of seemingly innocuous objects. A buddy of mine years back recommended avoiding wire brushes on grills due to safety concerns, but I thought nothing of it. A couple months later, I read on ISD a guy sharing his wife went to the hospital because a grill brush wire broke off and got embedded in her burger. She survived but that stuff is scary

 

[Irish2155]

How old us the house? Seems maybe a maintenance cascade...

Was built in 1987. I’ve lived here for about 12 years.

 

[Irish#1]

Thanks for sharing. We don’t know the danger of seemingly innocuous objects. A buddy of mine years back recommended avoiding wire brushes on grills due to safety concerns, but I thought nothing of it. A couple months later, I read on ISD a guy sharing his wife went to the hospital because a grill brush wire broke off and got embedded in her burger. She survived but that stuff is scary

Don't know if you saw it or not, but there's a recall for those things right now. .

Millions of brushes from Nexgrill, Weber, and Cuisinart have been recalled.

There's even an ambulance chaser. lol

Grill Brush Recall Lawsuit | Metal Bristle Injuries

Swallowed a grill brush bristle? You may have a claim. Learn about recalls and injury lawsuits. Free case evaluation available.

www.awkolaw.com

 

[Irish#1]

Was built in 1987. I’ve lived here for about 12 years.

He didn't like living so close to me so he moved. lol

 

[Irish2155]

He didn't like living so close to me so he moved. lol

Walked out one night half drunk with my Miller Lite in hand and the neighbor’s son was “home” (just got out of prison) and giving tattoos in the garage.

When I got back to the house told the lady it was time to go. Next day my house was on the market.

You ever venture to the One More? Of all places, that’s where my mom chose for Mother’s Day breakfast. Lol

 

[Irish#1]

Walked out one night half drunk with my Miller Lite in hand and the neighbor’s son was “home” (just got out of prison) and giving tattoos in the garage.

When I got back to the house told the lady it was time to go. Next day my house was on the market.

You ever venture to the One More? Of all places, that’s where my mom chose for Mother’s Day breakfast. Lol

Never been. Looks a little rough for my taste.

 

[Irish#1]

Weekend project. Had the bricks left over from a long time ago. Needed a second hand to help set the limestone caps, 150lbs. Didn't think they would weigh that much.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

Weekend project. Had the bricks left over from a long time ago. Needed a second hand to help set the limestone caps, 150lbs. Didn't think they would weigh that much.

View attachment 3064112View attachment 3064113

Looks great! You found some solar lights I take it?

 

[BleedBlueGold]

Any tech guys here who can talk to me like I'm five regarding doing a photo backup to an external hard drive? Between my wife and I, we have 100,000 photos or more spread across three different cloud based systems (icloud, google photo, and light room cloud). I'd like to get all of these into one place and on a physical drive. How hard is this? What kind of drive should I get? Best way to transfer, organize, etc? How long will this take?

 

[ColoradoIrish]

Any tech guys here who can talk to me like I'm five regarding doing a photo backup to an external hard drive? Between my wife and I, we have 100,000 photos or more spread across three different cloud based systems (icloud, google photo, and light room cloud). I'd like to get all of these into one place and on a physical drive. How hard is this? What kind of drive should I get? Best way to transfer, organize, etc? How long will this take?

I'd get something like this with two drives, for redundancy. A nas makes it super simple and they have apps for easily backing up from phones and PCs.

UGREEN NASync DH2300 | 2-Bay Home NAS for Photo Backup & 64TB Storage

Bring family photos, phone backups, Mac files, and 4K media together on storage you control. The diskless DH2300 offers two SATA bays, RAID 1, AI photo.

ai.ugreen.com

 

[Irish#1]

Looks great! You found some solar lights I take it?

Yeah and I love them. A little pricey $111.00 each, but they're metal, 150 lumens and have two brightness settings. I use the brightest setting. They stay lit all night and put out just the right amount of light. This pic is when the sun has just set. Best part, the wife loves them.

 

[Irish#1]

Any tech guys here who can talk to me like I'm five regarding doing a photo backup to an external hard drive? Between my wife and I, we have 100,000 photos or more spread across three different cloud based systems (icloud, google photo, and light room cloud). I'd like to get all of these into one place and on a physical drive. How hard is this? What kind of drive should I get? Best way to transfer, organize, etc? How long will this take?

That device Colorado posted is pretty nice and a good investment. 100,000 pics is crazy, but todays technology makes it easy. If that is more than what you want to spend, you can get 1TB & 2TB thumb drives, but you can't manage them as easily. Are these photos taken with a camera or phone? Phones compress photos where a camera doesn't and those will take up more space. Regardless I wouldn't go less than 1TB.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

That device Colorado posted is pretty nice and a good investment. 100,000 pics is crazy, but todays technology makes it easy. If that is more than what you want to spend, you can get 1TB & 2TB thumb drives, but you can't manage them as easily. Are these photos taken with a camera or phone? Phones compress photos where a camera doesn't and those will take up more space. Regardless I wouldn't go less than 1TB.

Both. My wife and I are hobbyist photogs. Majority of her photos on with a phone but we both have DSLR cameras that we use often for kids, family, vacation, and other photography opportunities.

The 100k photo could be an exaggeration but then again, it might not. I need to look into that. I have 40k of photos myself and my wife takes far more than me, so I estimated.

We have enough storage at the moment that Google Photos and iCloud are essentially acting as redundant cloud storage. They both have enough capacity to house all of them equally (we pay for it though since we both have accounts). So this project isn't a necessity so much as me wanting a more organized and physical place for the photos.

I really wish I had the forward thinking to do this 10+ years ago because using a physical ext hd for my main backup and then linking the cloud storage to that drive would've made this a whole lot easier. Instead, I'm basically retro fitting it. My brain isn't tech savvy enough to work through the process of loading all of the cloud photos onto the hard drive AND moving forward, continue backing up any new ones w/o creating a ton of duplicates, etc. (I've already committed this issue once before and somehow ended up with random duplicates...not even sure how it happened).

End goal: Photos are backed up, organized, and when kids are older and out on their own, it's easy to share these with them and others who may want access. Gone are the days of handing down photo albums and tote bins full. Worst case, I filter these into "professional versus snap shots," keep the best ones, and buy photo books (I've done this before and it's pretty easy, fun....just takes up space)

 

[ColoradoIrish]

Both. My wife and I are hobbyist photogs. Majority of her photos on with a phone but we both have DSLR cameras that we use often for kids, family, vacation, and other photography opportunities.

The 100k photo could be an exaggeration but then again, it might not. I need to look into that. I have 40k of photos myself and my wife takes far more than me, so I estimated.

We have enough storage at the moment that Google Photos and iCloud are essentially acting as redundant cloud storage. They both have enough capacity to house all of them equally (we pay for it though since we both have accounts). So this project isn't a necessity so much as me wanting a more organized and physical place for the photos.

I really wish I had the forward thinking to do this 10+ years ago because using a physical ext hd for my main backup and then linking the cloud storage to that drive would've made this a whole lot easier. Instead, I'm basically retro fitting it. My brain isn't tech savvy enough to work through the process of loading all of the cloud photos onto the hard drive AND moving forward, continue backing up any new ones w/o creating a ton of duplicates, etc. (I've already committed this issue once before and somehow ended up with random duplicates...not even sure how it happened).

End goal: Photos are backed up, organized, and when kids are older and out on their own, it's easy to share these with them and others who may want access. Gone are the days of handing down photo albums and tote bins full. Worst case, I filter these into "professional versus snap shots," keep the best ones, and buy photo books (I've done this before and it's pretty easy, fun....just takes up space)

I have a nas similar to the one I posted paired with this backup service High-Performance Cloud Storage for AI Workloads | Backblaze

It works easily and flawless and I have a physical off-site encrypted backup with backblaze for my important pictures and files. They send a physical hard drive if you were to ever need it. Setup costs aren't insignificant but worth it for the peace of mind for the important stuff.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

I have a nas similar to the one I posted paired with this backup service High-Performance Cloud Storage for AI Workloads | Backblaze

It works easily and flawless and I have a physical off-site encrypted backup with backblaze for my important pictures and files. They send a physical hard drive if you were to ever need it. Setup costs aren't insignificant but worth it for the peace of mind for the important stuff.

Help me understand what this is. Is this a company that handles remote backup storage for me? Pay them to essentially do all the backup structuring etc?

 

[ColoradoIrish]

Yup. So say it was just photos on a hard drive at your house, and for whatever reason you lost that drive they would mail you a physical disk of everything you had backed up. I just don't trust any cloud provider with my data and I find this more secure. Might be overkill for your needs tho.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

Yup. So say it was just photos on a hard drive at your house, and for whatever reason you lost that drive they would mail you a physical disk of everything you had backed up. I just don't trust any cloud provider with my data and I find this more secure. Might be overkill for your needs tho.

It does sound like overkill, but if someone else is gonna take on this project, I might let them. lol

 

[ColoradoIrish]

It does sound like overkill, but if someone else is gonna take on this project, I might let them. lol

I'm an engineer and sometimes I tend to over engineer this type of thing for the common person lol