Tree

[Haggis@wk]

I had a tree removed today. It was getting too big, the roots were threatening my pipes and besides I truly hate Live Oak trees, a holdover from my childhood when I had to rake those damn tiny leaves.

Thought I'd do a montage of photos. From start to finish, digging up the stump and all roots five inches below the surface, took exactly one hour, amazing!























My mailbox is the tilting one. We're thinking of starting a pool on when ut will fall.

[jamiebk]

amazing what those stump grinders will do. We had one for a tree in our front yard as well. One word of advise if I may...the stump grinding leaves a lot of course wood chips to deal with. I see that you have it nicely graded flat. However, it's really hard to get grass (or sod) to "stick" to that stuff. You usually have to dig it out and replace it with 5-6 inches of topsoil (at least I did).

Got a kick out of the mailbox. Maybe you could convince it with the bumper of your car....

[Shapley]

Not to mention the attraction all that soft wood has to termites. When the grindings are gone, they'll be looking for desert. I hope your house is dry...

Nice house, what little can be seen of it. Is that George Bush's house down the street?

[piqaboo]

I bet your neighbors are crying.

[Haggis@wk]

I bet your neighbors are crying.

Not really, the other tree you can see in the photos, my next-door neighbor's, will be pleased. Between the two trees hardly any grass grew and when it rains the water pulls a lot of topsoil away. I hope that my grass will come back this spring. Yeah Jamie, I'll stick some topsoil on it anyway to make up for the erosion. I'm glad it's gone. I had its companion chopped down a few years ago and the difference was amazing. I've never thought that Live Oaks were all that attractive and they were very easily knocked over in hurricanes. If I ever plant another tree it will be either a real fruit tree or a shade tree.

[Haggis@wk]

Nice house, what little can be seen of it. Is that George Bush's house down the street?

Are you kidding? These houses are just barely above "trailer trash" standards in Plano. If you don't have 5K+ sq. ft. in this town you qualify for aid and food stamps!!

[Haggis@wk]

Here's the treeless house. Look at the left front window and you can see Haggis wondering why I'm checking the mail without him.

[Shapley]

I wish I had done my house in brick or stone. We used vinyl siding. Had I been smart, I'd have included a brick ledge on the foundation so we could add a brick veneer later. As it is, I'l have to figure out an alternative method of adding a 'maintenance free' exterior.

[BigJon]

I LOVE masonry houses. Can't afford 'em, but I love 'em all the same. We've got one small panel of brick around our front window, that's all. House plans called for it around the garage front too, but I guess they cheaped out at construction time.

[Haggis@wk]

Our biggest concern here is foundation problems. The north Texas soil dries up very quickly in the summer and in drought condition we have to go out and "water" the house. It's not unusual to see a two-inch gap between the soil and the foundation on really dry days. I try to water the soil around the foundation until the soil 'snugs" back up against the foundation

[piqaboo]

Purty house.
[envy] I think you could fit our house on that patch of dead lawn. [/envy]

We want to repaint one of these days, but the last three layers of stucco on our place was misapplied and so it peels.
Yellow, blue, green, dark brown.

I miss big trees. There were three giants within a house of ours when we moved in. The last was cut down last year.
Two pines and a camphor tree.
We put in 4 shade trees, 3 are still alive but oh they grow slowly...

[jamiebk]

Indeed nice! That place would sell for $800M to $1MM out here in CA even now. We can't have much brick though because of the obviouls earthquake issues. Mine is a much more modest joint in a rural portion of the Bay Area (up north)




You'll notice the E-X-P-A-N-S-I-V-E yard! (not!!) you get a postage stamp size out here.

[Shapley]

Trees we have. Too many, at times. And we have a big yard:



When the ice hit last winter, some of the trees came down, but we still have plenty.



You can see the trees behind the house in this view a little better. There is a creek back there, about 40 feet below the level of the house. I'll have to get a decent picture back there sometime.

[Haggis@wk]

Indeed nice! That place would sell for $800M to $1MM out here in CA even now.

It would be tough getting $200K for mine before the current housing bubble burst. You can get 3-5K new/used house for under $300K in Plano, Texas. The average per sq. ft. price is $66. There are some huge houses here under $400K. Here's a map of the average prices in Plano. I'm in zip code 75023. Houses are selling and people are moving into Texas in record numbers. There are still jobs to be had and no state income tax helps a lot. Our cost of living is also lower. Can I tempt ya to move here?

[piqaboo]

I dunno. How's the opera?

Shap, what do you guys think of your roof? We're semi-considering getting that kind if we ever remodel or when we have to re-roof (that latter being a decade or so away, we hope).

[jamiebk]

Can I tempt ya to move here?

probably not.

[Shapley]

Shap, what do you guys think of your roof? We're semi-considering getting that kind if we ever remodel or when we have to re-roof (that latter being a decade or so away, we hope).

We like it, and we hope it lives up to the durability promise. It has one big drawback, which most likely won't be an issue to you: When the ice and snow accumulate, they tend to come off in massive loads. The snow usually falls in strips equal to the length of the roof, 16" wide (the width of the space between standing seams). for a 6" snow, that can equate to about 800# at a time coming crashing down. The drop from the front eave is about 17'. In the back, it is about 26'. That's quite a load coming down hard. It is frightening to hear it hit.

Last years ice storm was worse. We had lots of ice and snow, and a loss of power. I believe there was about 5" - 6" of packed ice and snow on top of the house. When the ice came down, the entire roofload came down at once. I estimated it at about 26,000# for the back half of the main house. There is a deck back there, and when the ice hit the deck it shook the whole house, and knocked the toe board off the deck. I was surprised the deck withstood the impact.

We didn't install gutters, which was probably a good thing. I think it would have taken the gutters off when it came down. They do offer welded tabs to prevent the ice from coming down that way, but we weren't advised to install them and didn't think to ask.

We installed 30 year shingles on the house when we built it, but a hailstorm took them out after only about eight. The metal roof seemed like a better choice. I had wanted to install one when we built the house, but couldn't afford it.

I had also looked at the corrugated asphalt roof. It sounded good in the brochures, but I have yet to find anyone who has installed it on anything other than a horse-barn.

Oh, another point. We bought the standing-seam roof, the type with the fasteners protected below the roof. Lots of metal roofs in our area are of the exposed-fastener type. The fasteners are installed atop the ridge, and have a rubber washer around them to seal out the elements. My observations of those roofs were that: 1) Nearly everybody that calls himself a capenter installs them, and many don't have a clue what they are doing. If you drive the nails to hard, the ridge bends and the fastener will not seal, and 2) the washers seem degrade over time. I've seen some of the older roofs in which the washers were dry and cracked or, in some case, gone completely. The salesman assured us that the 'new generation' of washers would 'outlast the roof', but I didn't buy it.

Choose your installer carefully. Best to contact the roof manufacturer or dealer and see if they have an approved list of installers. Ours was very professional and did an excellent job.

[piqaboo]

There's a similar roof about 2 blocks away. I suspect we'd ask them about their experience too.

Good point about the protected seals. I dont care what it is, it gets beat up by sun, heat and weather.

[Shapley]

The standing-seam roofs were common in Saratoga Springs, NY. We had one on the roof the house we rented when I was stationed there. Many of them were quite old, and still in good shape. They were mostly galvanized, rather than painted, and many of them had coatings of tar. I though this was done as a sealant, but my neighbor said it was so you could walk on them if you had to do so. Chimney sweeping, caulking around the roof penetrations, and house painting were cited as reasons for needing to walk on the roofs.

The house we rented was a two-story, with a large porch around the front of the lower story. We just rented the upper floor, and the living room windows opened onto the porch roof. There were no screens on the windows, which I thought odd, though we saw little need for them. Mosquitoes were never a bother, and flies seemed to enter very infrequently. Wasps were a minor problem (none of us were allergic and they, too, entered infrequently), but squirrels would enter the house occassionally. Anyhow, I would frequently climb out on the porch roof on warm days, and watch the activity along the street, like a true New Yorker, I suppose. I was thankful for the tar, because the metal roof, even on the gentle slope of the porch, seemed to be quite slippery where there was none.

All the metal roofs we saw there were the standing-seam protected-fastener type.

[Haggis@wk]

The best energy efficient house I've ever owned was the first one we bought in Apple Valley, CA. The builder built it for himself but when his wife caught him fooling around they sold it. The roof was manufactured concrete tile and I would love to have a roof like that here. If a tile broke I just bought a replacement although I had several dozen extras. All the eves stuck out so low that no window received direct sunlight. Since the high desert gets cool (cold!) at night by the time the sun came up the house stayed cool until noon or later even in those blistering summers.

I've mentioned before that it had a solar water heater that when it worked was a charm but when it broke I almost had to refinance to get the money to fix it. I got my money's worth only because I didn't but it to start with. And as I also mentioned there's no thermostat on the Sun, the water could easily heat up enough to badly burn the unsuspecting.

We made an offer on the house. The tenant (the aforementioned jilted wife) accepted, and then made some comment that we must have made our offer because she had just dropped the price by $10,000. We said we made the offer because the house had just been put on the market that day. It turns out her realtor (89 years old) had never listed the house.

Because she never had any lookers she thought she had listed it for too much money (she hadn't) and her broker (who had realized his error) told her she had to drop the price and she did. She still had a pending lawsuit against him when he finally died (at 93)

Because they closed the base that house became an albatross and money pit in one. I lost tens of thousands $$ on mortgage and eventual sale price, oh well, that's life.