First off. This picture is vile and while I appreciate your need for assistance, you have ruined my day and I will be busy puking for the rest of the week.
To answer your actual question: I recommend just replacing it. Extra screen and cord is cheap and easy to install.
It’s an incredibly large screen that goes to my back porch. I’m not sure that the window frame itself is easily removable. Would that make it tricky to install a new screen with something that large and not movable?
There are a lot of videos on YouTube about how to replace a screen. Most of them that I have seen have a pane that only works once and then when you remove it, you replace it with rubber tubing that they sell from the store. They sell a special tools kit to pry the original pane off and some rollers and clips to get the screen back in nice by pushing the tubing into place without the groove. I recommend cutting a piece of wood to the exact spacing that the screen needs to maintained since making the screen tight can warp its profile and not fit correctly.
Have you tried warm/hot vinegar in a spray bottle? If you have hard water it could be mineral buildup and some warm vinegar would help dissolve it. If it's not from hard water it may be trickier, but a super soft bristled brush and some simple gree or other cleaner may work as well.
No kidding, I stared at it for a minute going “is this going to set it off?” and when my brain finally decided it couldn’t come up with an explanation it launched hard into the skin crawling, scalp itching and nausea. It’s like visual kryptonite.
Bar Keeper's friend will get that out, I use it when things get especially grimy. I've used it on a similar tub before that was pretty gnarly with discoloration worse than that.
It is very abrasive though, be careful not to scrub so hard you damage it.
I will echo the Bondo route that others suggested. The big box hardware stores sell quart cans of general purpose Bondo in the paint aisle.
Cut out the vaneer over the bad area with a razor blade or box cutter.
Sand with 80 or 120 grit to remove any loose bits of the board. The particle board will crumble a little, but it will be fine. Just dont go overboard. Vacuum it to remove most dust.
Using a flexible putty knife, get one to two globs of Bondo on a clean piece of cardboard. Don’t do too much as you will have about 5 minutes of working time once the hardener is added. Follow the instructions on how much hardener to add, you wont need much. Fold the hardener into the Bondo with the putty knife until it is a uniform color.
Spread the bondo over the area you cut out. Try to get it smooth, but dont overwork it. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Using 60 or 80 grit paper, sand it as it starts to dry. If it is gumming up the paper, it is still too wet to sand, give it another minute or two and try again. You are shaping it with this step. If you let it completely dry, it is hard as a rock and more difficult to sand.
Once it is in a good shape, switch to the next step up for sanding and repeat (60 to 80 to 120 to 180 to 220). Do not skip gits or you will just make work for yourself. You can probably stop at 180, but since it is next to vaneer, i’d go to 220. Again, if it is gumming the paper, wait a few minutes. Once you are at 220, use it to sand the entire cabinet to rough up the surface and accept primer better.
Once sanded, wipe the entire cabinet down with a tac cloth. I also recommend wiping the cabinets with a wax and greese remover so everything will stick better.
Now it is time for primer and paint. For a smooth finish, use a good quality foam mini-roller and foam brush for tighter areas.
Prime the cabinet using any water-based primer; killz is pretty good. They make an oil based that would be better, but will smell up your whole house, so I don’t recommend it unless you have excellent ventilation.
Lightly sand the peimer once it is fully dried with 220. If any spot is too light, do a second coat. Wipe up the dust.
Paint with an alkyd paint. Do at least 2 coats.
Not necessary, but if you want extra protection, you could use a foam brush (not a roller here) and do 3 to 4 coats of a water-based polyurethane on top of the paint. It might be overkill for what you want though.
This might seem like a lot, but you will have a great finish when done. Also, fair warning, Bondo has a strong smell. Open a window.
Oh wow this is excellent, thank you so much for taking the time to do such a detailed write up! Much appreciated. Going to get everything together this weekend and tackle it over the next few days. Thank you!!
I think there's a "right" way to do this and a "temporary" way to do this.
Temporary: Paint with a brush and jam paint into the cracks to fill them. Paint again if necessary.
Right: Remove wallpaper. Paint. This will be MUCH more work and could lead to replacing the drywall which could uncover mold or other problems in the walls and turn "just painting" into a MAJOR PROJECT.
I actually did this when I got my tankless. It saved like 6 units of water which was like 600 gallons over the 3 months but I was only like $17 off my bill.
$17 over 3 months isn’t worth the work imo but if you’re on a water budget or if it costs a lot in your area ymmv.
I have one of these, I put it on the slowest to heat/furthest sink. I put a 200uF capacitor on the trigger wires and plugged it in to a smart outlet. I added an automation in homeassistant to turn that outlet off after 3min whenever it gets cycled on. Whenever we need hot water we just toggle the button in HA and the showers all have hot water in <90s and <1L.
There should be three adjuster screws on the cylinder. One adjusts the swing speed (how fast it closes), one adjusts the latch speed (how fast in closes in the final few inches) and one adjusts the back stop (the limit to how wide it opens).
Likely you need to adjust the latch speed and slow it down. You might also need to adjust the swing speed.
Second this - if you google anti-collision stickers this should do the trick. Alternatively you could also use some scotch tape (non-transparent) and tape a line across the outside of the window every 3-4 inches for a DIY fix.
How well do they work though? I’ve read that in order to be effective you basically need lines every 50-75 mm, and a few stickers aren’t that effective
That’s true, so closely spaced markings are recommended. I had the same problem and this dotted tape solved it completely. Personally, I didn’t want clip art graphics on my windows, and I like the fact that the dotted tape minimizes interference with my view outside. You can find more information on other strategies here though (like drawing deterrent patterns with bar soap).
*Two inch spacing worked for me, but you might need to make it denser depending on the species you’re accidentally luring
Assuming that is an enameled tub. Try Bar Keeper’s Friend (powdered not the liquid) dampen tub lightly and add a decent amount following up with a light scrubbing, letting the paste to sit for several minutes. It may need to be repeated or increased scrubbing. The slurry will probably require dampening it a bit to work it around. I find it removes iron and hard water stains. I have used toilet bowel cleaner but it is too harsh when cleaning the tub nekked! Like others have said, a water softener is the way to go. Our filtration system is currently offline waiting to be re-bed.
For the 3 or 4 dollars I feel it is worth having on hand regardless. I use it quite often when cleaning pots and pans where Bon Ami doesn’t do the job as well.
Depending on the size of the flue, it would be entirely possible to put a 4"-6" stainless corrugated liner in there with a “T-Body” and “snout” going through the side of the chimney in the attic and close off the damper with an opening for airflow. Then you would have in-line duct fans with a rheostat control at both ends pushing air one way or the other. The duct fans that are the same diameter as the duct don’t have much pressure, so you would probably want a centrifugal fan to spend once and get desired results. You can buy the fan with the speed controller or they do have ones you plug into. The fans are loud, so the Mrs would appreciate it if it were inside of a baffle box to keep the noise down while she works. How low speed the fans can go is limited, so don’t expect to have infinitely varial speeds without spending a lot more.
There also are temperature controllers so you can have the fans cycle to regulate temperature without manual control. You would probably want to put that on only the attic fan if you went that route.
You could use galvanized duct, but it will rot out over time in the flue and it is harder to install vs a stainless corrugated liner.
The fans are $200-400 depending on how much chooch you want. The liner runs $12-16 per foot. The T-Body and snout are about $150-200.
There are bi-directional varial speed duct fans but they carry a premium, typically require custom duct manifold/plenum fabrication, and are two fans put together to achieve the pressure required. Going with one fan at each end is easier, cheaper, and easier to repair should one fan fail.
If it were my project, I would try just having the fan in the attic pulling and control it with a speed control plus temperature controller. If that wasn’t enough is when I would add the fan in the basement and do manual control with variable speed and have both fans push. I don’t really see why you would want to pull air from the attic, but you seem to feel you would need to.
It can be tricky to get the snout on the T-Body, you will want some 1/4" extensions and impact, as well as someone who can help you.
I've been thinking about building a similar system for my home.
I live in a geodesic home and the main floor is almost always at a comfortable temperature but the basement floor is always cold.
Thinking about purchasing some vent booster registers and wiring them in with some ducting in one of the walls to suck the cold air out of the basement and push it up into the main floor or possibly all the way up to the top floor.
I checked AliExpress and there were some sellers there who had what I was looking for in the 40 to $80 range, but I imagine the main cost is going to be dropping 10 to 20 ft of ducting through the walls.
I don't think that one of them by itself will completely solve the problem but I feel like since it would be sucking the coldest air in the entire house and mixing it in with the hottest air in the entire house that it would at least help ameliorate the issues.
In your case there are a lot of complexities that may make such a simple solution less viable than OPs.
The total volume of the two spaces, the floor and wall construction, if the basement is finished, and the layout of the basement and main floor all come into play.
Adding ducting to the walls may be a major hassle and expense.
If it were my house, I would probably push air up from two spots into the main floor via registers I added or add more returns to the basement and hope the HVAC circulation helps with the top floor without having to add dampers to the main and top floors in both cases.
I tested the idea with a small blower fan. Well I say small but it's a decent sized and can move a lot of air.
I put it at the base of the stairs and by itself it caused the air temperatures to normalize between the bottom floor and the middle floor.
But it's also super power hungry and I don't want to burn 300 watts of power an hour 24/7 to normalize the Air temps.
There is a central wall that goes from the top to the bottom in the middle of the dome and I believe there is a pocket that I can utilize to hide the ducting.
I guess when I finally execute on the plan I'll take some pictures and show off my handiwork.
Should have been more precise. I have a funny situation. My house has had four major remodels performed over the past 80 years. One of them involved extending the roof and totally covering a chimney (there is another chimney elsewhere in the house). Rather than remove the chimney, they built around it including adding a closet on the middle floor. The closet is wider than the chimney, but the whole thing is framed out as a rectangle, so I have like 1x2’ of empty space leading from my attic to the basement ceiling.
So not need for liners.
I don’t really see why you would want to pull air from the attic, but you seem to feel you would need to.
I’m by no means an HVAC expert, but I was thinking that pulling hot air from the hottest point in the house (attic room ceiling) would provide the best circulation. Thinking more about it, I think I’d be better off having it be one-directional if only so I can install a filter to keep it from filling up with dust. I can convince myself that either direction is the better option. Maybe I’ll install the blower somewhere in the middle where it’s easy to access.
If the masonry is gone and there is just a framed out hole then galvanized would totally work with fairly easy install with the help of a second person or some clever use of support. You wouldn’t want to just blow air through the cavity without ducting as it would be horribly inefficient and tank the air velocity across that much distance.
Adding an in-line towards the middle does mean having controls up in the attic more involved and you do want the Mrs to have control over the fan there instead of her having to go downstairs.
If you wanted to circulate the air instead of forcing air with a passive return, then you get into a more complex situation with two ducts and fairly informed placement of intake and return.
Pulling into the attic will help to lower temps and will be the simplest/cheapest option so long as there isn’t a wall you can put a window heat pump unit in.
Do you think I could get away with some flexible ducting? Might be hard to navigate the rigid stuff into these spaces. Also, insulated ducting or no (thinking about condensation).
When you say flexible ducting, are you talking aluminized plastic or the corrugated aluminum? That would be a fair amount of weight for flexi in either case, you would want to have access along the route to secure it, especially if it is insulated. The aluminized plastic would need more support than aluminum.
Without site inspection, I couldn’t say how necessary insulating the duct would be. Using insulated duct would be a good “better safe than sorry” move but will make installation without full access a bit of a bother.
What reason does your handyman give for needing a second fan in your attic? What’s going to be different for your house? I’m assuming your attic is a typical uninsulated attic in the US. I live in Texas, and as far as the eye can see there are houses with uninsulated, passively-ventilated attics. Almost no one has powered attic ventilation. I have a thick layer of blown-in insulation up there, and with the volume of air your handyman wants to move, I’d be concerned the insulation would move with it.
In an ideal world, all our attics would be inside the insulated envelope of our homes, but our building standards are not there. So where you can affect energy efficiency is in improving the impermeability of your insulation as it currently exists. If you’re going for energy efficiency, slightly lowering the ambient temperature of your attic in the summer heat is just not an effective solution. Spend that money instead on fully sealing all the holes around joints and fixtures that are currently leaking air between your living space ceiling and your attic, and improving the R value of your attic insulation.
I don’t know if what I’m talking about applies to your house, but if so, check out this Matt Risinger video for a lot more detail.
The reason the handyman gave for installing two fans was basic, to improve the dispersal of hot air. My partner and I concluded that removing heat would be the most effective first step to decreasing the temperature of the house, but we can be talked into considering insulation first. We’ll look into leak patching and into insulation.
Do you happen to know if during the winter months, if insulation would significantly block the house from being heated by the sun? We are looking to get a heat pump in the long run and originally planned to have the insulation done at the same time, but in the meantime, winters can get cold here and any heat we get goes a long way.
Improving the insulation barrier between your ceiling and attic will only serve to increase your home’s heat retention in the winter. When it’s cold outside, the sun heating your attic is not going to increase the heat in your home more than the cold ambient temperature in your attic is going to decrease it. Before you pay to have this work done I’d genuinely consider whether there are other projects that would be much more impactful you could do instead. Definitely get other opinions from contractors first (never just get one quote for any project, prices and recommendations can vary widely) and see if you can get a certified home performance contractor to take a look at your goals
That’s what happens when you do it yourself. You notice the flaws more.
I spent months redoing my bathroom. I moved a wall, re-routed plumbing installed a new tub, and tiled. So much tiling. I ripped some out I was so pissed at how it went in. I still see every spot that I didn’t like.
After that experience I went into the bathroom at my work and looked at the tiling in there. The tiles directly in front of the unrinal I’ve been peeing in for 6+years. They were way worse than some of the stuff I was fussing over, and I never noticed.
Give yourself credit for finishing the fucking job. Learn to not make the same mistakes, and go out and make new mistakes to learn from.
I have to agree with the other commenters. It’s not perfect but professionals do the same thing. I paid 10x what you did and got the same result so you honestly win.
Also you can still fix it with joint compound but you’d have to retexture and paint.
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