Thread: So I woke up on Saturday and bought a house.

Old guy, (okay can I call you something else?) I've given a bit of thought to how I'd like to do it. The first thing I thought of was an I-beam or serious hunk of lumber running the length of the garage to get rid of the center supports. The problem with that, is that it would require the center support on the face of the building to remain. I want to get rid of that too entirely, and go with one double-wide garage door. I really want to be able to drive a project car into the center of the place and do all sort of work with tons of room on each side if I have to. So a beam running that direction doesn't sound like it is in the cards for me. Unless I could build a really strong header above the front door, but something tells me that's going to get expensive and more complicated than the alternative.

I've also been told that a beam running lengthwise would cut into my vertical space by needing to run under the joists? I dunno, probably not true but it worried me at the time.

I was at Lowe's yesterday and just priced lumber for the heck of it. It doesn't seem too expensive to get done what I want to get done. This is one project I might actually be looking forward to.

An I-beam butted up and bolted into the middle of another I-beam to form a T. You would have to perform some major reconstruction to make it look good but that would definitely work.

congrats man. love the back yard

Wow, didnt know you got a house Ben, haha. Congrats on the purchase. I love owning my own home. Man your house prices are still way up there though. My house is almost the same size, built in the same time frame, and on a lot twice the size of yours and we got ours for 110k. I know SC is pretty high on home prices still though and wernt greatly affected by economy. Looks good man and hope to see more pics. Im finally getting back to finish fixing up mine now that Im making more money, haha. Congrats and enjoy.

Facebook album permalink (in case the images don't show up in the future).

I'm finally getting around to posting some more pics.

Earlier I talked about getting a gas stove since the one in there was brand new electric we thought we could actually sell it (we eventually sold it for $200 on Craig's List).

Here's pics of the stove.








We had the plumbers come in and add a gas line for the stove, and cap off the line to the gas logs in the fire place. Going to burn real wood for as long as I can.

The plumbers ended up putting the line about 3" away from the wall.




The stove only has a 2" recess in the back, so it sits about an inch more off the wall than it has to and about 2 inches total.




We called them back to see if they could fix this, and they gave us some BS about not wanting to drill through a joist or something and that they had done their best. Then then took the stove and rammed it back into position to try to force things. This bent a gas line on the stove itself and almost punctured the hose when it nearly missed the back of an exposed screw.

Needless to say I told them I'd seen enough, and told them to leave.

I've since widened the hole in the floor some and done some creative bending on the copper line itself to get maximum clearance out of the bad situation. It sits decently far back now and we've stopped even thinking about it.

Were they smoking while doing this... Then they would have been cool tools.

We will not be using Chase Plumbing in Columbia again.

Facebook album permalink (in case the images don't show up in the future).

As a sort of combination house warming gift and Christmas gift (yah, I'm that far behind) Katie's parents told us they'd buy us a TV. With the projector it was getting old watching TV only in the dark. Time to enter the 21st century.

As you all know, I'm picky about things. TVs are no exception. After looking around for quite a while, we settled on a ViewSonic N4285p unit. This was released in late 2007 I think and sold for $2.5k then? At around $850 in December 2010, the price was quite a bit more than the comparably sized models selling around Black Friday but I have to say it's been worth it. It is the best TV we could have purchased by far. I'll get into details if anyone asks.



Temporary setup until we get some furniture up in this bitch.


Oblig. cat shot.

That's one hell of a center channel you have the tv on.

Ok I saw the pruce of the house.