sibsie

Mr Sibsie? Is that you?

We have that debate *all* the time though he goes on far more than Pulaski.

Today I was going the garden, sorry yard and mowing the lawn. Apparently I was using a weed whacker and not a strimmer.

Bob

aye, grass can be so pesky

Am impressed by the number of sit down mowers around, some people need them, but most around here have tiny gardens yet still use them...what happened to getting a kid down the road to mow the lawn?

Pulaski

Quite, and it would be a d@mn sight cheaper than the $200, (.... $300, .... more?) that a "yard service" would cost each month.

I, for one, have my own mower and mow my own yard, thank you very much; and if I didn't want to do yard work, and mow my own grass, I would have bought an apartment rather than pay the silly money to have someone tned my yard for me.

Nigel

Now personally I think ride-on mowers are brill! My eleven year old son loves doing the lawn and my teenage girls even get a kick out of it. It's a bit like a slow go-cart (though some of the newer ones are pretty nifty). I agree on lawn size though; if your yard is big enough, you wouldn't want anything else (unless you like the idea of spending two days mowing grass every week).

On an earlier question re Allen keys -- up here in NE they're generally referred to as hex keys (makes sense to me).

As for timber frame vs brick ... we have a fair number of older brick homes up here, so at one time brick was more common. As I understand it, it's a matter of economics. It's possible to build a timber-framed house for a fraction of the cost of a brick house (brick is less abundant and therefore expensive as a material, plus there aren't too many brickies around so labour/labor is expensive). Another big plus - it takes half the time to build the house!

The biggest drawback I find with timber is it's rather enticing for the wood-eating bugs. Up in NE where many of the houses are in the woods it's hard to keep nature at bay. Between termites and carpenter ants it's a wonder any house stays standing for longer than a few years. The answer it seems is to pour chemicals into the ground. Now that's reassuring when much of the water comes from artesian wells. Don't know why someone hasn't invented an impregnated timber that could be used for the first foot of a structure - thereby preventing the buggers getting in at all.

Nigel

What I don't understand is that in the UK we could buy Dry Rot / Wet Rot killer, which was designed to kill the fungus, yet I can't find anyone here who's even heard of such a thing.
Any ideas?

snowbunny

We do brick *facades* here -- the walls are still made of wood framing, insulation, and plasterboard. The early German settlers made houses of the native limestone, and some of those still stand. Ya gotta remember -- in the olden days hauling bricks for a house was a long and expensive process if you didn't happen to live near to a brick-making area (clay).

snowbunny

It exists -- I'm forgetting its name, but it contains arsenic.

dbark

Yes, yes, you're quite right Pulaski (as usual ) - it just takes a mind leap for me, to go from living in a 1904 London house to a 2002 southern US house! I mean - foundations, what foundations??

Pulaski

You're talking about your London house, right? .... I think that you may be shocked to dicover how little depth of foundation houses in the UK were built with 100 years ago.

My parents' house, built less than fifty years ago, has no more than 3ft foundations (not in London, but built on similar valley-floor clay), which were easily visible when they had an extension built and the extension had to have foundations a whole foot deeper than the original house.