For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

[mike24forever]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

As of today, my wife and I paid off our home. No more mortgage for us.

[Trevytrev11]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

As of today, my wife and I paid off our home. No more mortgage for us.

Congrats. I can't even begin to imagine what that will feel like. Has to feel great....only 28 years to go for me!

[Trevytrev11]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

From what I've read, they don't recommend setting it up near a kitchen (most likely place where the home owner would accidentally break glass). I don't really have a choice with that since the sliding door faces my kitchen peninsula.

The other is that you can go over and disarm it. If you have it on no delay (which makes the most sense IMO) then you'll have to answer the call from the monitoring service that everything is cool.

Our house was broken into this summer. At that time we had an alarm system with a motion detector installed. Because of pet's, we never use the motion detector (we have a cat).

From what was explained to us, the weight of the animal doesn't matter, but the height does. Height and weight usually correlate, so that is why they use weight when discussing because most people know how heavy their pets are, but not how tall they are. The height matters because they can aim the motion sensor higher or lower to ignore a dog. However, cats are notorious for climbing on furniture, so he said most people with cats can't use their motion sensor because it will go off frequently.

Too little too late for us, but we installed a camera system and glass break sensor soon after. With the glass break sensor, ours will only go off if the alarm is set. Not sure if yours is the same or not, but this means a broken glass is not an issue unless it happens when the alarm is set, which of course would be cause for concern.

We were also told by the sheriff that the number one thing you can do is to put up cameras. They are the biggest deterrent for burglars, which is why we installed them as soon after as possible.

Of course, this morning I get a call from the monitoring company saying our alarm went off, but the sheriff came out and didn't see anything. Having the cameras makes it nice as I can access the playback from my phone or from work and check to see if anything suspicious happened. We don't get many false alarms, but after being broken into, any call from the monitoring company instantly puts me on edge.

[Phobia]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

I had a hilarious moment this weekend. So if yall remember a week ago or so I installed bunch of different lights. This fixture was one of them.

Spoiler

So I walk into the bathroom right before we are about to leave for a college baseball game. I was heading to put on some cologne when I grabbed the medicine cabinet to retrieve my smell good stuff. Can you see the issue from the picture................(the mirror opens) I damn near ripped the light fixture off and can't believe I didn't break the glass. I burst out laughing, because I never even considered it hanging in the way. So I tell the wife to come see, "so your pretty little fixture you picked out....you failed to factor in something. Go get something out the medicine cabinet." So she started laughing and now she is going to swap the fixture out for a different one. Pros of being the showroom manager. Granted I could move the box up and do some dry wall patching but screw all that lol.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Yeah from the picture it looks like you would have had clearance......

[jeremym480]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Not too much longer before spring is here... helping my wife plant flowers, mulching, and cutting the grass every weekend is just around the corner. I purchased a pressure washer a few weeks ago so I'm going to add that to the my spring cleaning this year too.

Lastly, I'm thinking about building a raised bed in my back yard and growing vegetables this year. In the past I've tried growing tomatoes in some 5 gallon buckets, but it's never really worked out too well. There's nothing better than fresh vegetables though, so I'm really looking forward to giving it another shot.

[Phobia]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Not too much longer before spring is here... helping my wife plant flowers, mulching, and cutting the grass every weekend is just around the corner. I purchased a pressure washer a few weeks ago so I'm going to add that to the my spring cleaning this year too.

Lastly, I'm thinking about building a raised bed in my back yard and growing vegetables this year. In the past I've tried growing tomatoes in some 5 gallon buckets, but it's never really worked out too well. There's nothing better than fresh vegetables though, so I'm really looking forward to giving it another shot.

I have a nice size 16' x 20' garden which I grew Okra, black beauty egg plant, yellow squash, water melon, cucumbers, lima beans, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. I tell you one thing, tomatoes are a pain in the ***. They always have something wrong with them. This year I'm not messing with them.

You right about fresh veggies, just experiment with what you like. Lima beans, don't bother, you need 40 damn plants to get anything worth picking and dealing with.

[jeremym480]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

I have a nice size 16' x 20' garden which I grew Okra, black beauty egg plant, yellow squash, water melon, cucumbers, lima beans, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. I tell you one thing, tomatoes are a pain in the ***. They always have something wrong with them. This year I'm not messing with them.

You right about fresh veggies, just experiment with what you like. Lima beans, don't bother, you need 40 damn plants to get anything worth picking and dealing with.

I'm thinking about just tomato's, cucumbers and maybe yellow squash too.

Hopefully, I can change my luck with tomato's this go around. Last year I think I only got 3 or 4 off of the 2 plants that I grew. I've considered trying to grow them in one of those upside down planter things, but I mentioned to our resident gardener here at work and he looked at me like I was an alien or something. I think that planting them in raised beds rather than buckets will be an improvement though.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

I grew tomatoes in Chicago, along with peppers. Had 8 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants. Couldn't get nothing to grow when I lived in Indiana. In Vermont there are way too many wild animals as it is that walk across my backyard on a daily basis so I didn't even bother planting stuff here, wouldn't last a night here unless I surrounded it with a wire mesh or something to keep the animals out.

[GAMEC0CK2002]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

...
We were also told by the sheriff that the number one thing you can do is to put up cameras. They are the biggest deterrent for burglars, which is why we installed them as soon after as possible.

Of course, this morning I get a call from the monitoring company saying our alarm went off, but the sheriff came out and didn't see anything. Having the cameras makes it nice as I can access the playback from my phone or from work and check to see if anything suspicious happened. We don't get many false alarms, but after being broken into, any call from the monitoring company instantly puts me on edge.

Sorry to hear about that. Was it a front door forced entry or through the sliding glass door? What camera system did you go with?

[Trevytrev11]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Sorry to hear about that. Was it a front door forced entry or through the sliding glass door? What camera system did you go with?

They broke through the the glass in our back door. Not sure if they kicked it in or used a chair or something. We had some pool construction going on, so there was all sorts of crap they could have used. We got super lucky as they only got a few watches. Really weird as they passed up some higher dollar items. The door they broke cost more than the stuff they took. Something must have spooked them or something.

We bought a 720P 8-camera Lorex system from Costco. I think it was like 450 or 500 dollars. Set up was fairly easy. After making sure all the cameras were working one night, I had everything installed in about half a day the next day. Haven't had any issues since and their customer service was pretty good as well.

All of our cameras cover the exterior of the house and the box is located in a closet where our modem and router is and where all of our cables are junctioned.

[mgoblue]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

They broke through the the glass in our back door. Not sure if they kicked it in or used a chair or something. We had some pool construction going on, so there was all sorts of crap they could have used. We got super lucky as they only got a few watches. Really weird as they passed up some higher dollar items. The door they broke cost more than the stuff they took. Something must have spooked them or something.

We bought a 720P 8-camera Lorex system from Costco. I think it was like 450 or 500 dollars. Set up was fairly easy. After making sure all the cameras were working one night, I had everything installed in about half a day the next day. Haven't had any issues since and their customer service was pretty good as well.

All of our cameras cover the exterior of the house and the box is located in a closet where our modem and router is and where all of our cables are junctioned.

Did you somehow get all the wires in the walls? I've seen these, but figure setting them up must be a ton of work. We have stucco walls, so it'd be kind of a pain getting them anchored, and getting all the wires to a central location...

[Trevytrev11]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Did you somehow get all the wires in the walls? I've seen these, but figure setting them up must be a ton of work. We have stucco walls, so it'd be kind of a pain getting them anchored, and getting all the wires to a central location...

We hung all of our cameras in the eaves of our roof (the underside of the part of the roof that overhangs your house). So all of the camera's are mounted from the top and then aimed to the point of focus. On our house, the eaves are constructed of hardi-board and the cameras were attached with two screws. Our house is brick and stone, but I never had to battle the walls.

We have a ton of attic space, so I just went into the attic and extended the cable to the location of the camera to make sure the wire was long enough to reach (our house is about 90' wide and we were able to reach every spot we needed. Only one was a stretch). I drilled my holes from the outside (I tried to run a nail hole before to make sure there was no interference from ceiling joists, etc.). Once the holes were drilled, I went back into the attic and fed the wire through the hole and then connected the wire to the camera from outside, shoved the wire up and then mounted the camera (The camera has about a foot or so of wire that connects to the long 60' run of cable, there are two wires to connect; one for power and one for video).

The hard part is trying to mount in a corner. In these cases, I had to feed the wire from outside and use a hook to grab it in the attic as I was blind to the location and could not quite reach it from the inside. It still was not to hard, just a bit uncomfortable laying out across 2x's trying to extend and reach with a bent coat hanger to grab a wire that I could barely see.

It took probably less than 4 hours from start to finish to install eight cameras. Just make sure your holes are in the right spot. I didn't mark one of mine and got lazy and didn't want to go back to the attic to do so and I guessed wrong.

[Redacted01]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Closing in 3 days. Walkthrough went alright. Just some touchups needed on the walls was all and a few quirks the city requires that'll I have to cover. Still some exterior work to be done, but they say shouldn't be a problem getting the city's final approval on Thursday. Now to finish packing...

[GAMEC0CK2002]

Re: For all of you guys who are homeowners or newly owned

Closing in 3 days. Walkthrough went alright. Just some touchups needed on the walls was all and a few quirks the city requires that'll I have to cover. Still some exterior work to be done, but they say shouldn't be a problem getting the city's final approval on Thursday. Now to finish packing...

Sweet. I got a call from my builders to confirm the pre-build meeting on March 11th. Met with the lender last weekend to turn in my stuff for the full mortgage application.