New England B.S. Thread

Anything for productivity. Plus I bet you could write that off as a business expense.

 

Haven't tried that yet, but I think I should be able to!

 

Tax advice by Seth. First session is free*.




*Results not guaranteed to comply with any or all IRS guidelines or regulations.

 

Happy hump day - glad this heat is tailing off because I was dying in the new house. No central AC and the two AC units I ordered last month are still on backorder....

 

Time to do some low quality, off-topic complaining:

I'm starting to lose my cool a little bit at the absurd prices and gross lack of professionalism in my area. It extends to just about everything except the breweries, and it's so bad that even long-time locals are starting to talk bad about each other to outsiders (like me, haha!). Mechanics, plumbers, carpenters - everyone agrees that since the plague hit, the usual problems have only worsened because of the out of town big money buying up all the shit shacks and wanting to do blank check refurbs or rebuilds. I'm taking care of a property up here for a friend of mine whose family has had the place for decades, and while I'm perfectly comfortable doing certain things myself, other stuff is really better outsourced... IF I COULD FIND SOMEONE WHO WOULD ACTUALLY SHOW UP!

Latest example: I've called 4 carpenters in the area. Two bothered to show up to the scheduled estimate/inspections, and of those, one has actually come up with a price. Instead of an actual written estimate, dude just rolled up to the house a month later (this morning, while I was watering plants) and threw a number at me out the window of his truck, without actually remembering my name or the full scope of work. Even with the prices of everything being so high, the number was actually shockingly high, particularly given that he had forgotten about at least half of the originally discussed scope.

I straight up asked him if that was a "go away" price and he mumbled something about "taking a second look" and getting back to me with an e-mail.

This shit's dumb.

 

Very frustrating what is happening these days. The lack of skilled trades is going to be a huge problem for our society moving forward. Don't even want to tell you what I deal with on a day to day basis being the guy that is paid to make jobs turn a profit. Basically I pay way too much for terrible production and quality. No sense of pride out there either. It makes it very hard to put numbers on jobs because no matter what number you throw out there, it's not enough.

 

All the tacoma vendors are hitting problems too in sourcing material. Problem is their customer relations suck when it comes to it. All these times that people didn't have to give a crap, now they do, and it's glaring how bad people are at it.

 

I had similar experiance with getting some prices to remove 3'-4" of a load bearing wall between my kitchen and dining room just to open up the existing opening a little. Got prices between 7-$12K after waiting weeks to get someone out. In general it all seemed like fuck off pricing, as they all up front stated they were very busy with large reno's / new construction. So guess who's got 3 shiny LVL beams waiting to be sistered together in their basement waiting to be installed.... this guy. Granted there's like 3 circuits that have to get moved over, but they will be easy to re-route in the basement and run up behind the column. Even with the pricing of wood, that's fucking nuts, it'll be like $1200 in materials even with todays full special prices. I had an engineer that does residential stuff get me stamped plans since I haven't done anything with wood frame construction since college. Don't need to move any of the lolly columns or anything in the basement. Literally just building 2 temp walls, knock out ~3.5' of existing wall, throw the new beam in and shove some columns under it. Then just finish it.

 

I mean I can relate, my inter-personal skills are terrible.

 

What up NE folks. What’s new? Haven’t been on TW for a hot minute

 

The sky obviously. Otherwise pretty everyone here has gone domestic full size to compensate for small pee-pee's.

 

i thought lifting trucks was to compensate for tiny ding dongs. Everyone switching to Priuses would mean the opposite, right?

 

That's when you go from an outie to an innie.

 

UNFAIR! My pee-pee was small even when I had a Tacoma.

 

Hey! Welcome to Fordworld

 

Well at least it ain’t the 3rd gen section...

 

Hey Cam, how have you been doing? How's the island life?