Tag Archives: repair

Roofing

The roofers just left after doing a complete tear off and re-shingle.

They did a very good job and it looks great. … I do have a few take-away’s from this particular home project …

Make sure the roofer looks at the INSIDE Of the house as well as the outside before giving a firm quote. In our case the roofer didn’t know that the area above the living room didn’t have an attic. As such, they were unsure about the vents above the living room.
Make sure you know what everything on the quote is for … the quote called for 6 extra vents … 3 of which were going to be installed in the garage. Since we don’t spend a lot of time in the garage, only one vent is really needed. We also needed an additional vent for the kitchen exhaust vent that wasn’t included.
Before deciding on a shingle color / style … make sure you see a full size example. The shingle ‘chips’ that the manufacturer provides show the colors, but not the layout. In our case it worked out well. The shingle’s have black, brown and a little green, which works well with our brown gutters & trim.
For all home improvement projects, keep all the paperwork … turns out, when we had the gutters replaced, the guy didn’t install gutter flashing. This COULD have caused ice damning. Not exactly sure what I could have done about it even with the paperwork at this point … but, if I had paid for the gutter flashing before, I sure as heck would have gone back to the gutter contractor about it.

Now I have to get the vent in the bathroom replaced (Monday) and the bathroom ceiling fixed (later).

Dell PowerEdge T310

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(Read this entire post, as there is a very weird problem described later)

It’s been quite a while since I upgraded the hardware that runs this (and others) web site.

The warranty on the systems either will be expiring soon or has already expired.

So I bit the bullet and ordered a new Dell PowerEdge T310 server. The pertinent specs are:

Quad core Xeon 2.66ghz processor
12gb RAM
RAID controller
4 x 500gb hot swap drives (configured as 2 x 500gb RAID 1 sets)

The system arrived last week and I got it set up immediately.

I actually ordered the system with only one 250gb hard drive and 4gb of RAM … and upgraded it myself.

A few things annoyed me out of the gate …
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Higgins Road

For those of you who live and/or work in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, you probably have noticed how bad Higgins Road is between Golf and Route 53. The potholes are absolutely horrendous.

The potholes were created after this last winter … and there doesn’t appear to have been any effort to repair them yet.

I contacted someone at the village of Schaumburg, and was told me that Higgins Road is owned and maintained by the Illinois Department of Transportation, Division of Highways.

I agree with your assessment of Higgins Road and can assure you that we have previously contacted them many times regarding this issue. I think that it will help for them to hear from as many people as possible, to get this road repaired.

My car has been in the shop at least twice now for suspension and alignment issues (recently getting a new set of tires) … I’m fairly confident that the condition of Higgins Road either caused, or contributed, to the damage.

I encourage everyone to contact IDOT and ask them to get the potholes repaired as soon as possible.

Update 5/30/08:

I sent email to my state senator, Michael Noland, and representative, Fred Crespo, asking that they look into the mater. No response yet. I was quite surprised when I found that the state does not seem to provide email services for state senators and representatives.