this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
67 points (94.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35800 readers
1466 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

New home owner who has never had to hire a contractor before. Want to have chain link fence replaced and want to have put in white vinyl fence to match connected town home.

It is just a 40 foot length I need replaced and will need to have one gate. As I get quotes, what kind of price should I expect to pay? What's considered fair and what's considered a rip off?

EDIT: Thanks for all the feedback! I think I'm not in the right tax bracket to hire people to do this, so probably going to try to do it myself.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

The overhead running a legit business is unreal.

My general advice is don't use post mix concrete, use regular stone mix and backfill immediately. The backfilled dirt will hold it in place and slow the cure, giving you hours to go back and tweak as you go. That rapid post makes no sense, there's no urgency in the setting phase, that's the opposite of what you want.

And remember, if you do a good job it can last 20+ years, so don't be lazy and take a shortcut because it's "good enough". You're better spending $300 on a rental machine to dig the holes than to set a post that isn't deep enough. I'm in Canada where frost can be hell, my posts go 4' down and usually 5 bags concrete per post, then another 3 bags down the post once it's all assembled. Your 40' fence I could easily put in 50 bags. Don't base your shopping list on that, but know that if you care about longevity it takes patience and hard work, like anything else in life

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Renting the machine also would be good for your back. Folks can underestimate how hard digging narrow holes in the ground can be.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

I second that. I wanted to remove loam in the front garden (here it is 5cm top soil and then hard loam down to the center of the earth, it seems), so I could mix in sand and other stuff in order to actually get something growing there.

I started by shoveling two 90l buckets by hand, and wanted to go to the landfill with them. But up the road was a construction site. I stopped and asked, and they were happy to take my stuff - for free. I went back home and refilled the buckets, and returned to the construction site to dump them again. My back already was quite unhappy about that day, as the clay is rock hard and heavy up here.

There I saw them riding a front loader, and I asked them if they could drop by and just take a load or two with that. And they did. With just two runs they took out more than I could have done with a dozen runs on my own. They really saved my day, and my back. And it only cost me a case of beer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Folks can underestimate how hard digging ~~narrow~~ holes in the ground can be.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

4ft of concrete will be a nightmare to remove when the post needs to be replaced.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Realistically, one would just dig down half a foot, break up the concrete, cut the post, then backfill the dirt. Put any new post you need a foot to the side. No reason to remove the boulder.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

I've pulled them before with shovels and a farm jack, and it is a nightmare, dangerous too. Now we have machinery to do it, or a truck and chain, wouldn't do it manually any more