r/homeownerstips

I haven’t decided between a townhome, 2-3 flat, or a single family home yet. Im a single 26M without children, so I was thinking of also renting out a part of the place I get to someone else and make some extra income that way. I’m thinking 2-3 apartments at most, so I can live in one and rent the other(s). Im trying to find the most reliable real estate company. Lastly, I would like to avoid having to make renovations at all cost, because I don’t have as big of a safety net as I’d like on standby for any major repairs. A little about me, I’m a veteran, live in Chicago, 720 credit, ~60K annual. Any advice is appreciated.

Thermostat is in the front of the house facing west, slightly in a hallway but with no nearby vents.

Bedroom faces north, sensor is near doorway. One vent on opposite side of the room.

Sun room is…well sunny. Full windows on the entire exterior wall facing East. We have roll down blinds, which we keep down all summer. One vent on opposite side of the room.

We don’t have this issue with the heat, but on hot days I can’t stand to be on the hot side of the house but that’s the only space I have for a WFH desk set up.

Just recently, something happened at 3 AM that made me feel unsafe in my own house

The thing is that my husband travels a lot for work, so I’m home alone most of the time. I’ve lived in this house for six years and never really felt unsafe here before, but lately something just feels... off. Not in a creepy or paranormal way. I mean more like the feeling that someone has noticed I’m by myself a lot.

Last week, I started noticing little things around the property that make me question whether someone has been hanging around my house. I don’t have enough evidence to prove anything, but I think it’s enough of weird things to make me feel scared. Now I caught myself on checking locks more often and paying attention to every little sound at night or late eve.

What really pushed me over the edge happened, it seems like yesterday. Basically, I was asleep upstairs, and as I remember it was around 3 AM when the TV in the living room suddenly turned on at full volume. That noise woke me up instantly with my heart pounding. At first I thought maybe my dog stepped on the remote somehow, but then I saw she was right next to me in bed. She was wide awake, staring toward the hallway like he heard something too.

I went downstairs to turn the TV off, already feeling slightly nervous. When I looked toward the living room window, I swear I saw someone moving away from the house. It happened so fast, but I’m sure that I didn’t imagine it

I called the police right away, explained to them what happened and asked them to check the area. They came out but didn’t find anyone and no signs that someone was inside the house

Later, after that case, I talked to one of my neighbors, and he mentioned seeing a man standing in my front yard recently, looking around like he was searching for something. At the time, he assumed it was my husband and didn’t think much of it

Now I honestly feel nervous staying here alone, which is frustrating because this has been my home for years and I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve been looking into getting security cameras or some kind of monitoring system just for peace of mind and mostly so I can know if someone is actually coming around or if I’m just hyper-aware now.

Has anyone else gone through something like this? I feel like I’m constantly on edge lately.

I was getting dressed for work and picked up my shoe and there was a cockroach on the sole of my shoe (We’ve lived here a year and never seen a roach before or anywhere else) I immediately smashed it and checked the area around where I found it and didn’t see any more roaches or droppings. Should I be worried?

I’m a college student working on a project about water quality and I’d really appreciate some feedback from homeowners.

We’re designing a system that helps people better understand potential water quality issues in their area. It wouldn’t directly test for specific contaminants, but instead would:

• Use simple in-home signals (like cloudiness or temperature)
• Pull in local data (weather, water advisories, etc.)
• Combine that with anonymous reports from nearby households
• Show a community map of water quality concerns
• Send alerts if something unusual is happening nearby

The goal is to give people earlier awareness and better information, not replace official testing.

We made a short survey (takes ~2–3 minutes) to understand:

• How concerned people are about their water quality
• Whether this kind of system would actually be useful
• Any concerns (privacy, accuracy, etc.)

I am coming into possession of my grandmother’s house built in the 1920’s. It has original tile, which has been painted (and repainted over the years). The roof appears to be on its last leg and needs replaced.

I would very much like to keep the original look, which would really require having a painted fiber cement roof. Fiber cement roofs seem to be fairly common in Europe, but best I can tell they are totally absent in the United States. I’m not aware of any installed this century and I can’t find any American manufacturers that make fiber cement roof products, although there are many European options.

Do you think I can realistically get a roofer to install one? Is this just ill advised? It’s a shame, at least aesthetically fiber cement looks a lot better than metal/composite faux slate/tile. It also is more readily paintable as far as I can tell.

Have had a good experience with this crowd getting rta kitchen cainets. curious to hear of anyone else's?

Got the free design on a project/house and thought all in all it was very affordable.

We have water pooling up where the waste from our septic tanks lets go (disposal area)

We had the tank pumped, water wasn’t there for a few weeks then came back recently. Have called a few septic people everyone like we can see when we can get you on the books

Had a company come out today, said they could just turn off those waste pipes and just lets the other ones do the work because we have 6 drain pipes and it’s more then we actually need

Is that more like putting a bandaid on the problem then actually fixing the issue? What do you think the problem is like a cracked pipe or tree root?

Water started being under the grass last summer, this past winter water started pooling and currently pooling now especially if we have washer, dishwasher shower going at same time / using a lot of water

I am coming into possession of my grandparent’s former house. It has a tile roof that is about ~90 years old and seems to be reaching the end of its life (some fresh water spots can be seen in the attic)

As far as anyone seems to know, and presumably for the entire life of the roof it has been painted. Every few decades it has been repainted (the last guy my grandma got did a very poor job).

This leads me to my question. The house has a *lot* of roof. And the tiles on the dormers are the same as those on the roof (and also painted). With a good paint job, the house looked really really nice. Doing something like asphalt tiles would just not look right; the roof is just a huge part (like 50%) if the facade of the house. I would very much like to just go back with the same thing - square painted tiles on roof and dormer.

Are there any options for new roofing that can be painted? It would 100% just look a lot better. Square tiles that can be painted would be the best; that’s what it currently has.

My next best option would be colored slate, but that would be incredibly expensive and maybe require adding supports for additional weight.

Another option would be inspire slate (which you can get with some color) which is also pretty expensive and will presumably fade and I’m just not sure how reliable that is.

Contractor quoted insurance $1800, insurance said no because they’ve already given us $11k for total repairs to the shower.

The current contractor was not the one who opened the ceiling. It was a mold remediation company who opened it and then told us closing it is not their responsibility.

When we told our contractor that our insurance company declined the proposal he dropped the quote by $800. $1k seems high to me to close up and repair the dry wall on the ceiling.

How much should this cost in a high cost of living area?

The original problem was our shower had a leak, ceiling was opened up to see where the leak was coming from.

[supprimé]

recently purchased from here and looking for opinions from others. Seem to be good value and affordable for some rta cabinets I got off them for a renovation project.

anyone else have experiences with them?

edit: previous post seems to be deleted that I put up so asking again 👍