In these economic times, and having been a homeowner for many years, I’ve learned a few things that save a 50.00 fee here and there, which adds up mightily. I thought I’d invite other tricks and turns—
Sprinkler heads. So you hit it with the mower. You call repair and they charge you mightily. What did they do?
First of all, sprinkler systems use 1 of 2 sizes of line. Mostly it’s 1″ sprinkler hose, and 1″ fittings. You need: a shovel. Dig down to the place where the head T’s on to the line. The head should unscrew. Be careful not to get dirt down into it: surrounding the work area with paper towel is not a bad move. You take the broken head to Lowe’s or Home Depot, buy one that has the ‘pattern’ you want: they come as full-circle, 3/4 circle sweep, half, etc. Take it home, screw it on, fill in the hole.
Say you’ve got a head that’s buried behind bushes and wasting water. You can cut down the bush. You can also raise the head to a wand type: you dig down, remove the head, go to the store and get an extension that will screw onto the T and shower ABOVE the bush.
Say you’ve got a restricted water situation and want to water without throwing it for yards and yards. Lowes’. Get a little distributor head for a drip system. You cannot combine the spray sort and drip sort on the same section of sprinkler. You may want to cap wasteful heads (they sell that too), and run dedicated drip lines to the specific plantings you want to water.
Fertilizing your lawn: get one of the Scott’s handheld distributors, instead of the rolling sort: better distribution, cheaper, stores in a cabinet, and does a pattern that won’t burn your lawn.
Winterizing your outdoor faucets/sprinkling system. Consult your plumber on his next visit and get him to install an unscrewable tap-screw AND a lever-valve on those lines. When winter comes, instead of paying somebody 50.00 to blow out your lines and shut down the faucets, you throw the lever that cuts them off, open them to drain, and remove that little tap-screw, which admits air to the line to totally dry it out. For a sprinkling system, run them once with no water: blows out the line and does no damage. To reverse it in spring, put in the tap-screw, throw the lever to ‘open’ and you have water, having saved yourself another 50.00 charge.
painting fences and houses: here’s where you can pay 5000.00 or…200.00 plus a hundred for paint. I got a tank-type paint sprayer (Wagner). Two of us painted the freestanding double garage-plus-work-area inside about 4 hours. Painting the fence would take you, oh, about 2 hours. It’s not skilled labor. You just need two sane people and a reliable ladder. Hint: re-paint BEFORE the paint peels: saves you tons of work.
replacing fence sections. Piece of cake. Take your measurement. Buy your sections pre-made if it’s stockade. Take a stout hammer, whack the bad sections loose: use a post hole digger and some ready-mix concrete to reset a post or two if needed. If it’s a built fence, like ours, just buy more planks, some 2×4 and the pre-made sockets they also sell, and measure nicely. We built onto our fence and it looks better than the rest of the fence. That’s about a 300-500.00 job, that ought to cost practically nothing but materials.
Garden path and steps. Get a level. A bigggg one. Excavate your path with a mattock, pour builders sand, level, wiggle stones into place: check level. Lift stone and remove sand or add sand as needed. A plan and a level are all you need, plus the stone and sand. U-do-it: cost of stone and sand. They do it: another 5000.00 bill.
Edging a flowerbed: get some stakes and a 2×12. Dig down. Way down. A sharpshooter shovel is a big help (12″ rectangular blade). So is a mattock. Screw the stakes onto that board. Get a mallet and hammer it down, then level. Even bermuda grass can’t find its way under that barrier, and you have a little lip that will hold your mulch in. Cost: a board and some pre-made stakes.
Electricity: call an electrician unless you’re VERY sure you know what you’re doing: it’s cheaper to be right.
Getting electricity to a new ceiling fan? Wire it to a swag-chain, like an oldfashioned swag lamp, run it to a wall plug. We also did this in apartments, where we couldn’t have messed with the wiring. We did a cloth cover for the wire in one instance, just decorative. Ceiling hook holes and attachment holes for a fan can be spackled and Kilz’ed into perfect, pristine whiteness. We never had a complaint. Saves a couple of hundred dollars.
Installing a new sink: be sure you have the Same Size sink as the previous hole in the counter top. You can make it larger, but you can’t make it smaller. Be sure. Then you turn off the water, disconnect the pipes, unscrew the clamps from the underside, remove sink, install new, reverse process. Piece of cake unless you’ve got a size difference. Plumbing bill averted. Don’t forget to teflon-tape the connections.
wonderful! my only discovery is probably only available in Europe – linseed oil paint, its swedish. and best done on new exterior woodwork, as you need to start on bare wood. first coat – hot raw linseed oil. best timber treatment ever- woodworm hates it. then up to 4 coats of the linseed oil paint, which is only pigment and oil. no nasty chemicals, but it does take 24 hours between coats, longer if the weather is damp and cold. but, hooray, you don’t need to do anything for 7 years. at that point you just put on another coat of hot linseed oil. this rebinds the pigment, which otherwise will start to powder off. after 14 years, one coat of hot oil, one coat of paint. the thing is that this paint never cracks off and allows water to get underneath it, because it is bonded into the wood rather than being a coating. the hot oil penetrates the wood up to 1/2 an inch. I have done it on my wooden siding (we call it ship-lap) and all windows and doors.
There’s something similar for finishing furniture here, and I see no reason why it couldn’t be applied to exterior wood.
Too bad we can’t figure out how to make our own paint out of boiled linseed oil and pigment, but then it’d be prohibitively expensive. I use boiled linseed oil on my tool handles to keep them from drying out, as well as my rifle stocks.
When I owned my own house, I learned how to do repairs myself. I never tried to fool with the wiring, though, except to bring in junction boxes and ceiling fan mounting brackets and let the electrician wire the fans to the wall switches. I’ve replaced the wax seal on the toilet, replaced I don’t know how many garbage disposers, fixed sprayer heads for sinks, I just haven’t figured out how to do major refurbishing, such as a sagging roof (the guy who re-shingled the roof said that the roof was sagging when he did his job – wonderful, the professionals who think that because they’re not paid to fix something don’t have to say anything about problem areas)
I don’t have a problem working on stuff here at the house, in fact, I pretty much enjoy it. I replaced a floor that the cats ruined with their constant refusal to hit the litterbox, but now I find that it wasn’t Birdie, but poor Ruthie who had the problem. 🙁
I like the tip about edging the flower bed, which would work on a rectangular or square bed, I assume for curves, you’d have to make it in sections with the board cut and “joiner” plates in between to keep the bermuda grass runners out.
Ah, yes, edging. We are about to undertake re-edging a brick walk, slightly curving and not totally level. When we bought the house the walk was new, edged with timber, and more level. A year or so after we moved in we had to take up the walk so a new water pipe could be installed. (The old one was under a big Norway Maple). The reinstalled walk has sunk in the area when the pipe trench went, and the timber edging is rotting and being eaten by termites. I am thinking of using aluminum edging rather than timber, but I need enough edging above ground to keep back the dirt and the ivy from overtaking the walk. Bill cut back ivy and scraped off dirt; the walk is at least a third wider. It would be nice to keep it that way. So it may be timber again; it will take some sectioning to get around the curve.
The joys of home ownership, gardening in a yard filled with maple roots in a neighborhood where rose of sharon and mulberry bushes seem to spread from yard to yard.
The onl-iest thing I can think of with a curve like that would be to get some of those curved retaining-wall bricks, made so you can adjust the curve. http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=categorySelect&Ne=4294967294&category=Lawn+%26+Garden&N=4294960705
They’re not cheap, but they’re durable, and can be as buried or as high as you like. And they’re stubborn, no-mortar. Once placed they stay put. We used a 3-high stack to secure a portion of fence that was just going to lean, because there’s a sharp slope at the foot of the fence. 6 of those and it’s not budging. There are quite a few of those neat curved-masonry items, including some very nifty ball and socket bricks, http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&productId=230448-39241-608440PIP&lpage=none that are infinitely adjustable. Clever, these designers.
THat’s right, re curves. Mitering would make it even more solid, but clinkering the corners should do it, too, and who cares, since it’s mostly buried?
I can tell you on the roof, or at least on a sagging second floor: we had to have this done since the idiot somebody hired to install a second floor bathroom used concrete AND cut the stringer boards that hold the pyramidical roof pieces in line. The whole house was going to fall in. (Of course I was the idiot who bought it: we called it the Money Pit, but it had a great view.)
The fix: six truck jacks applied to the underside of the ceiling beams. Had to lift the whole house upper structure bit at a time, until we were level. The sounds of creaking nails and boards and parting plaster were horrific.
Once level, it was a case of stripping the sheetrock off the ceiling, then inserting some special boards which were both bolted and glued to the beams: our contractor chose boards with a warp opposite to the warp that had taken hold of the extant beams.
Those went on either side of three central beams, and by jockeying them a bit, they were on the footing with the original beams. The bolting, and simultaneous gluing, created beams that would have done credit to a mediaeval castle, and when the truck jacks were released, the house creaked, settled to its new level—shall we say we had already removed the concrete shower from the second floor and replaced it with fiberglas, for fear Jane and the shower would arrive like Dr Who in the Tardis in the middle of the ground floor.
It wasn’t as spendy as I’d have expected, and one guy did it. You might test the level of the attic and see if the sag includes the ceiling or just the rooftree. If just the roof, one guy, a jack, a drill, and some wood and bolts might be able to fix it, by jacking it at the point of load-bearing walls, so there’d be something real solid underneath the jack. It’s almost a DIY, if you can heft big boards above your head—not my cuppa!— but I’d say you need a couple of guys to run stairs and just stand by in case.
We had to re-caulk shower tiles and fill a couple of cracks, but that fix held and held solidly.
Ah, yes, structural problems caused by inept workmen. The plumbers cut the joists to run their pipes and in the process ruin the structure. It’s a very common problem.
The bigger problem is how to find an honest workman to fix your problems. Sadly there are many dishonest workmen out there who seem reliable at first but turn bad.
I grew up in the contracting business and as a 4th generation member I learned at my grandfather’s knee-literally-that ethics are the most important thing in business. While I didn’t go into the business I learned the trades and later in life met many people-mostly women-getting ripped off by contractors and “handymen.” When I lived in Los Angeles I had a nice business fixing the problems caused by these “workmen.”
You were fortunate your 2nd floor job went off smoothly. Just for instance, if the jacks aren’t placed properly they will punch through the floor and cause more damage. And on and on and on.
I’m not sure what you mean by a concrete shower. A mortar pan was standard in the old days but a normal 2nd floor structure should hold it well. Maybe your altered structure wasn’t up to the task.
Finding honest workmen is the single hardest aspect of home ownership. You should see what the idiots did to my girlfriend’s house before I came along.
Phil Brown
Pan, yes. It was a 5″ thick concrete slab that was bowing the unbraced floor, pulling the pipes apart and causing mayhem…but that’s ok: the drain pipe from the 2nd floor water heater, which fortunately didn’t work, let out right dead center of the insulation of the middle bedroom which we used as an office. Just quit there. And they didn’t just cut the boards, they inserted a free-hanging 10×10 bathroom with that slab right in the middle of the floor where all the weight was borne by the living room ceiling. Oh, I tell you, the elderly couple that had that house before me were ripped off by every crook in the county. And I bought it. La!
I tell you, one competent contractor is worth his weight in gold. And as you point out, that guy we got to jack the roof was very fortunately a good one.
We had that roof repaired at least five times before we got one guy from the Pacific NW (where roofers have to be licensed) who looked at it and said, yep, the pitch on the back addition is wrong. Water’s staying too long and that’s why it’s leaking. So he fixed it by a different technique, reshingled, and lo, no more leaks.
Did I say everything ever done to that house was definitely by the lowest bidder?
Hehe, we just knocked down a wall in my parents’ house, so, without further ado:
Knocking Down a Wall: MAKE SURE IT IS NOT LOAD-BEARING! Aka: check your houseplan. Tape up tarp/plastic sheeting to the ceiling and walls behind your workspace to control the dust from the sheetrock. Put on goggles, facemask if necessary and attack said sheet-rock with various implements. BE CAREFUL: aviod existing wiring and the wood to which the sheetrock is attached (tap it and listen for echo/no echo, or use one of those cool laser stud-finders). Take the debris outside because sheetrock smells sometimes and is messy. Put on gloves, goggles, facemask, and bunny-suit/old clothes before dealing with insulation because it is nasty stuff! Get rid of the insulation. Take down the wooden core structure of the wall. Redo any wiring that may have been on the wall you just took out (or call someone who knows how). Fill in any gaps in ceiling and walls with sheetrock, texture and paint as desired. Fill in any gaps in flooring with wood, then add whatever your floor actually is (parquet, tile, linoleum, carpet, what-have-you). Congratulate yourself on just having saved a tidy sum! 😀
I’m glad you added that about non-load-bearing. 🙂 And figure out where the wiring and pipes run. If you have sockets, you have wires. 😉 etc. House wiring is not fun to meet. You will see blue lights, and not from the language you will use.
“Did I say everything ever done to that house was definitely by the lowest bidder?”
As Alan Shepard was sitting on the pad for the first Mercury flight-the one where he is supposed to have said Shepard’s Prayer-he has said that what he was really thinking was that every part had been made by the lowest bidder.
Phil Brown
General note on anything involving tools: if it’s not working, step back and look at it and make sure you have the right tool. Applying force usually wrecks things (can be as simple as a screw head that afterwards definitely won’t budge) and invites injuries.
Farmstores are often great sources for tools and parts – as opposed to the upmarket DIY stores.
When you do something, do it right – get the right tools, get the right materials, *don’t* go for the cheapest.
And once you start, *FINISH*. If you’re not sure whether you can finish it, don’t start – or get a professional in.
I’ll add one other: if you’re female (or a kid) get the heaviest-weight hammer you can handle: if you haven’t the forearm strength to knock a nail halfway in with one blow, get a hammer that can, by sheer weight. Toy tools are a good way to get hurt. And power tools are a good thing, but read the instructions!
Alas, this not being my house, I can’t randomly start cutting into the ceilings and walls. This particular area of the roof is not covering an attic, just my utility room and bathroom, which are both on the first floor of the house. When I mentioned the problem to the landlady, she said that she had hired the guy based on her sister-in-law’s recommendation, because “he” was a friend and she “KNEW” he did good work for a reasonable price. Is it reasonable if you have to tear the roof out to fix the parts that are sagging. I think this house is at least 75 years old, if not older, since the beams are quite thick in the basement. If I thought I could fix the roof by cutting the ceiling in those two rooms and patching an opposite warp pair of boards to each rafter, I’d do it, but I’ve not done drywall on ceilings, or on walls, for that matter. I’m still a novice at that.
😆 Then it’s not your roof if it bows further! Which is good! But if it’s a real old house, it may have been done in raw oak. I’m pretty sure the ancestral farmhouse was: and once wet oak sets up, it may have bends and bows, but nothing short of a nuclear blast will budge it further or bring it down.
I once helped out at an sf con that set up their artshow with green oak and screws—oak sooo green it was wet.
Getting it apart after the con was a hoot. That wasn’t going to give, no.
I came home one morning from shopping, and as I was unloading my groceries heard the distinct sound of water raining down on concrete. This being the middle of a dry spell in California, I knew that I wasn’t going to like what I saw when I went out. Sure enough, there’s water geysering up out of a broken sprinkler head. Turned off the sprinklers, went inside and googled the problem. It did turn out to be an incredibly easy fix. Just unscrew the top part, unscrew the broken bit, get new bit, screw back in, screw top part back onto the riser pipe, and you’re done. Well, except for the bit about figuring out which parts go above and below the rings (first time I did it I quickly figured out that the pop-up part wouldn’t the way I did it). And test it before you put it on automatic! Turned out I had my new head spraying the opposite way than what I wanted, so I had to go and adjust that. Turned it on and everything was fine, but then I noticed that the next spray head was a little anemic, so fixed that one too.
I agree entirely on the electrician. I’ll use non-licensed workers for things like painting, but my electrical problems go to a licensed electrician who carries appropriate insurance.
Painting is something I am torn on. I know that it’s a lot cheaper to do it myself. But I hate taping. I hated edging, and cutting in. And, quite honestly, I just generally hate painting. So I always debate about spending a lot of my limited free time doing something I hate, or spending a whole lot to have someone else do it.
And I’m pondering what to do about edging the driveway if my landscape proposal gets the green light. I want an edge to keep in the mulch I will be putting down. The difficulty is that the pipe for the sprinkler system runs right along the edge of the driveway as well. And I do not want to break it when I put in the edging. I might just go with a row of bricks on the edge of the driveway.
The neat thing about spray-painting is that, a, it covers in one coat under all reasonable circumstances, and masking is minimal: we used a garbage bag flung over the fence, plus a hand-held (partner #2) piece of cardboard butted up against the edge. And sometimes you just decide you don’t need those corner caps in a contrasting color. 😉 Since the paint is airborne, you just have to keep that paintladen gust of air from hitting where you don’t want it, and the lightest protection, even newspaper, will work nicely. Painting under eaves? A snap. For outdoor painting, I would rather do anything than wield a brush. Your hand ends up hurting and you’ve dripped paint all over, then stepped in it and tracked it on the drive. 😉 The spillage from spraying is dust you can sweep up.
I even did it on the second floor of my former house once, solo. Got scared being out on that hipped roof, so I tied a rope around me and the tween-windows post, and thereafter monkeyed around on the roof as if I had good balance…
But I’m glad I didn’t fall off: I’d have been hanging between heaven and earth wrapped in a painting rig, and yelling for help.
There are several household projects that will eventually require me to paint something, and your comments have decided me on getting a power painter. I can get away with one of the ones that requires a compressor, because we inherited a honkin’ big compressor when we bought the house. The estate sale was ‘contents as is’, and the previous owner was something of a geek, so we got all types of mysterious and sometimes useful equipment.
When my mother was remodeling an 80-year-old, pier-and-beam-foundation house for a rental, the supposedly professional crew leveling the extremely unlevel structure (piers had settled very unevenly) started to apply lift to a back section that was a later addition, not an integral part of the framing. My architect mother pointed this out. They proposed to continue. She said that if they ripped off the spare room, there was no chance they would be paid for the job. THey thought they would show her, and picked up their jacks and left. She and my brother, home from MIT on vacation, went and rented a jack for each pier and did it themselves, raising each pier a little at a time till it was all level. I tell my tenants that the house was leveled by an MIT engineer.
If you are female, you sometimes have to be quite FIRM about knowing what’s right.
I have no problem working with electrical circuits as long as the breaker is off. I even split a 220 circuit into two 110s once. But learning how to install a replacement breaker was a bit scary.
My mother did something like that with the contractor who was fixing the house (car insurance contractor, long story as to how that happened: part of Why We Didn’t Do Mother’s Day). He thought he could get her to back down on her threat to call the building inspectors and have a stop order put on his work.
Come to think of it, that wasn’t the only time someone thought that she was a silly female who didn’t know what she was doing. The other time was the car dying at an intersection, right after being serviced. She said she could hear them thinking that she didn’t realize she was out of gas. (It was a bad fuel pump.)
The company that’s got the primary bid on my furnace upgrade was out this morning. Aside from a lot of head shaking on both of our parts, he’s still going to try to upgrade the furnace. He would really like to have electric baseboard heaters installed, since they’re most efficient of the 3 types of fuel I could use. I wouldn’t mind them, except this house has a wonderfully inadequate electrical service from the pole of a whopping 60 amps. Bear in mind that I have an electric range, an electric dryer, an electric water heater, an electric well pump all of which are on 220 VAC. I also have several minor appliances, such as my computer, my washing machine, my toaster, coffeemaker, stereo, TVs/VCR/DVD/Satellite receiver, and then there’s also the furnace blower, oh, and not to forget the lights! There is a fuse box on the back porch that still has the old cartridge fuses in the back (60 amp) and the screw-in plug fuses 30amp & 20 amp for each side, Main and Range. Then there are two circuit breaker boxes that branch off the fuse box, and I have no idea what is connected to either of them. There’s another breaker box out on the security light pole which is the direct feed from the transformer, it’s a 60amp breaker, and it has tripped off several times last winter, which entailed a trudge through the snow to reset it. I have the old cloth insulated, single wire run through ceramic insulators, outdated rotary switches, and frighteningly old materials all together. I didn’t wire the house, nor would I have left it like this. I have had a licensed electrician look at the house, he was incredulous when he saw the wiring, especially when he looked at the reason I called him in the first place. The refrigerator outlet was taken off one half of the water heater circuit. No wonder I had trouble with both the heater and the fridge. He told the landlady that the house needed to be rewired and given at least a 100 amp service, even if they didn’t rewire the house. They got a “second” opinion from someone else who told them that 60 amps was plenty for this house. Unfortunately, both of her brothers agreed with that finding. Yes, I know, I shouldn’t be living here, and I know it’s not the best place to live, but the rent is cheap, I have plenty of room, I can keep my bees and my cats, and it’s QUIET! I guess all of that is pretty much irrelevant if I lose it all in a fire.
Get a smoke detector and dIy some GFI’s where it’s iffy. I swear I know this house. Being careful not to turn on the coffeepot while the window unit is running…blooey. Reset.But the comfort of a place where you can have your critters and your stuff is beyond price. Just don’t use the penny trick on any of those fuses. 😉
Not to mention the foundation is field stone, the mortar has long since gone away, the siding is asbestos shingle, there is no insulation inside the walls, and the areas around the windows leak air. The windows themselves are relatively new, double-paned, double-hung sash, but whoever installed them didn’t do a very good job of sealing the area around the casement, so I get horrendously cold drafts in the winter. When it rains or when snow melts, the basement is awash in muddy water. I’m just tired of having to pay through the nose for heating oil at such a volatile price, and propane isn’t much better. But, it’s not my choice, so whatever they decide, if they do decide on doing anything, will just be what I have to live with. My days of owning my own place are long behind me, ever since I got divorced. Nobody wants to hire a 57 y/o disabled veteran with 22 years experience, because I would cost too much for the company.
Now those drafts: what about one of those sheets you use a hairdryer to tighten to keep out the drafts? Or—they still make blackout curtains. You can get them from Penny’s. Thick insulating rubber (white, these days) on the reverse side—you just hook them right up with your drapes or use them as curtains themselves: they’re not bad looking. We use it because our TV is right in front of a big window, and they have a magnetic strip that closes out the last vestige of daylight when you want to use them. They do a lot to insulate you from sun or cold windows.
I think you can get foam that will expand and fill the gaps. Or at least they used to sell cans of expanding foam for that – it’s not all that unusual a problem.
Expanding foam… but is it purple?
OMG.
I’ll have to go investigate. Right now, I am just dreading winter, not because I hate the season, I love snow and cold, clear nights, but I don’t like getting up out of bed in the morning into a house that’s below 40 degrees (F) inside. That’s been the biggest problem, plus I can’t afford the cost of fuel to run heat all night long, so I get the house warm in the evenings, and turn it down when I go to bed, but it still gets too cold. I’ve used space heaters which jack my electric bill up to double the normal amount.
Especially with the knee surgery coming up next month, I’m not going to be doing much of anything except lie in bed and read or watch TV….maybe I should haul the DVD player into the bedroom and watch the movies I want to see in there. I could even bring in the mini-stereo and have Dolby Digital 5.1 sound!
I know the solution – move, but I can’t afford that, either. I’m just hopeless….well, not really.
The expanding foam is called Great Stuff (and other knockoff brands). The shrink-wrap stuff to turn windows into double-pane really works if installed carefully, and lasts more than one season if a moth doesn’t get behind it and infuriate the cats.
I would always choose propane over electricity for the main heat source — the amount of heat for the price is MUCH higher. Electricity for heat is a horrendously poor use of the stuff – electricity is very efficient at making motors turn (like for fans) and very inefficient, brute force, at creating hot elements. 1500 watts for a tiny little space heater. Also, if you have gas or propane, then you still have heat when an electric wire comes down in an ice storm, and you still can stay warm from the kitchen range if you run out of propane. Diversify your resources.
(Every one of these comments is based on hard-won personal experience.)
I have an oil-filled radiator as a heat source and it’s ultra-efficient. At a previous, uninsultated flat I was running three of the things for $10 a month. Right now, I’m running it by choice _because_ it’s so efficient – it’s easy to regulate, it holds heat for hours. Space heaters are a waste of space and energy. These things are not.
On the bed edgings. Copper is supposed to be a slug repeller.(I haven’t tried to prove this) So it might be useful to cover the top of the boards with copper flashing.
Somewhere in one of my boxes I have a copy of Dereck Williamson’s _Complete Book of Pitfalls: The Victim’s Guide to Repairs, Maintenance, and Repairing the Maintenance_. It’s actually a collection of pieces on home repairs and maintenance. The advice can be very funny as well as very useful, stuff like using the right wrong tool for the job, and the key to electrical work. (Sheet metal work is described as ‘like repairing a locomotive while under way: technically interesting, but not very much fun’.)