See the example photo for what I'm talking about.

We like the wood grain, and so would prefer not to paint over. My question for DIYers is basically:

• How difficult is matching the stain in areas where chips etc have been taken out if we keep the colour?
• If we want to change the colour how much sanding is required. There's lots of "just don't" but also lots of people are not fans of woodwork and I don't mind it.
• Is it at all plausible to sand in place? or is it a pry out and refit job (in which case replacements are cheap)
• If replacing, how challenging are windows/doorframes vs skirting?

Behold: the output of my first pottery wheel class.

Applying this glaze and the subsequent firing will make these pots good safe.

I'll pick them up in a few weeks. Exciting!

The imgur link is a gallery with captions.

I signed up for a pottery class as a nice activity to do with my partner. It's not really what I intended to be posting in this community but I think it counts!

Our next week is glazing and then they will be fired and we can pick them up when ready.

I'll definitely be taking more classes and be booking practice time. It's so nice to just zone out and fuck around with a spinning thing.

hi all - i have this sort of half-formed idea about how a vegan DIY community like this is a lot like a solarpunk DIY ethos - but anyway, what are you working on at the moment? for me, my wife and i are going to tear down drywall and do some mold remediation. destruction is easier than creation, as they say; so we'll hire someone to re-hang the drywall once we're done.

otherwise since it's winter not much to report on the doing stuff front. we finished our privacy fence in the backyard just before the weather turned here, so we've got that done. we were going to do a flooring project in our den, but as prep work for that project was what led us to find the mold, it's scrapped for the time being.

photo: Link the cat, internationally ranked chess grandmaster, because we all need more cuteness in our lives.

I bought these lights on sale two years ago. Turns out they are designed to screw into the side of 4x4 posts, but I wanted to put them on these log fence posts.

I figured out a way to screw some zip ties into the post while using the screw holes to attach the light to the posts.

Now I can see my driveway in the bleak infinite nighttime of winter 🏆

This feels like a silly question but I am using electricity to extract the water from the air, I wonder if there is something to do with the water?

Watering plants, maybe?

Maybe the better question is: are there risks?

I will start by saying I’m not that kind of engineer and you shouldn’t take anything here as advice. It’s a comical re-telling of my mishaps and probably not even to building code.

• Part 1: Foundation drain sump pits/Iron ochre
• Part 2: A. Potato does Plumbing Part 2: Cleaning and Re-hosing a Sump Pump Blessed with Iron Ochre

Okay, so the new pump/hose situation was not working. The drinking water system backwash would flood the basement (slightly) mostly because the pump we fixed simply wasn't getting output anymore.

It was working when we initially installed it and we did test it outside just pumping from a bucket at it was outputting a good rate!

I went away for work for about a week and my partner had been dealing with this so I decided to just follow his lead and see what he wanted to try, but also get what I thought we needed (which was to go back to using some hard pipe a

I will start by saying I'm not that kind of engineer and you shouldn't take anything here as advice. It's a comical re-telling of my mishaps and probably not even to building code.

We did this weeks ago but I'm so lazy so I'm only posting about it how.

We wanted a way to disconnect the pump from the discharge pipe in order to remove the pump from the pit. We decided to try figuring this out one pump at a time, and start with the pump that sucks worse. I wasn't able to disconnect the existing hose/fittings when I tried earlier, but it turns out it wasn't actually that impossible to do if you were not worried about breaking anything, lol.

General piping arrangement

This is the before:

This is the after:

This shows what not to do in terms of arranging your fittings:

![](https://lazysoci.a

I'm mid-DIY on this one but putting it out there in case it's helpful for anyone.

I'm not specifically looking for advice, but if you have personal experience with iron ochre and are willing to share, I would welcome it.

I live in a swamp. I have basement foundation drains that we got replaced when we moved in a few years ago. We mostly wanted battery backups on the pumps, but we ended up getting a new drainage system too. This got us super acquainted with our drains.

There is a type of microbe living in the soil that consumes iron and leaves behind something called iron ochre. We use chemical treatment to help keep the drains running (cleating agent, keeps the iron soluble) but are at the point where the pumps need to be cleaned.

We have a water treatment system (iron/sulphur filter) that backwashes every few days. It is overwhelming the pumps and causes the sump pit alarm to go off (at 4:45 am).

Our pumps ar

I had a leak under my floating floor and now it is coming apart, how do I approach fixing this?