argyleaf

x-posting from r/HomeImprovement after a suggestion.

Video with hard-to-hear sound of crunching

I was laying in my hammock on the front porch and noticed a bunch of ants on the wood rafters. They appeared to be going in and out of some holes in the beams. A quick Google brought up carpenter ants and has me worried.

Can anyone confirm if they are carpenter ants? If so, what do I do and how worried should I be?

Video with sound

I was laying in my hammock on the front porch and noticed a bunch of ants on the wood rafters. They appeared to be going in and out of some holes in the beams. A quick Google brought up carpenter ants and has me worried.

Can anyone confirm if they are carpenter ants? If so what do I do and how worried should I be?

Hey all, I bought tickets to take my dad to the game tonight but he isn’t feeling up to it. I already sold the tickets but I want to give away the parking I bought in the central riverfront garage to someone who is going to the Reds-Brewers game on Sept 24 (today)@ 640p.

I won’t be able to respond for a couple hours (currently sitting on tarmac on a plane flying into CVG) but drop me a DM and I’ll ill transfer it to you from the Ballpark app (I’ll send you the link).

Hope it makes someone’s time at the game a little more enjoyable!

Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster!

My wife and I have been on the hunt for a parcel of land to (slowly) transition into a homestead in NH. After a couple of false starts we met a friend-of-a-friend who is looking to liquidate ~160 acres in an off-market transaction. We really like a lot of things about it (there are ~10 acres of open field with state-assessed high soil quality and the rest woods, bordered by a reasonable-sized brook, has roughed-in road access, abuts a large amount of conservation land, good school district, and is nearby to our current location) but there are a handful of gotchas:

• It has a conservation easement on it protecting all but ~10 acres (whose site ca

pics

Finally decided that the day had come to make a earnest attempt at birthday cake (I’m mostly a sourdough baker who isn’t fussy about slashing patterns). Just to make it more fun I was doing 2 simultaneously for my 3 year old twins birthday who described what they wanted as “chocolate!” and “pink!”.

My wife advised me to tone down from my hopes of getting the kids to eat adult flavors like a honey maraschino whipped mascarpone for a filling. The kids liked it a lot so next year I’m encouraged to do more adventurous fare. There will be more cakes in my future.

Chocolate cake

• Sponge: [Ina Garten’s Beatty Cake](https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-ga

My wife and I live in town in NH. We own our house (a duplex) and have got a line on a raw land parcel 17 minutes and 3 right turns (including leaving driveway) away.

It has many of the things we want:

• brook (on property line)
• long range views
• direct access (well from the town maintained road)
• south east facing
• price is doable

But there are also some real challenges:

• the driveway has a wetland permit and needs some big money work and it is expiring in a couple years. Crossing the wetland portion has been quoted at near 100k. The rest of the driveway was roughed in eons ago but has since returned to grass and hemmed in by second growth trees
• ledge is visible in many places on

My wife and I are looking too move somewhere in NH/VT (preferably in the Upper Valley of Lebanon, Hanover, Norwich, Lyme). There isn’t much housing stock so we are exploring buying land and building a non-extravagant farmhouse, though as an engineer I have strong feelings about the effectiveness of build systems versus high level finishes.

We met with a local banker and they told us that we would need to budget $300-500 (but more realistically 400-500) /sqft to bills which makes a 2000 sqft house $1M! That is about as small as we would want to go and it would blow our budget.

Are these reasonable in his numbers? My gut tells me that it’s high, especially if I do some of the work (feel comf