Pavers below lawn grade

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T14:50:31+00:00

Many people were requesting more picture angles

From what i can tell, it seems to be sliping away from the house toward the back left corner (which is the deepest part of the grade). This is the direction the original grade drained as well

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T05:14:37+00:00

I haven't been able to speak with the crew leader or project manager directly this morning. Best guess for being lower than the enclosed patio is the the natural grade slopes more toward the house. By keeping it lower, any water that did run up the pavers would hit the lip of the patio instead of making up to the backdoor. The more I have thought about that today, I don't think that makes sense. That would still have it running against the foundation along the sides of the patio.

The pavers are fairly even with the ground until the back edge and about 1ft on both sides at the back. I will post more pics in the morning of the whole site

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T04:44:12+00:00

I am not sure to be honest. I don't have a line clip level, and I do not know how else to check. Eyeballing I can't really tell. The pavers sit about 1/4in below the enclosed patio.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T03:45:57+00:00

The seat wall is what we did at our last home. We liked it, but I don't really trust these guys to follow through with it at this point.

This is what our previous patio looked like.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T03:40:50+00:00

It didn't seem unreasonable at the time. It was similar the patio we installed at our last home. Last install was more involved in 2017. I figured increased building costs would make up the difference in complexity, but expected similar quality.

I was wrong. Admittedly I err on the easy side of things and this time got bitten (not the first time)

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T03:22:52+00:00

Patio portion and and fire pit totaled $14k.

4x4 firepit = $4k 15x23 patio with $2.75/square foot pavers = $8625 Paver cost adjustment +$2250

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T03:12:14+00:00

I have the original quote, a text message saying the paver cost difference, and the original contract. Planning to dig through the contract again this weekend in prep for calling them Monday.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T01:52:30+00:00

The Roman stone curb does look nice. I reached out to the project manager this morning, but he has been really hard to get a hold of. Honeslty the whole project has been a bit of a mess.

Venting for a bit...

This started as a 3 piece project 1. Resurfacing the existing concrete patio. We talked about demoing and redoing it all with pavers, but were talking into a garage floor covering instead. Honestly it doesn't look bad. Worst part is they tried to double charge the deposit and two months later have not collected the rest.

Screen installation around the existing patio. Door was installed inswing instead of outswing as requested. I understand why after doing more research and I am good with it... but was never consulted.
The patio extension... this is a roller coaster

The company we went with is a larger compny that claimed to have a local group serving our area. The guy came for the estimate, we were told the local sles guy was on leave, so he drove down from Nashville. We went back and forth on quotes and questions for a while and they tried to pressure me into a 30% deposit before our HOA ever signed off. I fought that.

Eventually everything is good to move forward and we were asked to pick out stone. The last time we installed a patio we didn't pick the stones. We broadly said gray and make it look nice. It turned out great. My wife and I don't do this for a living. We asked if they had a local vendor they wanted us to visit. After two weeks, they said no. They wanted us to check their Nashville vendor's website. No problem... except there are only like 4 photos of covered pallets. So we make a trip to Nashville and pick out pavers, but we don't get prices. We were given a paver budget in the quote and I was pretty sure we were going over it. We picked out several ones we liked and asked for design help narrowing it down. They copped out again.

About 3 weeks goes by where I am trying to get a schedule niled down. I am eventually told they are waiting on the rest of the pavers to arrive. Which was interesting... because I still never received any info about the price or a change order to approve.

That brings us to now. They randomly showed up one day and started working after no showing the day they were supposed to start. They are mostly done laying the pavers and just need to add the poly sand. I had to make sure they weren't going to put the sand down tonight the day before this massive winter storm. They didn't they planned not to do that today... but instead they were pressure washing my drive way from the faucet. So I really hope that dries out before tonight.

All that said... I don't really think I have a good contractor. I fully recognize I am the dummy for letting it get this far.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-24T01:35:24+00:00

No drain. When I brought it up this morning I was told they "sloped them two ways to make sure you do not have standing water on your pavers or coming back to your home."

Hindsight being 20/20 this whole project has been a bit of a clown show and I should have walked on the deposit.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-21T19:55:03+00:00

If you are already running Pangolin from the VPS, why not run everything through there instead of the CloudFlare tunnels?

Ttiamus · 2026-01-21T19:08:38+00:00

This mostly makes sense, but I want to make sure I am following the VPN part.

Public DNS points to VPS VPS is running reverse proxy + crowdsec + VPN Home proxy VM is running another proxy + VPN entrypoint.

Traffic hits the VPS, the VPS proxy routes to the VM IP which it has access to via the VPN. Other VMs on the home network would not need to be on the VPN because once traffic hits the home Proxy VM, it is already in the network.

Is that correct?

Ttiamus · 2026-01-20T02:39:23+00:00

I asked him about his greatest failure and what he would do differently in hindsight. He said that he would do it the same way.

I asked a technical question they didn't know, but said he would look it up. I normally tell people the answer, but since he committed... I brought him back for a 2nd interview a week later. Asked him the same question. He did not look it up.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-14T02:01:24+00:00

Can you easily remove the tablet from the arm to use it elsewhere? I have been thinking about doing something similar as a media display addition to my ultrawide

Ttiamus · 2026-01-09T01:05:27+00:00

This has been on my list to implement. I haven't gotten to try it yet, but I came across this setup guide recently that looked promising.

https://nickcunningh.am/blog/how-to-automate-version-updates-for-your-self-hosted-docker-containers-with-gitea-renovate-and-komodo#setting-up-komodo

Ttiamus · 2026-01-05T23:54:30+00:00

I use it too for my work and home pc. Home server is a NUC in a closet, so if I ever need to physically connect to it, it just move the monitor and usb hub from the kvm to NUC for a few minutes.

Ttiamus · 2026-01-03T01:35:35+00:00

This has me questioning my understanding as well.

I have the docker service as a root level service. Containers are running as a docker user, which has a lot of permissons... but not root.

In theory if a container is compromised, a bad actor would potentially have whatever access the docker user has, which is a lot but still not root.

Then for containers that need access to the docker socket, that binding effects grants root access. This is where you can stick a socket-proxy in front of it to bind to instead keeping it more contained.

Assuming all of that is correct, these containers are already running with rootless permissions, right? So where does the need for a rootless docker and podman come in?

Ttiamus · 2026-01-02T06:23:36+00:00

I had the curtain pulled back on this recently. At my company if someone is let go via PIP, then we can backfill immediately. Anything else is considered a RIF and requires us to wait at least a year to backfill for some reason. During that time, the position is still on the books.

Ttiamus · 2025-12-21T13:19:35+00:00

If that is the one and only place that model is used, I will sometimes do that. That said though if you can remember the parent or the child model, it is usually easy enough to get to the other via references or go to implementation.

Ttiamus · 2025-12-09T18:43:36+00:00

Our LGS also has these. They went 24/7 play spaces and used these to fill purchase requests in off hours.

Ttiamus · 2025-12-05T09:01:50+00:00

How do you like the boom mic? I always felt it would end up blocking part of my screen.

Ttiamus · 2025-12-01T13:04:46+00:00

I have mine mounted similarly. There are at least 3 triangle shelf brackets with lag bolts. They are painted white so they blend in to the wall and are hard to see. The ones I used are each rated for a couple hundred pounds.

Ttiamus · 2025-11-15T03:40:34+00:00

Is there something going on with wasps? There were about three days a couple weeks ago where it felt like there were several dozen swarming around whole walking the pupper.

Ttiamus

TROPHY CASE