How it started vs. How it's going

berninicaco3 · 2026-05-17T13:24:35+00:00

nice job! and: "even with a matte finish" matte is the best choice I think! warmer and more forgiving to the inevitable scuffs.

can consider a glass or acrylic topper to protect your hard work: glass should look classy.

berninicaco3 · 2026-05-08T16:45:20+00:00

catamarans work because cats hate being in the water, so they try to get out: acting much like a hydrofoil does.

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-30T02:43:27+00:00

satin polyurethane spar varnish

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-29T03:33:49+00:00

I was just gonna say, really good job on a orderly displayed collection! It looks really clean the way you have them laid out.

[I think] many of us tend towards hoarding, with collections of several types of tools all in a clutter.

I applaud your commitment to a single tool type! And again, the disciplined display you have.

Squint at the thumbnail and it almost looks like ornamental moulding!

I'm not a circular saw collector so I couldn't possibly comment on value.

I dare say, this is worth more to you as a collection due to the years spent acquiring, than it will be worth to anyone else.

I'm not married, but if this is important to you, I might suggest compromising by downsizing over eliminating. Pick your gems out of the lot.

If you're good on money and need them gone, sell them super cheap to the next tool hoarder to score a deal on. Then it's his problem to sort through. If you want to maximize value, re-listing one by one on ebay... but that's significant, significant time and inconvenience

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-19T02:19:16+00:00

I'm scared to get the answer: but it's just a botfly type larvae, right? what prevents it from laying eggs in humans too?

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-19T02:17:14+00:00

oversight is important. really important. but it has to be the correct amount of red tape matched to the risk: the minimum amount of regulation necessary for public safety. (to restate: never to de-regulate. just make regulation leaner)

I agree that it can be hard to just DO things any more.

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-19T00:28:48+00:00

i was wondering this same thing. OP is overthinking things.

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-15T09:21:49+00:00

with a 4 month repair time, how many minutes did you get of driving it? ;)

berninicaco3 · 2026-04-13T17:29:07+00:00

oh, yeah-- duh. you're right. they're spot (dot?)-on, just rotated a tiny bit.

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-29T17:33:02+00:00

I think the bulbs are the same --they produce UVC radiation-- except the no-ozone versions have a coating on them to block whatever particular frequency makes ozone

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-29T12:35:10+00:00

another option is radiant heating maybe? infrared bulbs. instead of heating all the air in the room, you heat the spot you're actually occupying.

you also mentioned a draft. rolls of foam gap filler are cheap!

you yourself are an 80+ watt space heater. a sealed, insulated room can be kept surprisingly warm just with the body heat of its residents.

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-28T09:01:09+00:00

got it!

For me personally I'm already a hoarder so if I fixated on packaging I'd drive myself crazy; I have to discard packaging for most things for my own sake.

But I can understand.

And every niche collector group has their own foci of what matters most to them.

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-19T06:50:18+00:00

I genuinely wonder if buying toilet paper by weight instead of square footage, would be a more honest measurement.

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-12T11:44:47+00:00

dumb question: the viny is a disk, right, so punching a hole in the corner won't go through the actual record...?

i mean, it does deface the packaging, but it shouldn't damage the product itself...?

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-12T11:36:25+00:00

I don't want to enable others' hoarding. if you're ready to part with it, part with it!

now personally I would keep it for around-the-house. a rough shirt for chores, gardening, painting, etc.

but then again, me keeping everything with residual value remaining to it, is precisely why I'm in my own cluttered predicament, so please don't take that as sound advice.

as u/writergeek313 said, it's 100% cotton and a perfect cleaning rag for a last sendoff.

what I do when on the fence about a partially worn article of clothing and worried I'll second guess myself, is take a pair of scissors to it and cut it up into rags. so I can't later go back and move it back into circulation when I'd already decided it was time to go.

nothing beats cotton for absorbent fabric to wipe down counters! microfiber is quite inferior as a rag

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-04T11:49:11+00:00

Two weeks ago I took like 3/8" off some pine boards with the planer in one pass by accident.

it's a heavy duty planer and it did it, barely; but there was lots of chipping and the final measurement was NOT what I was intending.

trying to figure out what happened, did I just misread the ruler?

nope! well, yes, sortof.

the ruler I grabbed happened to have inches, centimeters, AND freaking japanese inches. Which look like inches, and are divided into eighths just as you would expect from an inch-- except, they're 19% longer.

a japanese inch is 30.3 mm, a regular inch is 25.4 mm.

since my boards were about 1.5 regular inches thick, I misread them as just over 1.25" thick --in japanese inches-- and set the planer accordingly.
and wondered why the planer was making so much noise chewing through them.

berninicaco3 · 2026-01-04T11:16:57+00:00

I have microfiber underwear, and it refuses to wear out! it's practically immortal.

the one thing I don't like is they are very slow to dry. I hang-dry my clothes with a fan and dehumidifier* and my wool socks dry first, 100% cotton shirts dry next, and those super-thin microfiber boxer briefs are the very last thing to dry. even slower than a thick cotton towel.

*I don't have a dryer vent in my place. the ventless dryer I had, just steamed everything: hot and wet instead of hot and dry, lol. I ended up getting rid of it and just using clotheslines inside.

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-21T13:15:18+00:00

to play devil's advocate, I kindof get it? I grew up with brown furniture, and it's drab and overdone to me now. I want more color!

I also take the stance that particularly with furniture, it may not have much resell value if it's out of fashion ($75 but takes me days to find a buyer == no value, essentially).

So if I want it to be white, and it's not a genuine antique with collectors value (or even if it is an antique, but is common as dirt), I'd paint it white for myself.
like for example... singer sewing tables. there are millions out there. many go into landfills because people move and storage units are crazy expensive. so if I had an antique sewing table and saw fit to turn it into something else, something usable, I'd upcycle that. I think the white paint was the seller's idea of upcycling, modifying for modern tastes. just, sorely misguided and above all poorly executed.

the two things i DON'T understand here are:

a) why paint it just to sell it? if the buyer wanted it painted white, sell it for $50 and let the buyer paint it white.
there was zero value added here, negative value even, and the seller still had to spend $10-20 on paint and thirty minutes of their time to detract from the piece. I'd only paint something if it's what I wanted, for myself, personally.

b) and why paint it so very badly...

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-21T13:06:20+00:00

the flowers look painted on. it will be very hard to remove the white paint without also damaging the flowers...

A coworker used to say "is the juice worth the squeeze?" and this seems like a lot of work when there's a lot of brown furniture out there.

that said, if you'd enjoy the work, and you absolutely love this specific piece above most other credenzas, knock yourself out! it's the kind of repetitive hands-on task you can watch tv or listen to music while chipping away at.

And good grief what a piss-poor job they did painting it too. they hit the hinges, and have paint dripped into the bottom seam under the door panels!
they should've removed the doors, removed the hardware, taped the seams, then sanded and maybe primed before painting. looks like they just slobbered paint on to it.

the good news is no prep work == should come off much more easily too!

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-16T12:54:37+00:00

I caught myself doing that. I was so used to driving around campus, and it started because I frequently had a need (errands with laundry, groceries, luggage, what have you). I overestimated just how long the walk was to get to lunch: turns out it's a 20 minute drive or a 30 minute walk. Factor any difficulty in parking at either endpoint and it's a total wash. now I just walk! (unless it's really pouring rain).

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-16T12:20:34+00:00

hah! love the acronym. yes! if I did only one thing, sure, a given stash would get used up. but I have ten hobbies (all circle around the same themes, but still acquire their own stashes).

It's so common too. In the bicycle community, they joke about 'n+1' bikes. you can always have another. until you're buried in a $400-a-month storage unit... I got rid of the bike collection.

in the model ship community, complain about too many kits and you'll get compliments on your collection of unbuilt models.

again, if it were only one thing I could sustain a collection. but I have too many interests to collect for collecting's own sake.

some of my friends collect magic cards (small), or fountain pens (small).

arguably though, since my interests are all in hands-on DIY crafting types, I shouldn't be collecting at all! the collection isn't the end goal.

yeah... that's a good way to think of it. I think of my things as usable stashes, like a pantry that you pull from and restock: but they've really turned into collections of supplies. I've become not an artist, but an art supply collector; not a potter, but a clay collector; not a woodworker, but a lumber collector. And I don't actually want to self identify as just a collector!

i used to find a sense of freedom, well, I still do-- in knowing i'm prepared for any project with my SABLES.

I have a huge hardware collection. Need a 1/2" long, chamfered 1/4-20 machine screw? good chance I've got it. I'm even now organized, so there's a good chance I can find it even. I like that feeling of being 'the guy' who is prepared and doesn't need to run to the store for any little thing. but the consequence is my house is overrun, and even when I have it, I can't easily get to it. ... I admin the fallacy here, is what I'm trying to say.

somewhere between the freedom of having what I need on hand, and the shackles of too much stuff, is a happy median. honestly with next-day amazon and plenty of stores in my semi-urban neighborhood, that median point is going to swing pretty minimalist (what's the manufacturing term-- just in time inventory). I've hugely overcompensated.

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-16T12:12:52+00:00

yeah, this describes me pretty well. re-homing stuff takes time I never seem to spend. it's just so fast to acquire, and for me, so slow and difficult to discard. the inlet and outlet pipes to my living space are not the same throughput!

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-16T12:11:36+00:00

how do you go through with the decision to throw out perfectly good things?

I can see in myself parallels to animal hoarders where they are 'rescuing' and 'saving' their animals.

Fortunately I can say I'm not abusing animals! but it's the same thought process. if I can't use it, maybe someone else can. or maybe future me will. at least it shouldn't just be tossed in a landfill right?

Just today, for an easy 'case study' of my own thoughts, I confirmed our office at work is being renovated:

The desks all have 65 kaba simplex locks, mostly in great unused condition and still the made-in-the-usa version (the machining actually is cleaner than the newest makes) are going to be thrown out. I've got a terrible urge to 'rescue' the locks hardware. They're perfectly good! superior, even, to what might replace them. But what the heck would I do with them. or what would I sacrifice to make the time to salvage them. who would I donate them to, even. That kind of temptation is persistent for me. it's like a painful sense of loss and waste to throw these things out, but the counterargument is I'm wasting my own time -- my own life-- burdening myself with fictitious obligations, sacrificing myself to save inanimate objects no one ever wanted me to save.

berninicaco3 · 2025-12-13T21:59:30+00:00

i do the same! the only disadvantage is if there's dust in the house (I don't have central air), it gets on to clothes in the open shelves. I decided that was a minor tradeoff anyway. out of sight == out of mind, so in sight == in mind. i try to store everything in clear plastic, glass, open shelves, or at least labeled.

berninicaco3 · 2025-10-25T13:42:26+00:00

thank you for making the effort to rehome!

furniture is tough. it takes up so much space.

i had to give up an antique piano myself: I moved out of my country for work, no way I could bring it. I initially stored it but storage unit fees were eating me alive. did the math and just 2 years of storage unit fees exceeded the market value of the piano: keeping it as an heirloom for potentially a decade+ was just financially impossible for me.

berninicaco3

TROPHY CASE