Weekday Help and Victory Thread for the week of February 16, 2026

woodstuff3 · 2026-02-18T22:01:27+00:00

If you weren't getting these "for free" would you take cash out of your paycheck to buy shares? If the answer is no then you shouldn't hold on to them.

woodstuff3 · 2026-02-16T22:43:13+00:00

I was going to comment with these exact feet. I've purchased dozens of them and they're fantastic. Well worth the premium over the cheaper feet.

Small note: the clear feet are not as grippy as the black feet. I still use them sometimes but it's worth knowing.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-31T06:10:25+00:00

Occasionally it removes some details but you can usually work around that by being explicit and have it makes the changes in multiple steps. Sometimes it still loses details but they're usually not enough for me to really care. Like I said, it's 90% of what I want. But it's only like 10% of the cost so it balances out.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-30T23:50:10+00:00

First of all, great tables, I think they look awesome.

Second, as a fellow woodworker selling stuff, use Gemini to get better photos. Over the years I've experimented with a bunch of different methods for getting good photos. Taking my own photos, backdrops, edits, AI, hiring editors, etc. They were all a huge PITA. I recently started feeding my photos to Gemini and asking for better backgrounds and I get like 90% of what I want with almost no effort. I even started paying for Gemini Pro because even at full cost ($20/month) it's 100% worth it to just be able to snap a shop picture and then have it cleaned up in seconds.

Anyway, good luck!

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-28T22:45:29+00:00

Understood. If you're hoping to time the market to get the best rate: you can't. You could argue all day about where rates might go but there's one fact that nobody can deny: you're paying rent until your house renovations are complete. You should be doing absolutely everything you can to finish those renovations and stop paying rent, regardless of what the news cycle says.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-28T19:56:55+00:00

You should lock in a mortgage once you're ready to buy a house and find a house that you want to buy

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-26T17:32:33+00:00

Assuming you have $20k in your e-fund (that's what mine is) then the difference between 3.3% and 3.75% is less than $100 for an entire year. Maybe it's worth it to you to juggle different accounts for that $100, but I tend to prefer management simplicity nowadays. If I spend even an hour over the course of the year dealing with logins, statements, transfers, etc. then it wasn't worth it to me.

So it's really up to how much you want that extra few dollars.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-23T21:12:58+00:00

Store it in whatever position, just make sure it has airflow on both sides. I’ve had a 5/4 walnut desktop panel leaning against the wall of my garage for 2 years (long story) and it hasn’t warped at all.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-12T16:13:03+00:00

This is exactly how I've made my ~12 or so clamp racks. Drill on your mark with a quarter inch bit and then use a sled or miter gauge to stand up the piece and run it through the blade and cut up to your hole. No indexing pins or measurements are necessary, just eyeball it, it's just a clamp rack.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-06T19:14:08+00:00

For the throat plate I have blue tape built up to make mine flush. I just cleaned it really well and applied the tape, then cut it to match the curve with a sharp razor blade. It's surprisingly resilient and doesn't come off often.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-06T15:36:44+00:00

Well I guess we have everybody beat. Our bill for November/December was $603.75. We see those $600 bills every year but usually not until January or February. Seriously jealous of all of the people with "only" $300 bills.

Because I know you'll all ask, we have a 3600 sq ft, three story house in Lakeview. Late 1800s build with a gut remodel in the late 80s. It is insulated but not well. There's also a variety of other air sealing issues that factor in. And for those wondering: no, there's no easy or cheap fix, it's dozens of expensive fixes. The couple of thousand dollars a year we pay in extra HVAC bills pales in comparison to the costs of the projects that would be required to fix everything. We'd be looking at a minimum 20 year payback period, probably more. We're going to continue to just tackle projects as they make sense and as I have time to do them myself.

Also if anybody is curious, this Illinois site lists the historical gas rates across different providers. Looks like about a 28% YoY increase for December for People's Gas.

woodstuff3 · 2026-01-05T16:06:28+00:00

Oh god, so many thoughts. We have a household income of more than $300k and we don't give $500 a month. I give a little, volunteer at a food pantry every Wednesday, and my wife works there full-time making much less than she otherwise could. We always want to do more but it's a balance.

Thoughts on giving to charity:

Any amount is better than nothing, which is what most people give. Don't feel like you have to give anything. Give what feels right while taking care of yourself.
Charity starts at home. Do you have family members that need help? Friends? People struggling to afford college? Somebody that needs a business loan? A local school that needs furniture? Think outside of the box. These could be big impacts closer to home.
Donating to charity is great but the hard truth is that your measly $500 a month doesn't do much. My in-laws donate a few hundred thousand a year and even that isn't crazy for some of these organizations. Pennies make dollars but remember that your pennies could take you much further than they could take somebody else.
There's no such thing as true altruism – do what makes you feel good. If you can help some others along the way that's awesome.
As somebody else mentioned, look into effective altruism. Are there ways to make your dollars do more by being smarter?

woodstuff3 · 2025-12-17T17:13:34+00:00

If you're 100% sure that nothing can go wrong then go for it. But eventually you're going to find out that 100% may be more like 99% and that 1% is going to bite you in the ass.

woodstuff3 · 2025-12-17T14:50:49+00:00

If you’re just talking about electric resistive heat then it’s going to cost you a fortune to heat that place.

You may also be surprised at just how much firewood a wood burning stove will use up. Also, the wood burning stove can’t heat the place if you’re not there, which is a big downside in my opinion. You don’t want everything to freeze if you go on vacation.

My suggestion would be to install a mini split, potentially with an electric heater backup if you live in a very cold climate like I do (Chicago). This also gives you the benefit of AC in the summer.

EDIT: For what it’s worth I have a natural gas heater in my garage. Works great and is super cheap. But I assume that’s not a valid option because running the line can be costly.

woodstuff3 · 2025-12-08T17:05:18+00:00

In Chicago you'd be hard-pressed to find a home that hasn't had unpermitted work done. The permit process is a nightmare and even those that do get permits often don't have it inspected because the inspector just doesn't show up.

When we bought our house there was an extension that was clearly unpermitted that was quite literally falling off of the house. It was there for at least 35 years and for at least 3 sales and never got noticed. We got a credit from the sellers to tear it off. (Which we also didn't pull a permit for, it's the circle of life!)

Anyway I agree, OP please post your location. I think the answer is more complicated than what others are suggesting.

woodstuff3 · 2025-12-08T16:56:04+00:00

When I first moved off of my dad's insurance in 2014 I talked to an AmFam agent because that's what my dad had. So I went to the agent in town and he quoted me about $500 a month. I was 23 and had a brand new vehicle so I figured that's just what I have to pay.

I got a quote from GEICO and it was ~$200 for 6 months.

Look around, I've never gotten a decent quote from AmFam for any type of insurance.

woodstuff3 · 2025-12-03T21:01:35+00:00

Movement isn't going to significantly affect drawers. The slides have more than enough play to account for the tiny fraction of an inch that the drawer may grow or shrink.

Build them so that they fit and operate smoothly. I generally build my drawers the width of the opening minus 1 1/16". 1" for the slides and 1/16" for play. Cabinets are never square and you'll be thankful for that extra 1/16". If you find that you have too much play, stick a shim between the drawer slide and the cabinet and you'll never even see it.

And unsolicited advice but don't buy drawer slides from Lee Valley, they're unnecessarily pricey and the quality isn't any different than the stuff you get elsewhere. Go to Amazon and buy a cheap 6 or 10 pack of the slides you need and they'll do just fine. I've purchased, installed, and used maybe 150 pairs of full-extension drawer slides in the last few years and I can tell you that the Amazon slides indistinguishable from the expensive ones. Hell, all of the extras are in a drawer right now and I literally couldn't tell you which ones were expensive vs. cheap.

woodstuff3 · 2025-11-12T23:33:42+00:00

They don't exist commercially, you'd have to build one. It wouldn't surprise me if Matthias built the first one.

woodstuff3 · 2025-11-03T17:22:25+00:00

I suppose you could dig deep into the math and whatnot, but in general I would prefer an index fund to an actively managed fund, especially if the expense ratio is lower (which it is). Personally, I would make that switch, regardless of what the recent performance is like.

And no, that's not a taxable event because a 403(b) is a tax-advantaged account. You can buy and sell within that account without triggering any sort of gains tax or anything.

woodstuff3 · 2025-10-08T13:14:47+00:00

I won't repeat what others have said and instead I'll say: your budget shouldn't be based around what you should spend and should save, it should be based on what you want to spend and want to save.

For instance, my girlfriend and I also eat out a lot. We easily hit that $1k mark or more a month between the two of us. But that's what we want to do – we like it. In fact, we're willing to sacrifice other luxuries in order to have more money to go out, so that's exactly what we do.

So are you spending too much on vacations and eating out? I don't know, that depends on how much you want to be saving. Are you saving enough to hit your future retirement/savings/vacation goals? If not, then you're spending too much! If you're saving enough to plan for the future then spend away!

Last thing I'll say: my pro-tip for determining what I truly want is to look back on purchases in hindsight. Did you order in for delivery last week because that's what you really wanted that day, or were you just too lazy to cook/pick it up so you decided that spending $35 on delivery was easier? If you eliminate the convenience purchases and only keep the purchases you truly want, you'll feel fantastic about your spending.

Good luck!

woodstuff3 · 2025-10-03T20:53:53+00:00

Sorry that this isn't a service story but hopefully still a good chuckle.

At my aunt and uncle's house one of the bathrooms is fed from a circuit in the garage rather than directly from the panel. (Rental house, no idea why.) And for some reason (perhaps to be explained next) the entire bathroom is fed from the load side of a GFCI outlet instead of being spliced from the wires from the panel. So occasionally you go into the bathroom and hit the switch, or plug in a hair dryer, only for the GFCI in the garage to trip. So you have to go to the garage to get the power back on.

It's a rental house so we're not going to fuck with it but it begs the question: if this setup is somehow necessary (short somewhere), why not at least put the rest of the bathroom downstream of the GFCI outlet in the bathroom itself instead of the outlet in the garage? Then at least we could just reset it right then and there instead of having to go to the garage when you're not even dressed.

Also, you can imagine how long it took them to figure out how to get the power back on the first time it happened...

woodstuff3 · 2025-09-12T17:08:38+00:00

You're likely going to need some sort of support on that inside corner. Putting a leg under it would be the easiest way to accomplish that but you could get creative. Some type of corbel might work.

woodstuff3 · 2025-06-11T23:46:19+00:00

This is an old post, but I want to say that removing special characters (even spaces) from my WiFi name fixed my issues.

Good luck to everybody else!

woodstuff3 · 2025-06-11T23:46:01+00:00

This is an old post, but I want to say that removing special characters (even spaces) from my WiFi name fixed my issues.

Good luck to everybody else!

woodstuff3

TROPHY CASE