Thanks I’ll take this into account, I think whether we continue with him will depend on his willingness to fix this. I appreciate the recommendations on fixing it though and I will be sure to paint/stain after whatever happens.

Thanks for the reply, I looked up a diagram and I think I get it. Right now they only appear to be attached to the deck and are just resting on the concrete below. I am not sure if he intends to attach it anywhere else.

I do recall seeing some black clips under the tread when he only had one board across each step. Based on this and some other comments these boards don’t seem to be intended for steps, just for the top of the deck.

Honestly I am not sure as to the purpose of the angled screws, I was hoping there would be a reason, but based on the comments I am not sure there is. I kind of thought he needed to pre drill some holes, but I am pretty inexperienced so I didn’t want to assume.

We hired him majority of the work so the contract was for more than just the deck, but I believe the amount listed for the deck and stairs was ~7k.

Hey, its not AI, I am just a total amateur and I only grabbed a few pictures. The first and third stringers from the left have splitting occurring, although both have a screw going in diagonally that seems to have caused the splitting.

While I am here, I’ll go ahead and say fuck AI, and thanks for being skeptical :)

The last two pictures are from the first and third stringers, both have splitting. Sorry not sure what you mean by runners, I am a total amateur, just learning that all these parts have names lol.

I work in software and said the same thing when I first saw this lol.

Our contractor claimed the boards were exterior composite decking boards that should hold up to weather. They aren’t real wood and are very fake looking, and we decided to go that route to avoid paint/stain.

Everything construction-wise you described were things I noticed but didn’t know enough about which is why I posted here. So thanks for your detailed post!

You are correct, none of the stringers are attached to the ground, just resting on it, or in the case of the right side, just floating. They are resting on concrete they poured, so I am not sure if that helps with the concerns about the lumber treatment or not.

We don’t need permits for residential construction under 4 units in our county so we are okay there, but my fiancées dad is still the county building inspector and will be examining it.

Thanks again for your help!

Would this still require removing the treads to apply or can you apply it underneath somehow?

Thanks for the reply! I will take a closer look tomorrow morning probably and be sure nothing else looks off. I recall seeing 1 other split that wasn’t nearly as bad, further up the stairs. Everything on the deck itself seemed fine when I took a quick glance but I’ll probably double check it again too.

I appreciate the walkthrough for fixing it, I have never been great with carpentry/wood working but I might end up giving it a shot depending on how he responds.

Edit: spelling

Thanks for taking a look! Based on the other replies and yours, sounds like I will be having him fix this. Unfortunate that it happened, but I am glad I noticed it now rather than when my foot went through it.

Also thanks for the tip on the water proofing! I hadn’t thought about that but it makes a lot of sense so I’ll be sure to ask about it when we get these fixed.

I just took a look today and already messaged him about it but he hasn’t responded yet. He is licensed, hasn’t mentioned anything about permits, but my fiancée’s dad is the county building inspector which we have mentioned several times directly to him so he should know what to expect in that regard.

The angle of the screws was one of the things that threw me off the most, didn’t make sense why they were put in that way.

We already paid 60% under the contract requirements for ordering materials/beginning work. I feel like we might need to look at some other options based on what we have seen so far though.

Thanks for taking a look!

No paint or anything from what I have seen, not sure if he intends to either. It’s just the wood for the framing and composite board for the top of the steps/deck.

Books and comics I do grab manually, as I haven’t found something that works super well.

However, I have started using Kapowarr for comic management and mass renaming to match the file/folder structure Komga expects. It is still lacking some features but the developer has been making steady progress on it and the only two major features I feel its missing are metadata creation, and torrent indexers. The latter of which should be part of the next version and may boost its ability to automate downloads. I can’t attest to its manga support as I don’t read any, but it grabs its metadata from comicvine so that will likely be the determining factor. The developer also only permits LLM generated code under rather strict rules iirc.

As for ebooks, I grab them from my chosen source and just use the upload button in calibre web automated. I haven’t found an automation tool worth using yet, but I do like to keep an organized library in case I want to revisit something or share it with someone else.

Yeah I am pretty comfortable with CLI on linux, but I just never bothered with TrueNas. Also I am lazy and once something works I just leave it there even when I could improve it lol.

I have been meaning to venture into Proxmox as well but I don’t have the time or spare parts to get a new machine running atm. Maybe someday I’ll get around to it though as it seems like a nice playground without breaking things.

Damn that is a nice setup lol. I only built mine a couple years ago and only managed to get 5x 16TB drives at $169 each. I have 4 in the system and one cold spare.

I have tended to avoid cli on TrueNas mostly out of fear that I’ll mess something up and I’ll be too lazy to fix it. That was my main motivation behind switching to Dockge for containers, it even shows apps running through other container management systems, although you can’t manage them through there.

I have a single dataset running off of an ssd pool that stores config and application data. Large media gets stored on a separate pool on spinning disks. The app dataset gets snapshotted and backed up, but I am yet to create a separate offsite backup.

I am also in the process of switching away from TrueNas “Apps” to actual Docker containers running from compose files in Dockge. These compose files all get version controlled in Git as well. Apps have been really difficult to configure initially as many of the fields have odd requirements you can’t see until it errors on startup. I have found it easier to follow the documentation directly from the application I am installing so compose files have been much more straightforward.

Yeah I am not in a hurry to switch but I would like to at some point. But with android becoming more closed source every month it seems, I am more curious about switching to a linux mobile OS if that becomes viable in the future.

I have mostly been pushing myself to degoogle and self host to achieve my privacy concerns and in that regard I have been relatively successful. Switching to an open source OS is just the next major step that I am not sure I am ready for just yet. I do already run bazzite and arch on my desktop and laptop though so the phone is really the only thing I have left to switch.

Lidarr has a Spotify playlist syncing feature built in. You can set it to sync certain playlists and it will automatically add those artists to Lidarr. I think you can also configure it to monitor/download only the albums which the songs in your playlist come from, or download the whole artists discography.

I can’t attest to the quality of Usenet or private trackers for music as I don’t use either (mostly public trackers for movies and tv) but public trackers weren’t the easiest to get all the music I needed. I ended up using Slskd, a frontend for SoulSeek, with the Tubifarry plugin to connect to Lidarr and it is much easier to find releases now.

The next issue I have yet to tackle is porting those playlists to a player for Navidrome. If anyone finds a simple way to do so please let me know!

• Lidarr + Tubifarry + Slskd: automated downloads and organization
• Explo + listenbrainz: discover weekly replacement
• Navidrome: Subsonic Music Server
• Feishin: Linux Desktop client
• Arpeggi: iOS mobile client (Yes Ik iOS on privacy sub. Can’t afford to switch yet and my family has been using iPhone since I was s a kid)

Listenbrainz requires you to make what you listen to public as it is part of the open source project. If that is something you are worried about I think there are alternatives to explo that use last.fm but that is closed source as far as I know.

As others have said, buy stuff from small bands on band camp or at shows or something and pirate from whoever you see fit.

EDIT: I also should have noted, this is a self hosted setup that requires a server to be online unless you download your tracks to your client device. If you want a single device alternative, I am not personally sure what to recommend.