Best home improvement project of the month.

[Packard]

Originally posted on Buzzfeed with the caption, “Home improvement is my passion”.

Perhaps a little less passion and a little more skill would have benefitted the project.

I can’t quite decide what the material is.  Linoleum floor tile maybe???

Here’s the link to Buzzfeed.  It is post #5 in the link.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ajanibazile/funniest-tweets-february-2024-so-far

 

[Svar]

Beautiful. Love the random saw cuts, nice touch. Very subtle yet bold.

 

[Cheese]

That's pretty cute.  [big grin]

That looks like Statuario marble priced at $230 per square foot...  [wink]

 

[woodbutcherbower]

That will haunt me forever. No matter what I do, I'll never be able to unsee it  [sad]

The guy also did all of his own electrical wiring;

[attachimg=1]

 

[pixelated]

The pictures posted so far remind me quite a lot of the gems in the "Just Rolled In" youtube channel.

for example,

 

[Packard]

In the early 1970s I was a traveling salesman and I had a company provided vehicle.  It was pretty nice, a Chevrolet Impala station wagon (with the dreaded clamshell rear tailgate).

It had a dreadful rattle in the driver’s side door.  I took it to the dealer and asked them to fix it.  They said rattles are not covered by the warranty.  I agreed to pay for the repair.

When they found when they removed the door card was an empty beer can.

I said, “I know I agreed to pay for the repair, but I am not inclined to pay for the removal of the empty beer can.”  The dealer agreed with me.

The mechanic said that in all likelihood a supervisor was walking the aisle in the factory and the worker had to hide the beer can in a hurry.  The only place available was in the door.

Addendum:  For those who are not familiar with the dreaded clamshell tailgate, this video shows the later model corrected for safe operation.

The earlier models allowed you to lower the bottom without first raising the top.  If you did that and reached in to pull up the tailgate, your wrist or fingers would get guillotined by the inertia of the rising tailgate.  Later models, which the YouTube is illustrating has a safety interlock that prevents raising the lower section while the top is in the closed position. 

They also offered ones that were electrically operated and they were no more dangerous than the electric windows of that era (which also could break fingers).

 

[Crazyraceguy]

That sink cut-out has to be a joke. There is no way someone did that and left it that way.

 

[Svar]

That will haunt me forever. No matter what I do, I'll never be able to unsee it  [sad]

The guy also did all of his own electrical wiring;

[attachimg=1]

What's the problem? The wires don't touch each other and air is a good insulator. There is a clear effort to spread them far from each other.

 

[Packard]

That will haunt me forever. No matter what I do, I'll never be able to unsee it  [sad]

The guy also did all of his own electrical wiring;

[attachimg=1]

What's the problem? The wires don't touch each other and air is a good insulator. There is a clear effort to spread them far from each other.

When I read the post, it is the sink countertop that will haunt him, not the UL approved electrical work.

We had a storm recently that downed some electrical power lines.  The local electric company advised that we should keep 30 feet minimum from live wires.  I stood back 30 feet from the image, and at that distance I didn’t see anything that concerned me.

 

[Cheese]

Actually, that Kingswood wagon is very cool...that one definitely fell off my radar screen. The polished American Racing wheels with a negative offset are also killer as is the large wheel diameter.  Those look to be at least 19" in diameter.

I've always thought about purchasing an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser circa 1975-1980.

 

[Packard]

Another problem I had with that car was there was a large chamber under the floorboard to accept the tailgate when you opened the rear cargo door.  Despite Chevrolet’s best efforts, in a rain storm water would trickle under the floorboard and accumulate.

Also, if you had any small items or sheets of paper in the cargo area, they would slip between the tailgate and the floorboard and also accumulate.  It allowed for the growth of mold and mildew.  The cargo area would smell horribly.

It was about 5 hours labor to remove the cargo door, clean out the mold and then put everything back together. We didn’t know about the dangers of black mold back then, but it was probably bad for my health too.

Later I had my personal mechanic drill out some weep holes to deal with this problem. But if a sheet of paper slid back into the chamber, it would block the weep holes. 

Chevrolet abandoned the clamshell design after that model was redesigned.

 

[Crazyraceguy]

My dad bought a new Malibu wagon in '77 and that tailgate redesign had already been done. It had the more common/modern up-swinging one-piece tailgate and those "newfangled" gas struts to hold it up.
It had the factory steel rally wheels with the trim rings and center caps. It was a pretty cool car for the time and I don't know of a single pic of that thing  [sad]
My little brother wrecked it in '82 or '83?

 

[Packard]

I liked that car.  When we traded it in, the gas crisis was in full swing and cars suddenly had to be fuel economical.  But carburetors could not function properly with the low float levels and lean fuel mixtures.

My next car was a Malibu.  It would stall every time I would make a left turn from a full stop.  I don’t know how many times I was certain that my car was going to get t-boned.

The dealer could not fix it.  After 3 months we traded it in again.  Back in those days a new car lost 50% of its value the moment you drove off the dealer’s lot.  So early trades like that were expensive options.