AMERICANS! Please help...

[xiamenese]

Unless you've got a newbuild here ... in which case most of your internal walls will be wood-frames with plasterboard, you've probably got very friable brick and plaster, and I think I'd probably trust myself more with rawlplugs, than with those there new-fangled, bank account-draining "tapcons"!

Mr X

[lunk]

A store selling tapcons, would that be a 'tapconjunction'?

[vic-k]

A store selling tapcons, would that be a 'tapconjunction'?

luvit luvit luvit!!

[Ahab]

Ye Olde Pile.png (378.97 KiB) Viewed 4747 times

Ha! Wrinkle your brow and show us! Sounds neat. That said, I'm concerned by "a s*tload of Tapcons". That's a lot. Just how large is your kitchen? This does bring to mind working on job sites, wrecking out old for new, and finding walls barely held together with enough drywall screws to handle a five-story lobby. Given your parsimonious expression I find it difficult to imagine you living in Tapcon-infested digs—you don't have a grand kitchen do you?

Dave

I tried pasting in a picture, and all I got was a lousy filename.

But, no, it's not a "grand" kitchen. We cut all the wood for the beams and boards from our woodlot and hauled it to a local sawmill; the north, west, and half the east wall are dry-stacked concrete block coated with stack-and-bond, four inches of Styrofoam, and earth-bermed to the eaves. The south wall is mostly patio-door replacement glass. The whole thing sits on a concrete slab, which sits on six inches of styrofoam; all the concrete acts as a heat sink for heat from the sun and from the wood cookstove.

Because the walls downstairs are concrete, and so is the floor, attaching wood partitions, cabinets, bookshelves, stairs, whatever, had to be done either with lead sleeves and lags, or Tapcons. Tapcons aren't that expensive, if you value your labor, and are more structurally secure on anything short of ¼-inch.

We poured the slab in 1979, moved in 1980, and someday we'll finish. A grand house it ain't--1500 square feet. More a hobbit burrow, I suspect, though the kitchen occupies half of the ground floor.

I tried dragging in a .png of the house, and also a converted PDF, but I still get only a file name. Vick-K can do it, but apparently it's beyond my abilities. Or, possibly, not.

[vic-k]

Verrrryyy nice!! Obviously backwoodsmen is misnomer for 'clever buggar!'
You'll never finish it though, cos, they do say, when a man's home is completely finished, he has to move or else he'll die. Don't ask me who said it. I've been using it most my adult life as a reason for not finishing this or that. Or else , " Gi'me a break! I can't do everything at once … can I."

Ahab:
I tried dragging in a .png of the house, and also a converted PDF, but I still get only a file name. Vick-K can do it, but apparently it's beyond my abilities. Or, possibly, not.

Can't see anything wrong with the piccy mate

Hard to find an outlet for Tapcons over here. All in the States. I think I've got two, from 17 yrs. ago in a box of miscellaneous screws, in the garage.

Well done there mate
Keep up the good work!
take care
Vic

[dafu]

. . . someday we'll finish. A grand house it ain't--1500 square feet. More a hobbit burrow, I suspect, though the kitchen occupies half of the ground floor.

That's great! Looks exceptionally comfortable.

Dave

[Ahab]

It is. Our old house was one of those sprawling sea-captain's residences, and was, I determined, the principal reason they all frowned in their portraits. After a 30-below winter in 1977, when we burned through our annual 12 cords of wood before Patriots Day, we vowed, like Scarlett O'Hara, that we'd never be chilly again. Now we burn under two cords a year, culled from our woodlot, and that includes all heating (though the sun covers about half the load) and most cooking. Summers, there's a beehive oven buried in the earth opening into the kitchen, and a four-hob electric cooktop and a toaster oven. Four years ago we stuck a 3.2kw PV array on the roof (that's the dark band across the top), and now make roughly 80% of our electricity.

All this, and a big garden, makes it a bit easier living on writer/editor money for the past 30 years.

[dafu]

All this, and a big garden, makes it a bit easier living on writer/editor money for the past 30 years.

That's what I suspected (sigh) but it doesn't sound as though this has been onerous. You've certainly made good energy-saving choices. So we're looking at the South side, yes? I was little worried about how dark it might be inside with the trees so close but then noticed the skylights. What's with the translucent? panel just above the gutter? Soft light for living room or another project-yet-to-be-done?

Anyway, like I said, looks exceptionally comfortable!

Dave

[Ahab]

That's what I suspected (sigh) but it doesn't sound as though this has been onerous. You've certainly made good energy-saving choices. So we're looking at the South side, yes? I was little worried about how dark it might be inside with the trees so close but then noticed the skylights. What's with the translucent? panel just above the gutter? Soft light for living room or another project-yet-to-be-done?

Anyway, like I said, looks exceptionally comfortable!

Dave

The trees to the north are white pine and red oak; there are three apple trees to the south to shade the house in the summer and admit light during the winter. They're kept barbered so they never block the solar panels across the roof ridge. The downstairs roof overhang is calculated to exclude any direct sun between roughly the end of May and the middle of September; but in winter, the low northern sun penetrates all the way to the back of downstairs (the upstairs skylights are shaded in the summer by the apple trees).

The translucent panel lights the attached greenhouse, where we grow winter greens and start plants for the garden (the diffused light from that greenhouse paneling prevents hotspots, which you'd get from glass). There's also a workbench and a loo out there, which is a very nice place to sit with a notebook and exchange astonished looks with hummingbirds or grouse, depending on the season, while taking care of business, so to speak.

[John Dodds]

It's DULUX (with a "u", not an "a").

Yeah, never heard of Dulax... made me think of Exlax, which is a laxative

Anyway, Glidden is probably a safe bet, at least in my world.

Bruce

[pigfender]

So, I've got another one of those questions.

Is "Direct Debit" a recognisable term? A search shows that you have DD as a concept in America (Automatic Clearing House), Australia (Direct Entry), etc, but it's not clear if the term Direct Debit itself is a term you'd recognise.

As in... "I have a £5 a month direct debit to the RSPCA."
Is it obvious that means you've set up an automatic donation to charity that just happens without you ever having to think about it again?

[Ahab]

So, I've got another one of those questions.

Is "Direct Debit" a recognisable term? A search shows that you have DD as a concept in America (Automatic Clearing House), Australia (Direct Entry), etc, but it's not clear if the term Direct Debit itself is a term you'd recognise.

As in... "I have a £5 a month direct debit to the RSPCA."
Is it obvious that means you've set up an automatic donation to charity that just happens without you ever having to think about it again?

My bank calls it Automatic Payment. ATM cards are pretty universally called Debit Cards.

[nom]

So, I've got another one of those questions.

Is "Direct Debit" a recognisable term? A search shows that you have DD as a concept in America (Automatic Clearing House), Australia (Direct Entry), etc, but it's not clear if the term Direct Debit itself is a term you'd recognise.

As in... "I have a £5 a month direct debit to the RSPCA."
Is it obvious that means you've set up an automatic donation to charity that just happens without you ever having to think about it again?

Can't answer for the Americans, but for what it's worth I've never heard of "Direct Entry" in Australia (you really read that somewhere? Truly?? You sure it wasn't some accountants having a joke*). However, the term "Direct Debit" is used. It applies to any electronic payment made directly from one bank account to another (which, in day-to-speech, includes use of a Debit card). This does not need to be a regular payment, although it can be.

*Accountancy humour is an acquired taste apparently, so much so that not even all accountants acquire it**
**A relative of mine—a manager in an accountancy firm—attended an accountancy convention and was admonished by another delegate for telling an accountancy joke on the way into the keynote. Apparently the other person thought accountancy was too important for jokes. Bless.

[pigfender]

Yup... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial ... rect_Entry

Okay - it sounds like whilst you might not call it exactly the same thing and know that it means an automated payment that you don't have to think about, you'll have a basic appreciation of what it does (cash paid directly from your account).

Cool.

Thank you America and Australia.

[big soft moose]

You might be over thinking the descriptor question, surely part of a British writer's charm for an American audience is their quirky Britishness and their use of British terms etc ... Even if your novel is set in america , if your narator/principle is British it makes sense that he'd use British descriptions ... of course if your principal is an American then that's different, but it will be really hard to pull off if you're not.

In 'after the wave', i've got a secondary character of American descent , and i'm seriously considering binning her as writing her convincingly is a serious challenge, even though she's loosely based on an american ex girl friend.

of course the other option is to use generic terms that are understood internationally, so for example instead of worrying about direct debit vs automatic payment, you could just say "donated"

"Charles was a careful and meticulous man, he donated £5 to the RSPCA every month, spoke to his mother every monday, and each morning made sure that the skulls of his victims were scrupulously clean"