Month: August 2018

Categories
Fixing Stuff Phase Two Samuel Sisters House

Repairing Spray Foam Roof

In July we embarked on a huge project. Tuckpointing and placing brick caps on the roof at the sisters house. This job ended up looking fantastic and I’m going to outline the steps below:

Phase 1: Repairing the Bricks
During this phase we hired a local bricklayer to come in and re-tuck point each chimney stack. In addition to the chimneys we also had him rebuild 3 knee walls in the front of the house. Pictures of this process are below:

Chimney, uncovered and open to the elements
Crumbling Chimney
Uncovered Chimney w/no flue cap in place
Chimneys capped with new concrete topper and flue cap
Chimneys capped with new concrete topper and flue cap
Chimneys capped with new concrete topper and flue cap
Knee wall being repaired. We had to cut the spray foam roof and re-tuck point 3 scores of bricks

Phase Two: Repairing the Spray Foam Roof
Once all of the brick work was completed it was time to repair the spray foam roof. Initially we wanted to hire this job out because neither my dad or myself had any previous experience installing spray foam. Finding a contractor to complete the job actually turned out to be a massive headache. It finally reached a point where I ended up pouring into researching how to install spray foam and where to actually get the stuff. In the end we were able to find the exact product we needed:

Spray Foam repair kit:
We purhcase this kit: https://www.energyefficientsolutions.com/Roof-Spray-Foam.asp?item=FOAM060

Spray foam sealer (this is applied over the foam to protect it from the sun + its an added layer of waterproofing):
We purchased this sealer: https://www.energyefficientsolutions.com/white-roof-coating-paint.asp

Tips for installing spray foam:
It turns out the spray foam is relatively straightforward to install. There is definitely a bit of a learning curve and during the process I learned several great tips and techniques:

  • Temperature is crucial. Buy an infrared thermometer to ensure your foam tanks and the roof are the ideal temperature. I purchased this thermometer from Amazon and it worked perfectly: https://amzn.to/2PB8TyZ
  • Apply the spray foam in the morning, around 9:00 a.m. If you wait longer the sun will heat up your roof to much. I was amazed that at 11:00 a.m. the roof material and bricks were already 122 degrees fahrenheit
  • When operating the spray foam gun, shoot the gun in quick bursts. This works way better than constant trigger pressure. The ideal motion is right to left at 1 foot per second then right to left again. Continue this all the way down the area you need to cover and you will get great results
  • This kit comes with two types of nozzles. The fan nozzle is the best one to use, it creates a wide even spray.
Foam installed and sanded down
Foam installed and sanded down to be as flush as possible.
First Layer of Sealer painted on
First Coat of sealer painted on.
Categories
Laravel Samuel

Animating Content Using AOS

We went on the hunt for a lightweight package to animate content into a Laravel project today. We found what looks to be a great package that we are trying out now, will report back findings and notes after using:

AOS Github Page:
http://michalsnik.github.io/aos/

There is a great ReadMe file located here:
https://github.com/michalsnik/aos/blob/next/README.md

Categories
Php Storm Samuel

Helpful PHPStorm Shortcuts

Running List of useful PHPStorm Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Shift + Shift will out up a dialog box that will search the entire project
  • shift + Delete removes an entire line
  • Control + K allows you to commit changes to the repo straight from PHPStorm
  • Shift + Shift then type annotation into the search box, will show full version history of the file you are currently in
  • Alt + Enter will add any missing classes to your current file automatically, very useful when updating a controller file in Laravel
  • Control + Alt + Z will revert a single line to the previous version, very useful when updating versions of Laravel
  • Control + Alt + Shift + J will select all occurrences in a section. Very useful when bulk re-naming or replacing items
  • Control + G will allow you to type an exact line to navigate to. Very useful when navigating to an exact location in a CSS file
  • To mass remove white space Hold down Control + Shift + J until all of the code is on one single line. Then press Control + Alt + L and that will put the indentation back and everything will be grouped nicely without any whitespace