You spent years fighting weeds between brick pavers" is exactly why I ripped mine out too. I did the same swap in my backyard here in Tucson and it's been night and day. The decomposed granite just lets water soak through instead of pooling up or running off, which is huge during monsoon season. I also put down a layer of landscape fabric under the DG to help block weeds even more, and it's been almost a year with barely any coming through. The only thing I have to do is rake it smooth after heavy rain, but that takes ten minutes compared to the hours I used to spend pulling weeds from between bricks. Hardscapes look nice at first but they're way more work than they're worth in this climate.

I bought a used Steelcase for $150 and it's still solid after five years.

right? the toaster thing is hilarious though because at least you could control the humming, but with the sky thing you have no say at all. it's like your brain is running some kind of secret lab experiment on you every night and you're just the tired subject stumbling through it. i swear dreams love making you jump through hoops for stuff that should be super simple, like imagine waking up and your real car actually needed a specific number of claps based on cloud coverage, that would be a nightmare. honestly the more i think about it the more i think our brains do this on purpose just to make us feel crazy when we wake up and realize none of it matters. but then you still try it anyway because what if one time it actually worked, you know?

Wait, you recovered $1,400 in three weeks from a fifty dollar tool? That math actually checks out hard. @quinncarr I know right, I was in the same boat thinking cheap stuff would ghost me after a month or two.

My cousin tried that whole skin reset thing once and ended up looking like a tomato for a week. @olivia_moore you're probably right that it just stirs up more trouble for reactive types. She spent a ton on fancy serums to calm it down after, so the deep clean just made more work in the end.