My next house won’t have any wallpaper. We are redecorating our downstairs bathroom, and so step one is to strip the wallpaper, then paint the walls, then put up wainscotting, then put up crown molding, and then do a final spiff. The room is not even five feet square, so how long can it take? I took yesterday off to work on it, and I’m still on step one – yep, once again I’m stripping wallpaper and hating every minute of it. There is a new wrinkle this time; when they put the wallpaper up, they put up an underlayer of what resembles superthick dryer sheets. It doesn’t come off in one pull – no, it come off in a minimum of two layers – sometimes more. In a couple of spots I’ve been reduced to scraping off a thick layer of paste with some fiber still embedded.

Given how busy this time of year is, it may not have been the best time to tackle this sort of project. However, we have a neighboorhood tradition of a progressive Christmas party (between Christmas and New Years so people are somewhat relaxed) and what with our new annex and updated master bathroom, we’ll be a stop along the way. So we wanted to put the icing on the cake by redoing the downstairs bath. Ambition goeth before the late night cursing.

Tags: Home Renovation

Our room annex construction continues. My wife has informed me that she doesn’t care for the term addition. It seems that her childhood neighbors had an addition that was never finished – the husband took off before completion — and served as a junk area. So I promised her I would call it the annex (somehow I figured festering sore was out of the question). When we started, the contractor said four weeks. In retrospect, that figure was unrealistic. But it set our expectations and we figured we’d be done by Thanksgiving even with inevitable delays, even if it took twice as long. When my daughter asked if it would be done by her birthday (in February), I asked which one. The whole thing started two weeks later than originally planned, we lost two weeks while we waited for new roof trusses because the architect got confused about inner and outer dimensions. We lost another two or three weeks (they all blur together after a while) because they didn’t leave provisions for the heating ducts, despite our repeated attempts to get them to explain how they were going to hook the new ducts up to the old. Finally they cut up the new floor slab to put in the ducts – which gave us a heavy coating of concrete dust throughout the house. And both these delays slowed the project down even more because the next jobs didn’t get scheduled until they were completed. And then the Holidays, which we were supposed to be done by, killed us. Firms wouldn’t ship materials. Contractors wouldn’t even start jobs if it meant they might have to work in a week containing Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years – three more weeks down the drain. 

With the holidays over, we figured the pace should pick up some. Yesterday, my wife had told me the electricians had been there first thing in the morning, so I knew some work got done on the addition, oops, annex. But when I got home, I was overjoyed just to see that the lumber sitting in the front yard for months had finally been hauled off. And then to go inside and see that the painters had been there, and finished – that was heart attack material. Three tasks in one day – I can almost believe we’ll be done by the end of the week (the latest estimate). End of next week is more like it, but I can see light at the end of the surprisingly long tunnel. Why we only have the carpet, the bookshelves, trim and touchup, finish the siding (they ran out!), and rebuild the fence to go. Soon I’ll have a brand spanking new room annex, and a sea of mud to go with it. Oh yeah, once it’s done, I’ll have to go to work. Furniture, decorations, and this spring, landscaping. Maybe I shouldn’t be too anxious for them to finish.

Tags: Home Renovation

Yesterday had its ups and downs. Problems at my ISP knocked funmurphys offline. But back in the real world, they were working away on the annex. Jerry was restoring the fence and side yard to its pre-construction state, and freezing his feet off (thin socks); the unknown carpet installers were, well, installing the new carpet. So I came home not just to progress, but an inside that is almost done — done enough to move the furniture back out of the garage, where it has been forcing me to park outside in the cold of winter, and put together the Fruit of the Murphy Loins foosball/air hockey table they got for Christmas. So something for everybody. What did my wife get? She got to arrange the furniture at a 45 degree angle to the walls and stuff like that. The project is rapidly going from gigantic headache to party time. And the best part is, no more dust! Well, just the normal amount.

Tags: Home Renovation

After the cost and delay of our room annex project, the thing that’s disturbed us the most is the trash. OK, dust ranks up there, but we expected it. What we didn’t expect was that nobody who has come to our house has felt the slightest need to clean up after themselves. The only guy who cleans up is the one who shows up in response to our complaints about the trash, and he doesn’t do a particularly good job of it. Old insulation lays where it falls. Spills of caulk, wall mud (I don’t know the technical term, sorry), concrete stay where it falls. You know somebody’s been there working by the pile of trash left behind. Soda cups from fast food places remain until we throw them away. Sometimes it seems like the workmen go out of there way to make a mess, and then ignore it. And it’s not like they’re working late and don’t have time to clean up; it’s simply beneath them. If the construction was self contained, it would be one thing. But we have to live in the other half of the room. Maybe next time, we’ll stipulate women workers and see if they are any better.

Tags: Home Renovation

For the last week I’ve had a nice concrete floor for the room addition, and nothing else. Work was halted because the roof trusses had to be re-ordered because of the measurement snafu. Today, the framers are supposed to show up and start. I have no idea what will greet me when I get home tonight. I guess that’s the exciting part of home improvement. The giant ruts in the yard from the bobcat hauling concrete for the frost walls and floor is, I suppose, the lousy side of home improvement. Now I can relate when I read histories of WWII that talk about the overwhelming tide of mud in the Russian spring, since my backyard has turned into a vast expanse of churned up mud. I just can’t wait to get out there and re-grade and re-plant (hah!).

Yesterday work started on the bathroom. We are putting in a new shower, new floor, and new countertop in the master bath. When I got home, I had a shower without walls and a floor of nothing but plywood. Frank Bielec would paint the tiles right on the subfloor, but I’m foolishly paying to have tile installed. Last night we began taking the old wall paper off the wall, mainly on the theory that with the toilet in the tub and the mirrors taken down, we could get to places we couldn’t ordinarily get to (nor want to, for that matter). I have come to hate stripping wall paper off the wall so much, I have sworn to never again put any up. The prior owner put up some sort of plastic paper that has to be taken down twice – first the plastic front and then the paper backing. No doubt this was felt necessary because it was going up in a damp bathroom. After 3 and a half hours, I have a majority of the paper off. Needless to say, it’s mostly the paper that’s hard to get to or that stubbornly clings to the wall that is left. Tonight I have a cub scout leader’s meeting, so I’m off the wall paper hook. I have a feeling the remaining paper is going to remain up until after the room is finished and I’ve regained my good humor enough to continue.

Tags: Home Renovation

I had to say the construction project was going better than Dream House. Late this afternoon I got a call from my wife with the news that the Architect screwed up his dimensions – the addition was 16 inches too short and the interior wall would have a jog in it. Well, fortunately my wife noticed before they poured the concrete for the walls – just the footing is off. So now they’ll hand dig the footing and wall (in clay that is slightly harder than Portland cement), repour the footing, and then pour the walls. They are also off by 8 inches away from the house, but I think we’ll just bank that for later consideration. Somehow, I have a feeling other things are going to come up.

Tags: Home Renovation

Thursday we got a good news/bad news call about our home improvement projects. The good news was, they moved up our start date to Friday for the room addition, the bad news was they moved back our bathroom start date by a week. So I took Friday off so I could move the plants that were where the addition was going, and to get ready for the cub scout pack campout the following day. The builders came by, looked around, said piece of cake, and left. A fire inspector came by and said we didn’t have a fire district permit. When I called the builder they said we did. Don’t you just love bureaucracy in action – I wonder how much I’m paying just for filling out all the permit paperwork.

Monday, they showed up, marked the underground cable and electric lines with spray paint, and demolished half the deck – the foreman told my wife that while using screws instead of nails is what he would have done, it made tearing the deck apart much harder. Tuesday they showed up, knocked down more of my fence than they told me, tore out the rest of the deck, dug and poured the footings, and tore up far more of my back yard than I expected. The hard clay – we’ve had a very dry summer/fall this year – defeated the first backhoe, pulling it into the trench when they tried to dig the footings. They had to get a bigger one to haul the first one out and finish digging. They poured concrete in the afternoon, so now I have a rectangle of concrete in a field of dirt for a back yard. 

They also accidentally cut the cable line. So they had to call the cable company, who came out amazingly fast (my wife figures they must have “pull”). When my wife found out, she told the foreman that she was upset because she was going to miss Trading Spaces. The foreman told her how much he loved the show and that he got to meet Ty when Trading Spaces was filming shows here recently. 

As many as the screw ups were, it is going smoother than any of the episodes of Dream Home I’ve seen.

Tags: Home Renovation

We went to the neighborhood trustee meeting last night to get architectural approval for our plans to add on to our house. I was worried because a few years ago, when the other fearless leader was a trustee, neighbors of ours had a hard time getting approval for the front porch they were adding. They kept getting asked to provide better drawings. So I was nervous, but we didn’t have any problems. They looked our drawings over for a couple of minutes, asked a few questions, and signed the drawings. I guess the difference was, our neighbors kept submitting something they sketched up, and we gave them real architectural drawings, drawn up by an actual architect (and paid for with actual money, too).

The hardest part so far has been getting a contractor. In the spring, we wanted to get bids on the addition. So we contacted a couple of firms that people we know worked for. We got them to come out, and then we had a hard time getting bids out of them, and when they did, the bids were astronomical. The same neighbors who built their porch knew a guy who wanted to do our addition. He called a couple of times, begging us to let him come out and bid. So after getting the astronomical bids, we did. Then we had a hard time setting a date to talk to him, and after he came out and we told him what we wanted, we never heard back – even after repeated calling. So we gave up on the addition idea.

This summer, we decided that since we weren’t going to do the addition, we’d redo the master bathroom. The shower was in bad shape, the tile floor was in bad shape, and the other fearless leader didn’t like the countertop. So we began our search for a contractor. We were pleasantly surprised with the first one we tried. He was polite, showed up on time, returned phone calls, and gave us a bid in a reasonable amount of time. The only problem was, he did things a certain way, carried a certain grade of material, and that’s the way he did things. We decided to check with another contractor to better explore our options, and he was equally pleasant to deal with. We went with the second guy because we could get what we wanted. When my wife was complaining to him about how lousy the contractors we’ve dealt with this year (to get the carpet installed we had to issue two ultimatums and listen to a sob story about the contractor going to the hospital with our measurements), he told her they did room additions on the side. He gave us a reasonable bid, he seemed to check out, so now we’re having the addition and the bath done. Can you say debt? I thought you could.

I think I’m going to steer my kids away from white collar work, and try to get them to become tradesmen. If you are competent in your work, punctual, pleasant to deal with, and give the customer what they ask for, you can clean up. It’s too late for me, but like all fathers, I want my children to have a better life.

Tags: Home Renovation