Renovations
As I mentioned before, my home will be going under renovations. Correction, is under renovations. Today carpet was pulled up in the basement to prepare it for the new carpet. When ever you start to pull up, remove or break through things in a house you get to see all the problems that others before you tried to cover up or did incorrectly. Some are big, some are small and some are just plain “why the hell did they do that”. For example, in the basement downstairs, they screwed the sink vanity to the wall… from the other side of the wall in the hall. o_O We also discovered that they laid the tile down wrong in the shower which has resulted in leaks over the year and completely rotted out the wood. Ugh… more problems = more money. We’ve got a good contractor though so I know it’ll all work out.
I’m not a handy man so I only help out where I can. I have done a few odd jobs around the house. I can paint a room, switch a overhead light to ceiling fan. I’ve put up shelves in a nook, switched out bathroom faucets and even replaced a toilet. Just odd jobs, nothing like a major renovation. Are you a handy person or would you rather hire someone to do the job?
Play Asia
June 16th, 2012 at 10:32 pm
my dad and i were replacing the siding on our house about eight years ago, and we found four layers of siding on our house. with no exaggeration(ok, maybe a little) our house could have survived a nuclear strike. there were two layers of espestos siding, wood siding, and aluminum siding. and four layers of shingles on the roof. that was not fun to remove.
June 17th, 2012 at 7:10 am
House renovations here have not been by choice. Back door into the laundry is below ground level and has a ramp running down to it, with a wee little drain at the bottom. Add blocked gutters and heavy rain, and downstairs floods out. First time this happened, all the carpets had to get replaced, and found out the exact same thing had happened two years prior with the previous owner, with the same carpet guy replacing it then as well. Two years later and nearly half a dozen incidents where we had to bucket the water out of the ramp before it flooded the house, we finally got a drainage pit and water pump installed to prevent it from happening again.
Then there were repairs in the upstairs bathroom at one point, which must’ve shook some pipe loose under the floor, causing a leak to flood the ceiling of the bathroom directly below it. It was surprisingly watertight except for one finger-width patch, until the ceiling board was pulled down to see what was happening, and a torrent of foul smelling water poured out.
And moving even higher up, the previous owners used to have a fireplace in the hallway upstairs, but was removed before we moved in. Turns out that when removing the chimney, it wasn’t properly covered outside on the roof after being removed, and leaked into the insides of the roof. We only found out after the hallway light fitting filled up with water and began dripping – we were amazed it didn’t short something out!
Granted, those were the sorts of things that were beyond any sort of a DIY fix – for the most part, my handywork consists of tightening up doorhandles on cupboards, getting draws sliding properly on their tracks, removing old curtain rails and demolishing a closet area in a corner of the garage that was impossible to get into. In other words, if it takes more than one tool to do the job, it’s probably too complex for me to handle it.