The House
From DotelTech
Contents |
Day 1 (4/14/08)
The house is finally here. After hoops and jumping we finally have keys. Thats the good news. The BAD news is we are already over budget (but some how we managed to budget being over budget.) On top of being week late on close of Escrow. Thats another story in itself, but long story short, evidently the Escrow company just "forgot to finish the paperwork"
Day 1, long and hard day, the day the walls came tumbling down, or more preciecly hammered, punched, kicked, and attacked down. In 6 hours the locks have been replaced, power restored, water on, doors removed, gate fixed, pool quoted, drywall removed, closet shelves removed, and a whole lot of noise, dust and most probably very confused neighbors.
Of course we have pictures. Click here
Day 2 (4/15/08)
End of day two. Carpet people have been in to measure the carpets, pest guy has come and destroyed any creepy things that might have been creeping in our house. Our unsightly rusted mailbox was replaced by a nice house warming gift from our neighbors. Finally the wall bracing was removed, electric has been re-wired and the supports for the walls removed. The room is now open and free, we made the pickup date for the trash (at least most of it). Tomorrow the dishwasher is installed.
Day 3 (4/16/08)
The day ends, lots of repairs to walls, holes filled, cracks sealed. Plaster has been blasted off the pool. Pool is nice and naked now, no more giant cracks, however there is no water or plaster in there either. So we have a skate park. The final piece of drywall has been removed after 2 days of debating on the final shape of the room. The dishwasher was not installed unfortunatly. We have to cut our part of our floor for it to be installed, and they wanted $200 more for "hoses" Screw that. I won't pay for "Monster Cables" I'm sure as hell not spending that on "Monster Hoses"
Day 4 (4/17/08)
Pool has been re-plastered, and filled with water. Yes and I know how happy I'll be in 30 days, considering we pay by the GALLON. Pumps and filters have been ripped apart, cleaned an reassembled. Timer for pool is broken but been bypassed for the next few day/weeks. It won't work on automatic but it runs well enough on manual for the job at hand. The purple room has been stripped and gotten a coat of paint that is very NOT purple. Water heater has been hooked back up and we have HOT water. Repaired drain enough to allow use of the guest sink for the time being. Guest toilet has a crack in the tank, so unless they sell tanks we will need a new toilet, for the moment we are installing a coffee can for emergencies. Removed the previous owners "door art" interesting at the very least.
Day 5/6 (4/18-19/08) The days blended in to one
Dishwasher was found to be working, just installed incorrectly by last owners. Corrected that problem. The dishwasher still is and old and crappy model, but it saves us $600 for the time being. Garbage disposal which was new was also installed wrong. That is now working as well. Exterior lighting on the patio has been fixed and we have light. (no thanks to my muddled thinking and exploding multi-meter probe, If your tired DO NOT RE-WIRE, it leads to bright flashes of light and smoke). More cleanup on pool, Pool is looking great. lots more painting, and Spackle. Missing drywall pieces have been replaced, taped and sealed. Now to float the wall.
Day 7 (4/20/08)
Lots done today. Pools been calibrated and stabilized, however we just found out we are missing the Skimmer. Not really missing, the pipes are there but they have never been hooked into the valves. Another item to purchase and fix. Funny how I keep finding those. Tho the "dead frozen and unrepairable" garage door is now working. The tracks and guides were tweaked bent and damaged "beyond repair". The previous owner obviously does not follow the law of duct tape. I however added a new law. Hammers and crowbars can fix anything. So after reshaping the tracks and rollers with the hammer and crowbar the garage door works. Its noisy and far from graceful, but it DOES work. Next we found that most of our walls have many layers of crap built up on them. So we have to float all the walls. This is a long mind numbing process. A process we screwed up on and had to redo. I guess thats the fun of doing all the work yourself, you learn as you go. And finally we come to the the problem of removing wallpaper. Floating walls, cleaning, knocking down walls, rebuilding electrical and banging the living snot out of garage track is nothing to removing wall paper. I would love to meet the sadistic bastard that decided gluing paper to a wall was a good idea. This stuff is a pain in the patooki to remove. We floated an entire room in the time it took me to remove 8 feet of wallpaper.
Day 8 (4/22/08)
Lots done, Lots to do. All the walls that need to be floated have been. Little sanding left on a few of them. The wall paper is down. We are victorious. We are smarter then the wallpaper. Ceiling has been re-textured where needed. The ceiling is now ready to be painted. Fixed the skimmer on the pool. Cleaned up alot of garbage. Carpets get installed in 2 days. Lots to do still.
Day 9 (4/23/08)
Lots more sanding, painting, and cleaning. Lots of cleaning done, trim sanded, and started painting. Lots and Lots of small very time consuming things started. Noticed we needed to modify the laminate WAY too early in the morning (or late at night depending on your view). Did that. Hope the neighbors didn't mind power tools at 2am
Day 10 (4/24/08)
The carpets have been installed, look and smell great. Took ALL fans and light fixtures down. At night, in the dark. Running around with flashlights. Then we find we have the wrong mounts for ALL the fans. The fans we need flush mount kits for have poles, the fans we need poles for have flush mount kits. NICE, so we ended the night after cleanup and some more detail painting.
Day 11/12 (4/25/08)
Painting is MOSTLY done. Still have touch up, some painting in the hall, and the outside of the house. The baseboards too. Did I say done? Ok maybe I'm deluding myself. But Done enough for now. Moved all the large furniture over. Cleaned up stuff laying around. Cleaning air conditioner. Picking next projects, Broken sprinklers valves, Vents on side of house need new screens. We have 2 living plants on the lot. A nice little bush thing, and a tall ugly bush thing.
Day 13 (4/26/08)
Went to hookup washer and dryer. Pull out hoses, hook those up, SPLASH, bad seals in valves. So I replace the valves for the washer and dryer hookup. PLug in washer, No power. Track it down to defective power jack in wall. Replace. We can wash now. Hook up dryer, Wrong plug, replace power cord. Plug in, STILL no power. Bad power breaker. Replace. Now we can dry. In all washer/dryer should have been 10 minutes tops. Turns out to be several hour hookup. Moved in furniture cleaned, cleaned and cleaned. It's starting to look livable.
Day 23 (5/6/08)
OK OK so it's been awhile since I've updated, SORRY. Actually been in the process of physically moving the 61.7 Metric tons of crap we own, cleaning up the apartment, and unpacking/sorting, cleaning. I am 100% convinced the previous owner never ONCE in 30 years cleaned the cupboards. They are GROSS. Large variety of things have been replace/repaired and upgraded.
Started with the fans, we threw out all the old fans because they were broken/ugly/old/loud and were going to replace them quickly with some nicer hand me down fans. we immediately found the mounts were the wrong type. Well I'll just replace the mounts. Find they do not sell the mounts int he size we need. But thats ok, I can use a chop saw and a drill and make the mount myself. Go to mount them and what do I find. Original owners rigged mounting hardware in ceiling. So this means a trip into the attic to install REAL proper mounting boxes in the ceiling. Guess the fans will wait for the weekend.
More cleaning then you could possibly imaging, Showers are a disaster, sinks, and an entire baseball diamonds worth of dust on the laminate floors. We of course sent our pet Roomba to some of these tasks. I don't think Roomba has ever eaten more dirt, carpet fiber and bits of drywall in it's life. Roomba's been doing a great job tho, he does get lost in the house sometimes and dies in a room, not being able to find his way back to his home.
Started the yard work, got a mower and mowed the first lawn since I was in high school. Not too bad, However I filled the ENTIRE giant 90gallon trash can with weeds pulled from the side and front yards. ICK. I've only made a tiny dent. I'll be spending many weekends converting the yard into something to be proud of.
More pipe and valve replacements in the house. I've come to the conclusion that if it has a valve, it leaks. New valves, new seals, and lots of Teflon tape later the majority of the major problems have been taken care of. Still have bathrooms to work on.
Finally the water purifying system I was so excited to have. A complete disaster. It didn't work at all, so I decided to break down, dismantle it and clean it up. The RO system had NEVER been serviced. EVER. Stuff was growing inside. Mold, slime and red/green things. I rebuilt the entire system. New filters, New hoses, new purifiers, everything. Found the drain lines were clogged as well. So I learned how to dismantle the house drains and clean them. ****30 YEARS OF DRAIN GOOP IS SMELLY NASTY AND GROSS*****. But now it's clean.
So much more to do. Baseboards still need to be bought and cut, guest bath needs to be gutted. Master bath needs to be cleaned and painted. Lots and Lots to do.
Day 54
Ok So it's been awhile since I've updated the page. About a month actually. Soo Soo Soo many thing have been done, fixed repaired, replaced and umm modernized. We have gotten quite good at doing repairs.
The air conditioning
Well the hottest day of summer hit. 104 degrees. Of course we find the AC unit does not function. Of course we find this out at 5pm on a Friday. This means no repair person can be out here until Monday. Very nice and dandy. We ended up having to keep frozen bottles of ice in the fish tank to keep our reef from dying. Average house temperature was 95 degrees.
I had been hoping to wait for a cooler day to finish installing the ceiling fan in the master bedroom. Looks like NOW was a good time to get it completed. Any relief from the heat was welcomed. Got the master bedroom fan running.
Monday comes and we are told there is nothing wrong with the AC unit. "accept a bad breaker and it has never been serviced in 30 years". The warranty company they sent to fix the AC unit is not allowed to clean the units, or replace breakers. The guy was nice enough to show me how to service it myself. Saving me the money, and allowing me to add another item to my "Now know how to do" list. Had the breaker replaced and got our AC working on the last day of the 4 day heatwave. Figures.
Fans Fans Fans
We finally got all the fans (except for front room which need all new wire) installed. Repaired any problems in the ceiling mounts. Built new mounts to allow us to use the donated fans. Wired them up. and Now we have fans and light.
More pipes, seals, valves etc
Dunno how many valves, seals, pipes, gaskets and hoses I've replaced. Way too many to count.
Drapes
This falls under the same category as wallpaper. The process went smooth as silk right after I threw the instructions away and did what seamed right to me. Let me post the EXACT instructions from the install sheet.
I shit you not these are copied verbatim from sheet.
Change 2-way Draw to 1-way
- Lay face down, Pull sections apart free master cord from right master slide off and discard.
- Cord and Stack right. Change Screw. master slide off, move rings outside(large) rod, Replace master, rejoin.
- Cord and stack left, untie, remove cord, restring cord, re-knot, untie cord on right and pull down. between wheels on right. Add guide, restring and re-knot. Change screw in master most all ring in inside(smaller). Replace Master rejoin.
As you can see, this is a horrible horrible translation. of probably a translation of a translation. I think I should have just followed step one, and lay face down.
More paint, baseboards and the like
Round 2 on paint, touchup and install baseboards. The "WOOD" baseboards are now "Rubber foam" which I think is both cool and weird. Who knew. Looks good, easy to cut.