THE HOUSE

Over a year behind schedule and a few thousand dollars over budget, the house remodeling project rolls on. Here are some pictures and stories that have occured so far.

It's been over a year since I took over the house as a sole homeowner. It is a lot of work to merge two households into one, while fixing up the place and working full time in the process! I don't know how my brother manages with five kids and all of those animals thrown in also.

I spent three years and four months not living at the house before I came back. Prior to my leaving, we put all of our income into paying off the mortgage and regular upkeep. There wasn't much time or money to put in our dreams. Mom started some of those in her last two years and did a nice job with some key projects. When I took over last May, I decided to go all out with my dreams.

The first month was a very busy month. My apartment lease was ending at the end of the month, so I decided to move my stuff into the house at that time. This gave me just over three weeks of time to do some basic cleaning and make room for an apartment worth of stuff. I was juggling trying to deal with the loss of my mother, working with the funeral arrangements and the estate paperwork, packing the apartment items to move, and making room in the house for those things. When June rolled around, I had to move out of the apartment and found myself in a very crowded house. Two complete residences don't easily fit into one!

I had a high priority task to do when I first moved in, replacing the windows. Two windows were broken and the sill on one was rotten. Mom had found a contractor to replace the window panes, but I decided to have the frames replaced also. The seals on the old windows were pretty bad. Looking back at the decision, I think it was the best way to go. The new thermal pane windows keeps noise and weather out so much better than the old ones. It was a major expense, but should cut the heating and cooling bills. All three front windows in the picture of the house above were replaced, as well as one in back.

I have cleaned up the front yard quite a bit. I trimmed dead tree branches, have removed weeds multiple times, and have done some leveling. Landscaping is a future project. For now, I'm just trying to keep the yard as free of weeds as possible.

I also purchased gutters for the front entry and rear patio areas. It took awhile, but the gutters are up and working now. Installing the gutters is at least a two person operation. I learned that predrilling holes in the gutters at ground level helps the process a lot. We don't get many days of rain here, but when we do it comes down hard.

HOME COMFORT SYSTEM

In the spring of 2006, the rusty old evaporative cooler was replaced with a shiny new Trane Heat Pump. If you compare the picture above with the one at the top of the page, you will find the new unit is much less noticable from the street. However, it is much more noticable that something was done by the temperature and enviroment inside the house!

For a photo gallery with text on the installation process, visit the Trane installation show.

The side yard still proudly features the pomegranate and two flowering bushes which have thrived for many years. The pomegranate still produces fruit, but I don't eat them. The bushes just recently were in full bloom and they are quite beautiful. Lady (the dog) lives in the side yard now.

The wall between the front and side yard had a gate that was in pretty bad shape. The posts that hold the gate were rotten and warped. I replaced them and the gates hinges. I also put a new latch on which mounts to the inside. Although I raised the gate over an inch, the slope of the yard brings dirt to the gateway during rain and I have to shovel dirt out every now and then.

Here is a picture of most of the back yard. The wood pile and very unstable metal shed are both gone now. Eventually, the rock sections will be leveled out and better landscaping will occur.

The swimming pool was used quite a bit over the summer. At the moment, the chemicals are balanced but the pool needs to be vacumned again. It is a never ending battle to keep the pool clean. Each time we get a wind storm, we get dust blown everywhere and most of it finds its way to the pool (or the furniture inside the house).

Mom decided to try planting a palm tree frond and see what happened. The result is at the top just left of center in the picture above. This tree is only about seven years old and I have to use a step ladder to trim it now. The palm tree is a very nice cornerstone of the back yard and I think of moms love of nature every day that I see it.

One very nice improvement that mom made in the last year was having a concrete slab laid down and then enclosing the carport with a sliding gate. Our carport used to have a very rough concrete rock floor that was hard to sweep and ugly to look at. The new floor also slants toward the alley for excellent water drainage. The sliding gate allows access to both sides of this two car carport, with the gate running parallel to the back block wall when open. The covered carport is at the top left of the picture above.

Mom had purchased wood tile flooring for the living room which she was going to put down. There seemed to be enough wood tile to do the living room and hallway, so I purchased enough linoleum for the other rooms. I decided that the old carpet needed to come out before I even moved stuff in. So during May, I worked at carpet removal and floor cleaning along with everything else. Under the carpet, I found a tile floor that was stained and brittle. I knew this had to be removed before new flooring could be installed. It was an unexpected situation which made me not finish the floor cleaning when the time came to move my apartment property in. So I put down plastic to protect my belongings from the unworked floor areas. I had bit off more than I could chew though. Cleaning and painting took priority and the flooring material sat around for the year. I'm just now getting some of the linoleum cut and the wood tile will wait until that is done.

Removal of the old carpet was easy compared to removing the tile below it. The main floor is a concrete slab. The old tile was very brittle and bad broken in places and bubbled in others, so it needed to be pulled out. The adhesive still had excellent holding power and is much stronger than the tile itself. So the tile came out in little pieces, requiring a lot of effort for each piece.

About the time I was getting the linoleum flooring from the store, I decided to buy some wall tile for the bathtub wrapping in the front bathroom. There were some tiles which were very loose and much of the grout was gone. When I pulled off a few tiles to take with me, I noticed the wall board was coming off with the tiles. One thing led to another and I ended up tearing out all of the tile and some water damaged board behind it. I decided that since I had the wall pretty well destroyed, this would be a great time to add a shower fixture to the bathtub setup. I also wanted to add an electrical outlet to the grand design and fix the squealing exhaust fan.

The back bathroom wasn't in as bad shape, but there was some water damage around the shower faucets which were apparently leaky. The room also had wallpaper which was coming up in places. My goal became remodeling both bathrooms in unison. That quickly became a huge job and I ended up getting a contractor to do the plumbing and rebuild most of the bathrooms.

The contractor and I decided that the best plan would be to tear out the walls in the front bathroom from floor to ceiling in the bathtub half of the room. Then the plumbing and electrical could be done. And finally new walls could be put in and tiled around the bathtub. During this, we found water damage on the ceiling board and ended up replacing half of the ceiling also.

The new shower system works great. I decided against a shower door system for the moment due to finances. However, that is a project which can occur any time in the future.

The only original items in the front bathroom is the light fixture and medicine cabinet. I bought a new vanity for the back bathroom, but ended up putting it in the front bathroom. The orginal vanity was in fairly good shape, so i put it in the back bathroom until I get a replacement. I put the best fixtures in the front bathroom as this will be the most used one.

I replaced the exhaust fan assembly and almost all of the attic vent system that went with it. I had to add a new support joist for the fan because the mounting was different. The wiring for the fan and new wall outlet is not yet complete.

I installed a cabinet that mounts around the toilet, but the bottom support board was the same height as the water shutoff valve. So I mounted it a little higher with boards under the feet.

I also remounted the medicine cabinet and have it filled now. I got very lucky and was able to find the original mounting anchors even after a few coats of paint had been applied.

Much of the back bathroom also was replaced. There was far less wall destruction and no ceiling work though. The shower stall has no bathtub and the bottom assembly was not replaced. Almost all of the other plumbing was replaced, including new shower fixtures.

Interestingly, not one of the six water shutoff values in the two bathrooms actually worked properly. All were replaced during the remodeling work. I also replaced both sink drain systems, even though only one was in poor condition. I figured that if it is done now, it won't go bad for a longer period of time.

I got new towel racks for both rooms and purchased a shelf system which fits over the toilet in the front bathroom. These give a splash of wood color to the otherwise white or bright walls, floor, and fixture color.

Generally speaking, the rooms have come a long way. As of this time, they are finished except for the detail work. Just a bunch of little things that need to be done before they are truly complete.

It took just over a year, but I very recently completed the first room remodel in the house. This is the bedroom before I put the furniture back in. The room has been cleaned top to bottom, has two coats of paint, restored baseboards, and new linoleum flooring.

The only thing that is not done in this room is the inside trim on the new windows. This hasn't been done for any room yet. I will get to this once I decide what I want to do with them. The curtains in all of the rooms are another future project.

The office is my second almost complete room of the house. It is very close to being finished, with the final details just left to do. I had to repair some big holes in the concrete floor before I put down the linoleum and replaced the baseboards. This room had been painted almost a year back, but there was some trim that I had not done at that time. Now most of the furniture is back in place and the room is very much usable again.

This room is designed to be a bedroom and has a fairly large closet space. I removed the doors from the closet and am using that as an extension of the room. This allows me to use over four feet of space that used to be reserved for doors.

The living room has been mostly clear for some time, but I use it to store furniture from the other rooms as I clear them out to work. I've also been using the living room to cut linoleum, as it has the biggest floor space in the house. Once the other four major rooms are complete, I will clear out the living room and lay the wood tile.

The kitchen has been cleaned top to bottom, painted, and reorganized. I have the kitchen arranged as it will probably be in the end, but the flooring will be the last linoleum that I lay. With this in mind, one wall of the room is devoted to longer term furniture storage of the pool table and filing cabinets that will go elsewhere later. The kitchen has turned out to be more work than expected also. I had to fix several problems with the cabinets and drawers that I did not know existed. I am finally to the point where I have utensils arranged and put where they will go, linen (dish cloths, oven mitts, etc) in drawers, and the many pots, pans, etc in decent order. Preparing meals should not be such a challenge anymore.

OK, so it is suppossed to be the second bedroom, but that isn't what it has been used for lately. When I first moved back in, this is where everything went that didn't have a good place where it belonged. And while working in other rooms, some of the stuff came in here to be out of the way.

As time went on, I got things more organized and quite a bit of stuff found a real home elsewhere. As more time went on, I brought in the wood shelf system from the kitchen and organized more.

The room will eventually have the ability to be a real spare bedroom although it will also still act as a storage area. Signs that this is coming closer to reality is the fact that I found portions of the floor again. In fact, between a third and a half of the total floor space is currently walking space. When that gets to over half, I will have the ability to setup a bed and table to call it a guest bedroom.

One of the nice things about having a spare room is that you can put stuff in there and close the door in case company comes over. There needs to be no excuse for the way it looks because it is just an oversized closet. At least that is my story and I'm sticking to it.

As time goes on, I will be adding pictures and more text to this section. I am finding that as my vision gets worse the house project progress has slowed down drastically. Everything is taking more time to do and with a major project like remodeling a whole house, it could turn into a several year delay.

Go to: