The Home Improvement Thread

Parents Forum Parent Cafe
621

Thank you for all of the suggestions.

@Silpat Your JCP suggestion was perfect. I spent some time going through their options, and I think I can make some of those work and stay under my window treatment budget. I am going to call my realtor to set up a time to measure the windows.

(There aren’t even any window treatments in the bedrooms or bathrooms. I don’t want sunlight streaming in every morning. :wink: Not sure anyone can see in the bathrooms due to elevation and window height (vs floor to ceiling sunroom windows), but I need to think that through.

@emilybee The fp is my biggest ?? I do not like the brick. There is another brick fireplace in the basement with a partial brick bar. The brick fits that space and is not going to be touched. But the brick in the family room just seems to there. The house has beautiful crown molding everywhere (even in the garage!!). The wrap around porch has redwood ceilings. The details are wonderful. The brick just seems blah and detracts from everything else.

I really like the suggestion of dealing with the cabinets first. Good idea.

I do foresee the complication of after dealing with the cabinets having to deal with the oak trim. :frowning: My ds has a friend who is a commercial interior designer. I might ask her if she has any insight on how to approach that. She originally wanted to do residential, so I do know she has some interest there.

622

I refinished my cabinets once and the hardest part of the job was taking off the doors and rehanging them. The old screws were often stuck but it can help if you put a piece of a rubber band on top of the screw top to get traction. It was definitely worth it in the end.

In the same house we had a brick fireplace in a room with two paneled walls and built in shelves. I painted all the paneling and shelves. I had the brick fireplace covered with tile and it was gorgeous! It wasn’t the full wall though, just a big square of brick up to the mantle with paneling above. I couldn’t do the tile work myself so that was expensive although it helped to buy the tile myself and I could choose affordable tile. We tiled over the hearth too, which had been brick. We used a dark slate for the hearth and buff travertine for the front with a horizontal band of multicolor slate mosaic tile as an accent.

If you paint it, you’ll need some kind of high heat paint, at least near the opening. A good hardware store or paint store should be able to help you.

623

Good tips. I have thought about tiling over the fp. They make it look easy on HGTV. :wink: I am not sure about IRL done by me. I am a good painter and have no qualms taking on those projects. The backsplash is a pretty small area, so that will be a good place to try tiling. The fp goes to the ceiling and the raised hearth is the entire width of the room.

624

@bunsenBurner, around this part of the PNW, old cedar trunks are popular in yards!

625

Venting here: My range finally died, I’ve despised it since we moved in, but waited for it to die in order to replace it. It;s in an island so we actually had to get a new island done (long story) and the island was built and delivered. The countertop guy came out to template and needed to see the appliances, he pointed out that the cabinet maker failed to leave room for the downdraft. (Who is supposed to read their specs? The professional guy, that’s who!) Great, that was an emotionally fraught day, but I did a lot of pinterest and found a solution, he added a frame to bump out the cabinet under the rangetop. Yay, easy fix, he did it the next day. Then the countertop guy came out to retemplate and he told me he wants the appliance guy to install first as it is difficult to tell how the rangetop and downdraft will butt up to each other precisely. But the appliance guy says the downdraft has to rest on top of the counter to bear part of the weight.
On Friday I gave the counter guy all the appliance guy’s answers and spec sheet, never heard back, contacted them Friday end of day and they gave the same answer as the day before, as if they had not looked at anything I provided. Grrr
Finally I texted each guy the others contact info and told them to talk to each other on Monday. Now I wait.

I really hate the way every worker dude makes snarky little comments about the other worker dudes, essentially, if “he” had done this or that another way, my job would be easier, but framed as if the other guy is a dolt.

626

We did not hire a window contractor because he has been dissing the job the other guys did. Mr. B said he can’t stand that kind attitude, and I agreed.

The templater that measured our kitchen said that countertop needed to go in first. He did not even need to see the actual appliances; he picked them from his CAD software library by looking up their model numbers. Everything fit right in when Mr. B was installing them.

627

Our living room has a brick fireplace - it’s painted semi-gloss in the same shade of white as the walls. I don’t love it but it’s inoffensive. I hate it when the trades can’t agree how to work together.

Our exciting project of the moment? Replacing a leaking radiator. It was still under warranty so I got sent a new one, no questions asked. (I did sent them a photo.)

628

Venting about vent rerouting. Window replacement project is underway, and Mr B decided to reroute the vents that were in the wall while the contractors had everything opened up. Two trips to HD and piles of metal junk resulted. This guy was supposed to be working on the ovens… sigh. I was expecting to see a huge drywall mess, but thank goodness he was messing with the floor! I did not need the prayer, cursing, or a glass of wine after all. :slight_smile: I was going to put the bottle away, but Mr. needed something to plug a round hole in the plywood… and a wine cork was just the right size. A bottle of Rombauer to the rescue! We did enjoy a glass of Zinfandel after I helped Mr. with lifting the big oven into its space. :slight_smile:

629

A new year, a bunch of new and exciting projects! Today, we figured out why one of the obscure electrical outlets in the kitchen does not work. Mr. traced the wire in the wall with his handy tracer tool and found the place where one of the wires was broken. He then used his video camera device to look inside the wall… gobsmacked! There was a very long nail or screw driven into the wall from the outside… and it pierced the electrical wire breaking off just one of the three wires!!! Holy guacamole.

630

Update on my cape house:

We finally got some trees taken down - 18 out of the 68 on our half-acre lot.

How do I know there are 68 trees? Because as part of the process of getting permission to cut down a tree, we had to have a tree plan done (basically someone identifies every tree on the lot on a plot plan), file a request with the local Conservation Commission and the state showing what we wanted to take down, pay a $116 filing fee, have the Conservation Commission agent walk the property (along with the certified arborist we have to use for the tree work, can’t just use a regular tree guy, no no no) telling us which trees we are allowed to remove of the ones we requested, have a public hearing, and then finally get the work down. All this because we are on the water within 100 feet of the flood line, so our entire property is subject to their jurisdiction. Oy.

Oh, and as part of getting permission, they are requiring us to plant two trees, with a trunk diameter of at least 2" ($$$), and they told us what kind of trees we have to plant. Sheesh.

The architect is working on the final set of plans for the changes we want to make. As soon as it’s done I’ll post the plans.

The big excitement right now is with the basement wall, seen under the deck in this picture:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/32532343@N00/34817140240/in/dateposted-public/

We knew there were water damage problems in this wall that needed addressing, but we had no idea how bad it was. That part of the basement is finished, and I tore out some drywall to take a look. It turns out that virtually every piece of wood in that wall is gone, to the extent that when my contractor saw it, he was worried that the house was in imminent danger of collapse. He came back that afternoon and put up temporary bracing. I’ve posted a few pictures:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/32532343@N00/39452187971/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/32532343@N00/39421162142/in/dateposted-public/
https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/32532343@N00/25581922598/in/dateposted-public/

Notice there’s no wall studs… they literally fell out and crumbled as the drywall was coming off (the pressure-treated wood you can see in the pictures is the temporary bracing they put up). The sheathing was just gone in some areas. The sliding door down there was very hard to open, clearly it was being pressed on from above.

The portion I took pictures of was accessible from the inside, which made fixing it relatively easy. But a good chunk is not accessible from the inside without gutting out a bathroom and the laundry room, so they are going to tackle that from the outside. With temperatures in the single digits here, they have postponed it for a little while. At least the bulk of it is shored up now.

631

Ouch! 68 trees on half an acre that also has a house on it is not a healthy forest! Makes me wonder if those conservationists know much about forestry… Possible that they classify every twig as a tree, but it is even more painful for the land owner!

Thank goodness our tree nazis only consider “essential” trees that are 6 inches or more in diameter at a grown person’s chest height. A lot of trees on our land are garbage trees, and we are working on replacing them with quality plants.

If you need power yard machinery, Mr. B highly recommends Li ion battery-powered Greenworks chainsaws and other power tools. You will probably need a good blower to keep debris off that deck. Greenworks blowers are not noisy at all and work great. No gas, no mess, just charge the battery, and you are ready to roll.

632

Geez, as usual you will spend every dime on infrastructure issues, including fees and services for City inspections and reviews, before you can even get to the fun stuff.

That isn’t going to be easy or cheap to fix all those walls at the bottom of the house. Another example of stuff that you can never find in a home inspection before you purchase.

Thanks for keeping us posted. Your renovation is interesting

633

That is some mighty rot out there, for sure. Good thing it is all braced! Our siding guys repaired the major dry rot spot from the outside as the plywood also had to go, but we ripped out a good chunk of drywall on that side as it became brittle and icky. The siding guy laughed that if we waited a couple more years, one day we would have ended up with no privacy in our bedroom! :))

634

@notrichenough: I hope you are rich enough for all those repairs!!

635

‘Sucking it up’ - getting past this repair faze and into the fun stuff. Obviously the property location is key, and ‘it’s only money’. When one ‘has enough’ - willing to part with some of it to enjoy a home. SWAN - being sure about structure of home is so key.

H and I are 4 years away from retirement. Our home was built well under our close observation – and our site supervisor was our neighbor and very skilled construction manager - he built big and small projects and was semi-retired…did it ‘for fun’. His son was contractor for high end homes in our area. Now we are just replacing some things like our 25 year old HVAC, first downstairs unit and now replaced upstairs unit – and Wells Fargo had 12 months interest free, so we took advantage of that both times. At some point, we will shine our home up like a gem…our location is in best school district and very close in to jobs. At some point, we may find a reason to move - will only move if it is to go to where kids are…first grandchild will be born in May.

636

Even with what we did, I think there are still too many trees, but the tree-hugging eco-nazis have control. The fines if you get caught taking down a tree without permission can be as high as $350 per day until you restore it. In particular, anything along the water is considered sacred, and we can’t take any of those trees down unfortunately. And there’s a bunch of those.

Our home inspector, who has an amazing eye for stuff like this, flagged this wall as an issue during the inspection. He put a picture in the inspection report where he jabbed a screwdriver through the side of the window frame and embedded it up to the handle. So we knew this was a problem area, although it’s way worse than we thought.

It’s basically the result of 40+ years of water draining off the roof onto the deck, and splashing/getting into the wall because the flashing wasn’t done right. The deck is new (the old one collapsed a few years ago), and one of the things my contractor is doing is reworking where the deck attaches to the house to fix this, and the old deck may have been worse. There may be gutters added in the future, although I am concerned about ice dams.

Cost to fix this is at least $20K, and could hit $30K+, depending on how bad things are on the rest of the wall.

Haha, yeah, this could set my retirement back a year or two. :smiley:

637

@notrichenough one of the first projects I worked on as an architect had a wall like that. Termites had gobble up whole studs. I think only the siding was holding up that wall. I always warn clients now that you never know what horrible expensive problems you may find once you start poking around.

638

Best way to prevent ice dams is to insulate your roof properly including making sure there’s no air infiltration.

639

Yikes. Our eco-tree nazis are much more reasonable compared to yours, NRE, but we are also limited and can’t touch most of the trees in the swamp. Can petition to take out diseased big trees - with a permit and $400 arborist report. Last winter the big windstorm did us a huge service by toppling one of the diseased maples. Thank goodness it missed the neighbors fence! Now that the tree was officially dead, we could clear the part that fell outside of the swampland (but who was looking, lol).

640

I agree, but that side of the house has a cathedral ceiling, I don’t know if we can even access the space to add more insulation:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/32532343@N00/35167542476/in/dateposted-public/