Ah, the Bar

Can you see the termites? They are IN the sink cabinet yet, the cabinet looks perfect.

  

We’ve been rebuilding the bar, this is the old picture when the new pipe was going in.  We got all the way up to new drywall, texturing and painting, flooring and then stopped.  Other projects needed doing…     

March is our 1 year living in the house (yeah!) and we’re starting on the ‘non-critical’ finishes now that all the ‘critical’ ones are done.  This means the Bar.  Fancy one too – with two walls of mirrors, floating glass shelves and that cabinetry that Car-man was rebuilding this last weekend.     

We saved as much as we could from the tear-down and now have it all back in place, with only the sink portion of the cabinets that needed rebuilding – A big ‘Thank You’ goes out to that termite colony that did away with the old cabinet prompting the Exterminator’s visit and subsequent discovery of the second floor supporting wall that was nothing more than a hollow wooden sponge.  That discovery put wall building instantly on the ‘uber-critical list’ so we took the opportunity to make it better, stronger and bug proof-ier.      

I’ll send along a picture once we finish the counter top!  It’ll be amusing; all 70′s glass and mirror mixed with ’10 granite…

PEX RePipe

Just a quick update for those following the repiping story;

We’ve had three hard freezes (unusual), one lasting 4 days.  Only about 2/3′s of the plantings in the yard survived, so we’ll be busy in March pulling out the dead things and replacing them.

However, we WON’T be needing a Plumber.  The Company that repiped our house last year, checked in a week back.  Much to our mutual delight, it was a social call – after inspecting the work and how it fared through the freezes, it was still a social call.  No problems.  Nada.  Not one.

Was that good?  Can’t really tell you, but I can say we were about the only house on the street that didn’t have a plumbing truck outside of it at one time or another, over the last 3 weeks.

Christmas Last Year

Christmas and New Years last year were busy times for us; we’d just moved into our home and were pulling it apart to put it back together the way we wanted it.  Kind of like a big Lego project. 

I’d like to say it stopped there, just 2 weeks of work, but that would be an outrageous lie.  It was three months before we could live with any real comfort in the house and five months before we had our first “what should we do now moment?”  Our TV never turned on, our comfy chair and sofa never got sat upon; we looked longingly at the pool, fireplace and garden chairs as we moved tools, ladders and drywall from room to room.  

We didn’t put up a tree, or any lights.  We satisfied ourselves by decorating the fireplace with the bingo-board of moving box tags, one gift for each other, one toy each for two sweet little boys (when they dropped by), and a paper plate of table scraps for each of the doggies.

Christmas and New Years this year are going to be loads of fun, we have family with us, with more arriving as the days pass.  We won’t have a quiet moment until mid-February, and that’s really, very much to our liking. 

We hope your Holidays are filled with family, friends and lots of love and good wishes!

Smelly Carpet

Someone asked if the smelly underpad was really that bad.  It took me a while to go through all our pictures of the house renovation but I was able to find several pictures.  The stains appear clearest in this picture.

Smelly Carpet

The previous owners had it cleaned very often, so when we walked through the house it looked perfect. We decided to replace the carpet because the color was not to our liking.

Pulling carpet is easy and sometimes saves money (depending on the new carpet install quote – some charge for removal, some don’t). We marked out 10 x 5 sections, then cut the strips with blades, flipped the carpet over and rolled (wear gloves). That’s when we discovered the staining and the true source of that disagreeable smell (the underpad had absorbed all those stains). Once the carpet was up, it was no longer blocking the smell and we had to open every single window and door, run all the exhaust fans and even brought in a few portable ones.

In the end (now) we’re happy we did the work. The house smells of Christmas; pine, cedar, shortbread cookies, gingerbread men, and soon – turkey!

Pinhole Leak

This time last year, we were fully involved in our new “old” home. We’d purchased it knowing that we were going to do a fairly extensive renovation. We weren’t changing the shape of the home, or the size, or moving walls, we were repiping.

Repiping?

Pulling out all the old galvanized water pipe and replacing it. Actually, not us, we hired a Professional Plumber (licensed, bonded, insured). We believe in good foundations, strong bones, sturdy structure; all that lovely decor amounts to naught if it floats out the front door.

Want to ruin your day? Have a water problem.

Want to see your house equity plunge past zero? Ignore that water problem. 

Before you get nervous, it worked out wonderfully.

Really? A HAPPY Plumber story? 

Yes. 

Chatting with our neighbors, they asked why did we do all that work when we couldn’t see any leaks?  The answer is personal, we like to know as much as possible before we do major things. 

When we’d walked through the houses in this area we noticed they were all steel pipe, no copper.  Two minutes on the internet and we learned it was galvanized steel pipe.  Fifteen minutes later we were concerned enough to be calling Plumbers to get a “ballpark” estimate on the cost of repiping (we learned galvanized pipe from that period had a 30 year lifespan).  It was interesting talking to those Plumbers, they know a LOT – some of the older ones even remembered putting the galvanized into the homes in this area, and all of them acknowledged a high call rate, again for this area.

Pinhole leak, circled in red.

Once we closed the house sale the Plumber started opening the walls to pull the old pipe and our suspicions were confirmed – we had pin hole leaks.  Not enough to cause flooding, or pooling water,  just enough to keep up a continuous fine misty spray within the walls.  At that, the inner drywall was gone, in some places only the side of the drywall that faced into a room, was still up looking perfect (really).  In the shower, all the drywall was gone and the tile was sagging into the shower, held together only by wire mesh (it’s how they installed tile in that decade). 

We caught ours early and now, we don’t worry and our water pressure can almost peel paint off a car – it’s that good and the water is CLEAR, the dishwasher cleans the dishes, the washing machine runs on a short cycle and best of all, our water doesn’t spit chunks of crud out the faucets anymore.  Happy, happy, happy.