Demolition: Is it worth it?

Welcome to the first in a series of “Is It Worth It?” posts on Don and Amy’s Basement Reno blog, where I take each of the tasks we tackled over the course of our renovation, and describe the trials and tribulations we encountered and conclude whether it’s worth doing yourself or if you should just hire someone to do it for you.

You know, if you were ever foolish, wealthy, AND bored enough to want to try something like this yourself.

And yes, I stole the idea from Canada’s Worst Handyman. Good show. But we're going to Seattle to catch one last baseball game this weekend and I won't have much else to post, so this is what you get.

First up: demolition!

Our experience

As I’m sure you remember, our demolition came about in multiple stages. The majority of it went fairly smoothly, and we didn’t actually destroy anything we didn’t mean to. The only injury incurred was a bruised eye socket thanks to a stubborn nail and a certain lapse in concentration when switching between dust mask and eye gogglers.

The advantage for us in doing the demo ourselves was the whole multiple stages thing. We actually needed to frame in parts of the office and bathroom before we could start moving other things to get to the rest of the bits we needed to demolish. If we had hired somebody to this, we would have had to ask them to come back several times, which probably would have cost more.

Pros:
Let’s face it, demolition is kind of a no-brainer: see wall, smash wall, done. Of all the tasks involved, demo certainly requires the least amount of brain power and - surprisingly – relatively little brute strength, once the concept of leverage comes into play. Not only that, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun, too.

Cons:
The potential for injury and/or tetanus is fairly high, it’s generally very dirty, and once the fun of all the smashy-smashy is over, there’s quite a bit of clean-up involved.

Is It Worth It?
In a word: absolutely. Just remember to wear your eye gogglers, kids, and invest in a pair of decent gloves and a Magic Bar or two. Oh, and I highly recommend hiring someone to take the trash away for you as we did. Saves a lot of time and, believe it or not, money. We’ve gone with 1-800-GOT-JUNK on more than a couple of occasions, and they’ve been consistently great.

Next time: digging your own drainage ditches for fun and profit! Or not!

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A little more of that old in-and-out

Inside and outside, that is, as we tried to take advantage of the non-inclement weather this past weekend to button up the landscaping (read: massive holes in the ground) before winter, and hurried to get the workshop cleaned up a little before the carpets/laundry room floor go in.

Of course, the War Department was not content with just doing OUR landscaping, but insisted that we also help the Maker Of Pies and her hell-dog do their lawn as well. As it turned out, this was a good idea because once we got done helping Maker Of Pies' husband (Mr. Awesome) with their house, he came over and helped us with ours. As you'll see, this was a good trade for us...

The day began with a large truck backing into our driveway and dumping three yards of "lawn mix" (sand and topsoil) in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, the truck was back with another three yards of topsoil:



Mmmm... dirty.

We promptly left it sitting there and went over to help Mr. Awesome with his place, hoping that the rain would hold off for at least a while so we wouldn't have to shovel mud when we got back.

It only took the three of us (the Maker of Pies had the plague or something so she couldn't help out) a couple of hours to grade, seed, roll, and fertilize their lawn, so we were standing in front of our twin mounds of hard labor by one o'clock.

And that's when the real fun started.

Before:
Just in case you've forgotten what the fruits of our previous labors have done to the outside of our house, I took a few pictures...

Here's the rather sizable depression in the back yard where we hauled away all the extra dirt that was left over from digging out the perimeter drain:





Also in those pictures (but impossible to see) is the trench we dug for the electrical line out to the garage that sunk down over the past year. It's quite narrow, less than six inches, but could be treacherous when racing out there in sandals to disentangle the cat from the lawn furniture again.

In the front yard, we had the remnants of my all time favorite hole:



As seen from the street, with the big bare swath over top of where we laid the new water service line:



After:
So, with Mr. Awesome's invaluable assistance, we got started shoveling, wheeling, spreading, seeding, raking, and hurting. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the driveway was clear:



The backyard was filled in:





And the front hole was topped off and a scattering of lawn mix laid down over the whole yard:





In case you were wondering, the brown patches are peat moss that the War Department laid over top of the grass seed so it wouldn't blow away. She claims it works, and when it comes to outside stuff, I know better than to argue with her. (Yes, it could be said that I should know better than to argue with her about the inside stuff, too, but where's the fun in that?)

All in all, it went amazingly smoothly, and it's quite the relief to get that finished up before the really bad weather comes. Pretty much the only complaint I had with the whole day (aside from needing THREE vitamin I before bed) was the outside supervisor:



NOT the sort of thing you want glaring down at you when loading a wheelbarrow with yet another load of dirt, I have to say... the inside guy is much more laid back.

Speaking of the inside, we have a hard deadline for prepping the office floors and we're going out of town this weekend, so we decided to start another project that would entail moving everything out of the workshop and storing it in the office where the carpet is going to go.

Yeah, it didn't make any more sense when I was typing it than it does reading it over again now...

Anyway, here's the pictures to explain.

Before before
This is what the workshop looks like (from both ends) most of the time:





Yeah, we're a tidy bunch.

Before
Here's what it looked like after we moved all the crap out and washed the floor down twice, once with TSP and once with muriatic acid:





After
And here's what it looks like after we painted it with an alkyd epoxy concrete paint from Rona, followed by waking up with terrible headaches from the fumes and Amy deciding to stay home from work and paint over the smelly paint with some good old Armor Coat from Crappy Tire:





Sadly, no after after yet; still have some painting left to do. Anyway, I think that's enough pictures for one post. I have more, but one of them is going to be a post in and of itself.

Oh, and coming soon: a break-down of all the different tasks and jobs involved in doing your own basement reno, together with a frank appraisal of whether they're worth doing on your own, or if you're better off hiring someone to do it properly. Er, for you. To do it for you. Yeah.


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Unexpected diversions

I'm sure it happens to everyone who renovates their own house. Hell, I'm sure it happens to people who aren't renovating their own house. But why does it seem to happen MORE when WE'RE renovating our house?

I'm speaking, of course, of those little things that go wrong with stuff in the house that are completely unrelated to whatever it is we happen to be working on. Here's a fun idea: let's make a list!

Here's a short, non-chronological (and probably incomplete) list of unrelated things that we've had to fix unexpectedly while working on the basement:

• front door sill


• kitchen drain


• bathroom sink drain


• my wisdom teeth


• refrigerator


• kitchen linoleum where we ripped it while moving the fridge


• dining room chairs (reupholstering)


• the cat

...and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm too tired to think of.

Oh, and of course, this weekend's very own unexpected diversion:



The damn garbageratormajig lost one of the little blades inside and was making an awful racket. Of course, this happened while I was in Prince George, so it took the War Department a couple of days to decide that MAYBE that loud, metallic grindy-type noise wasn't a usual thing, and maybe she should just not use it for a while.

Anyway, we got a new one, but holy hell, when did garbage disposal units get so damn pricey? Of course, we couldn't find the make and model of the one that was in there, so we had to completely dismantle the kitchen drain and put in the new one from scratch, but it's done, and really only took a couple of hours. Or three. No more than four, really.

Oh, and as an added bonus, the new one is called a Badger 5. Tee hee. (I spent the whole afternoon yelling "Snake!" It was awesome.)

Anyway, the real basement news is ... the painting is finished! Wheee!

That's right, we have officially finished the painting, and even put down a deposit on some very nice carpet. It's looking pretty sweet, even if I say so myself. And here's a schwack of pictures to prove it (I took some with and some without the flash so you could kind of see the colors in different light. I dunno if it worked though, I'm still trying to figure this camera out.)











(Needless to say, if you have any ideas on how I should go about building a proper cabinet for that gaping hole around the electrical panel, I'm all ears.)

All I have to do is pop in a couple more tapcons to crunch the floor right down and we're ready for the carpet guys.

Tapcons. Joy.


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All doors, all the time. Except when it's thresholds.

So, yeah. Doors are done. Well, except for the closet doors, which only just occurred to me as I was typing that.

Damn it.

Anyway, EXCEPT for the closet doors (which really only need to be hung - twenty minutes' work, tops) we're finished the doors. That includes the bathroom door, the office door, AND the workshop door.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, the War Department decided to fix a door that wasn't actually broken. No, wait. It WAS broken, we just didn't know it was broken until she started fixing it. Painting it, actually. She started painting it, and ... you know what? Let's just get on with this.

First up, here's the door between the office and the laundry room after we put up the trim and painted it white (of course):



And from the office side:



Must admit that it was a lot easier to set up the hardware on that door than it was the stuff on the workshop door. For one thing, we needed to get a new spindle and a new knob for it, and the ones they sell at Rona are those cheap-ass, tacky little fake brass things. Lucky for us, the Restore had a pair of knobs that matched the one we already had exactly, and the spindle for them to boot. Of course, we had to wander into the employees-only section of the store and pick through some contraband boxes, but they were nice enough to forgive that transgression and sell us the bits we needed.

And after much fiddling about with cork spacers, a 3/4-inch spade bit, and a little old-fashioned cursing and swearing, we've got the hardware installed (and working!) on the workshop door:



We've decided to leave the back of the door unpainted as it sort of fits in with the rugged look of the workshop (read: drab old concrete and exposed pipes):



And yes, I will EVENTUALLY finish that last little bit of drywall - I just have to patch the hole in the upstairs bathroom first so I know how much scrap I'm going to have left to work with.

The closet has been finished, caulked, painted, and touched up in preparation for hanging the closet doors (which won't actually go in until after the carpet):



And that's about it for the doors... oh, right! I seem to have mentioned a threshold and a certain little project of Amy's that took an interesting turn...

The War Department has been wanting to paint the threshold under our front door for quite some time. It's exposed to the worst of the weather, being at the southwest corner of the house and all, and she was worried that it wasn't going to make it through another wet and rainy winter. So while I fussed about making chili (Labour Day tradition, don't you know - goes great with Edmonton kicking Calgary's ASS ha ha ha!), she got the wire brush and sandpaper out there and set to cleaning up the threshold in preparation for painting.

This is sort of what the threshold looked like when she started (except it was still attached to the house, not sitting on our workbench):



Look okay, right? Maybe just a little brushing to get off that loose paint and some extra TLC? Well, not so much...

Shortly after the War Department got going with the wire brush, she peeled off a great big piece of caulking. And then another. And that's when she realized that the job was a little bigger than she thought. Turns out that the threshold had been broken for a while, and whoever had repaired it last hadn't taken it upon themselves to do it properly, but had just caulked up the biggest cracks and slapped another coat of (crappy) paint on it.

And this is the result after the caulking came off:



Yeah, that'll be FINE for a winter or two!

Anyway, it's a good thing chili gets better the longer you cook it because we had to let it sit for a couple of hours while we cleaned up the mess, cut a new threshold out of some pressure-treated lumber and installed it into the doorway:



Looks pretty innocuous just sitting there, but let me assure you that it took some precision cuts - and not just reciprocating saw precision, either! REAL precision.

Anyway, the gap under the door has been repaired and the house is safe from marauding wildlife - the stuff that doesn't already live inside, at any rate. I'm off to scenic (HA!) Prince George for a few days to help yet ANOTHER person move, so don't expect much progress in my absence. Unless Amy decides to bite the bullet and get the carpets done while I'm gone...


Shyeah. Right.
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