We've reached another milestone

Or should I say, we've PASSED another milestone...

At any rate, there we were two weeks ago, merrily enjoying our new carpet, and busily moving stuff back into the office from the garage where it had lain forgotten and ignored for (great Caesar's Ghost!) a year and a half. I had just found a home for all of my files and papers in a new filing cabinet (scored for free from the War Department's work - sweet!) and was preparing to start filling up the bookcase.

Then the War Department woke up and realized something rather disheartening. We still hadn't had the final occupancy inspection.

Of course, this meant removing all of the stuff from the filing cabinet, putting it back into boxes, and finding a place to store the boxes while we finished off the last couple of things we had to do before the inspector could come and look.

The first of these things was the bane of our entire existence, the dye test. (See here for the whole sordid story of why the dye test has nagged us since Day One.) We had done all that work on the drains, but had never actually called the city back to have them make sure all our work wasn't for naught, and that we really are connected to the city storm drains.

As usual, and of course, getting the dye test done meant I had to physically present myself at City Hall and fork over the sixty bucks in person. I wanted to book the final occupancy inspection at the same time, but I had this niggling little feeling that if I showed the least amount of cockiness, the karmic bastards in charge of home renovation would make the dye test fail or something, and we'd be scrambling around with picks and shovels in the rain. I resisted the capriciousness of fate and simply booked the dye test.

Which, of course, went off without a hitch. These pipes are clean!

That left the final pre-inspection task: building a cover for the electrical panel. Which we've been putting off and putting off because we KNEW it was going to be an absolute bitch to design, and an even bigger pain in the ass to build.

And we were right.

As usual, the best way to explain why this thing was such an enormously unpleasant undertaking would be to illustrate it with a picture. This one's from a while back, but aside from the color of the walls, nothing in the general area had changed at all:



Covering the actual panel itself wasn't really the problem. The real difficulty lay in designing something that would cover the corner and the ceiling and tie into the bulkhead without impeding anyone trying to get into the panel to work on something. Oh, and of course, I hadn't really framed in any extra support to attach whatever we finally did design to the wall. Bad Don.

Anyway, after a few heated discussions and some wildly unfair accusations of incompetence leveled against the cats, we decided to take the simplest approach, and just build a cover in place using 1/4-inch plywood.

So I hauled out my trusty framing implements and some scrap pieces of two-by-four and set to work. Several hours and a couple of minor injuries later, I had this:



Then I made these:



Then I attached them to the framing, filled, sanded, and painted them, cut and painted a door, attached some magnets, and now it looks like this:




Ta da!

Not the most elegant of solutions, but it actually doesn't look too bad (from a distance), and it didn't seem to even warrant the inspector's notice, so I'm going to call it a job well done.

Fortunately, you don't have to book the inspections in person, but you do have to be at home to let the inspector in, and as luck would have it, (Injury Report Exclusive!) I was home nursing a really sore neck that day. Which I'm pretty sure was caused by the awkward angle at which I had to hold my head so I could paint the bottom of the electrical panel.

Anyway, the inspector showed up, checked the interconnected smoke alarms, had a look at the programmable timer for the bathroom fan, signed the papers, and left.

We passed our final occupancy inspection! Wooo!

Of course, this is by no means the end of the reno. It just means we don't have anyone checking up on our work anymore.

Anyway, lots more to come, including some shots of the finished (yes, FINISHED) bathroom, and the re-furnished office.


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Perimeter Drainage: Is it worth it?

Welcome back to our special series, Is It Worth It?, where we ask the question no one else (except the people on Canada’s Worst Handyman, of course) dares to ask: are all those things you do during a basement renovation really worth doing yourself? Or should you just bite the bullet and hire a professional before you really screw things up?

Last time, we covered demolition, and it was pretty much an unqualified “give ‘er!” This time, something trickier: digging out your perimeter drains and replacing the weeping tile.

Our experience
Oh man, do I really have to relive this?

Well, digging was one of the very first things we started, and if you must know, we still haven’t completely finished filling in all of the holes. There’s still a dandy little impression in the driveway that requires some concrete/asphalt work.

But to recap the overall process, here’s what we did done dug as diggers:

• We dug a trench about four feet deep and two feet wide across three-quarters of the back of the house - all told, about thirty feet long (including the bit that went around the corner).


• We dug a two-foot-by-four-foot hole, about six feet deep, on the west side of the house, and another, roughly the same size, through the asphalt driveway on the east side of the house.


• We dug a trench 12 inches wide and 24 inches deep across the front lawn for the new water service.


• And, of course, the hole to end all holes, the giant monster in the front flower bed which, by the time all was said and done, measured six feet by eight feet, and was a little more than ten feet deep. And yes, it really is that big, and no, it really doesn’t look that impressive in pictures. You have to stand in it to get the full effect. (I really took a lot of pictures of that hole, didn’t I?)

Pros:
There really isn’t much in the way of “pro” for this. I guess you could make a case that doing it ourselves let us progress at our own pace, which meant that making holes for the plumber bigger, or digging an extra clean-out for the Roto-Rooter man, didn’t entail having to stay home from work while we waited around for some chain-smoking deadbeat to come by and hand-bomb a few shovelfuls of dirt over the fence until he passed out from the heat and the six beers he drank at lunch.

Um… where was I? Oh, right. We could go at our own pace, work on the holes that needed work when we had to, and didn’t have to pay someone to do it for us. Those are your “pros”.

Cons:
You do know that they make people do this sort of manual labour as punishment, right? I mean, it’s HARD. It’s even harder if all you do is sit around on your secretarial spread all day, staring at a computer screen, and then try to put in a few hours of shoveling after dinner. I dunno if it gets any easier if you do it for a living, but it sure couldn’t be any worse.

Oh, and let me assure you, it’s not without hidden costs: I went through an entire bottle of Vitamin I last summer. So, yeah. There’s that.

Is It Worth It?
Yeesh... you know, I’m really not sure about this one. I mean, on one hand, it’s just digging. It doesn’t exactly require a high degree of technical acuity, if you know what I mean. It’s something just about anybody can do, and requires nothing more than a shovel and a wheelbarrow. And, of course, a pick if you happen to be unlucky enough to live on a lot comprised entirely of clay. But really, that and a little time in the salt mines are enough to tackle the job.

That being said, I have to admit that if we were to do this all over again, I think we would have bit the bullet and at least tried to hire somebody. Manual labour is generally pretty cheap, and for a few hundred dollars, we probably could have had it all done in a day or two, as opposed to dragging it out for months (or - cough - years). While it’s certainly true that finding contractors to do that sort of work has been nearly impossible in this town for the past few years, even if it took a couple of weeks to line them up, it still would have been done faster in the end.

At the very least, I can assure you that I’d rather not do that much digging again – unless I get to rent a Bobcat!

Next time: framing!

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Winding down the reno

Yes, it's true, we're starting to actually finish things. For instance, we've already started bringing in the stuff from the garage and putting it into my office. Which, of course, turns out to be another one of those hidden renovation costs that they always forget to tell you about on the home renovation channel.

You see, when you spend more than a year of your life doing a renovation, and blow through enough money to buy a new car (not including the money you may or may not have spent on a new car), when the time comes to move back into those lovingly renovated rooms, your old crap that you stashed away a year ago starts looking pretty damn ratty sitting on that nice new carpet, next to the carefully painted walls.

So, of course, we find ourselves having to buy some new furniture...

Anyway, I'm saving the "after" pictures of the office until I get all of the furniture and artwork in place, so this won't be an especially graphic-intensive post. I do have some pictures, however, so let's get this party started.

One of the pictures I didn't post last time was this puppy here:



That's all of the SubFlor (aka Dri-Core) panels we need to do the laundry room. Yes, they ARE just stacked in the workshop for now. We wanted to save them for the weekend my brother was in town - ssssh! He doesn't know this is going to be a working vacation yet! Hee hee hee!

Oh, and note how spiffy that freshly-painted floor looks. That paint turned out really nice. You know, once we did four separate coats (two overall, but we had to do the room in two goes).





Anyway, that's about where things are. Oh, and I wanted to take a picture of how awesome the grass looks in those patches we seeded three weeks ago... but I forgot, and now it's dark. Instead, I'll leave you with another shot of the awesomeness that is my office carpet:



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Wanna see something cool?

Carpets!



Woo!

Yeah, there's a lot more to come, but I felt I should at least post SOMETHING.



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