Insert closet-related joke here

Well, I was trying to make it an even three months, but I just couldn't go another day without posting. No, really. My dad threatened me with actual, physical harm if I didn't post something. And given that he always used to be able to smack me in the head from the front seat, even when I was sitting in the very back of the Land Cruiser, I decided not to test the true length of his reach, and just post.

So, let's see, where did I leave off? Um. Wow. That long? Huh.

Well, how about we tackle the big question first, the one that everyone asks me when they notice I haven't updated the blog in ... gulp ... eighty-four freaking days:

"Are you guys done yet?"

And I'll give you the same answer I've given them for the last 84 days, "No, it's gonna be another two weeks."


First things first: we did manage to finish the floor in the laundry room, and let me tell you, those vinyl planks are great. They look good, they're easy to install, they're cheap, and they're easy to clean:



That looks pretty damn spiffy to me.

The next project was to rebuild the closet under the stairs. Actually, the next project was to add some structure to the stairs before they bent too much farther out of plumb, and THEN rebuild the closet.

So here's the first stage of the structure we added; a brace along the left side of the closet to hold everything steady - we had no illusions about being able to bring it back to plumb:



The next step was to add some bracing so I'd have something to hang the drywall on, and some extra supports for the landing:



Take a closer look at that one, especially the bracing on the left, if you want an idea of just how far out of plumb the stairs were. Oh hell, just check it out from the other side:



And here's the bracing (after some rather extensive modifications to the existing crap) on the side by the workshop:



And here it is with my solo contribution, the hanging of the drywall:



Before we get to the next picture, I feel obliged to point out that I had almost nothing to do with it. All I did was try not to make TOO much of a mess hanging the drywall. All of the mudding and sanding (and I do mean ALL of it) was done by the War Department. I tried like hell to talk her out of it and convince her to call Tony to come back and do it for us, but she wanted to do it herself, and damn me if she didn't do a hell of a good job:





I did help with the trim and painting, but the really good work there is all hers. It's also hard to see behind the cat boxes, but we also completely walled in the alcove under the stairs and painted it over to match the color in the stairwell.

Right, so that's where we stand. Next step is to figure out a door of some kind (we have an old closet door we were hoping to reuse, but once again, I failed to anticipate that, and didn't build the opening to suit it which means we'll have to either come up with a different solution, or do some nifty modifications to the door or frame).

We also need to do the ceiling in the laundry room, but that's more a long term thing. We've burned through the entirety of our renovation budget (and then some) and the ceiling isn't a high priority right now, unlike getting the garage sorted out, and repainting some of the outside trim before the summer gets here.

So, next time (and I promise it won't be long), I'll put up some pictures of the finished bathroom and office, but I did want to show one thing before I sign off.

We had some serious snow back in December, and it afforded us with a crystal clear illustration of what all our hard work has accomplished. Here, take a look at this, and then I'll explain what you're looking at:




That's the back wall of our house during the worst of the snow - we got about 25-30 centimeters, quite a lot for Victoria. Anyway, if you look closely at that picture you can tell where the wall of my office ends and the wall of the laundry room begins. You see, we haven't insulated the laundry room yet, so we're spending quite a bit of money and energy to heat the walls, which is dissipated out into the snow outside, melting it away from the brick. In my office, however, all that time and effort we put into framing and insulating the space is paying off: the heat is staying on the inside, where it belongs.
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What's this? An update? It can't be!

And yet, here you are. Reading this. Huzzah!

Okay, I really have no excuse as to why I haven't made a proper post since... oh my jebus. October?! Really? Wow. I really suck at this whole blogging thing.

Still, there's no time like the present, so how about I fill you in on all the things we HAVE been doing, and pay a little less attention to ... um ... the stuff I haven't? I mean, in my defence, we've been really busy with things like work, and family visits, and - yes - working on the basement. We've also cleaned the gutters, raked the leaves, moved a metric shit-ton of stuff in from the garage, and even found time to argue about whether we should get another cat or not. (No. No, we should not.)

But you didn't come here to read about the standard trials and tribulations of owning a house - you came here to read about how much it sucks to do your own basement reno! And in that regard, my friends, I can definitely help you out.

So... where were we? Ah, right... we had painted the floor in the workshop, got the carpets installed, and we passed final occupancy. (Have I really not posted since the CARPETS went in? Good lord....) Well, once the inspector had gone, it was time to install the floor in the laundry room. To be honest, I wasn't exactly planning on doing this until the new year, but the Top Brass are coming for Christmas, and we kinda wanted to be able to show off a "finished" (or, as we decided, "damn close to finished") when they arrive.

So we started by moving all the enormous, heavy machines out of the laundry room and washing down the floor. As a quick reminder of what our laundry room floor looked like at that stage, voila:



I believe the term for that is "fugly". At any rate, we certainly wanted to cover that abomination up as quickly as we could. Of course, like EVERYTHING in the damn basement, covering it up was a lot harder than I had expected. Oh, and it involved Tapcons, too! Joy!

I suppose that, given the alternative, it went a lot more smoothly and with less ouches than tongue and groove plywood would have, but it was still a largely unpleasant task. Most of the pieces were too large to cut on the little table saw and, as winter's here, the rains precluded setting up the big table saw in the driveway. So the jig was pressed into overtime service to cut all the panels and get them laid out.

A little note here for anyone thinking of doing DriCore (or, as in our case, Sub-Flor) in their basement as I don't think I'll do a whole "Is It Worth It Post" on that alone: make sure your floor is as level as possible. I'm not kidding. This stuff really wasn't made to go over a wavy-ass floor like ours and the levelling kits don't really work for shit. But we weren't about to spend the time, money, and effort to rent a concrete scraper and take up the top layer of concrete so we could lay down a layer of Portland Cement to level the floor. I know, I know, Mike Holmes would not approve, but then Mike Holmes probably wouldn't use this crap anyway.

Anyway, here's what it looked like after about four hours of laying SubFlor:



Yeah. I got a little faster as I went along, but not much. All told, given a couple of breaks, a few sick days, and the occasional more pressing concern, it took us a good three weeks or so to get all the panels down. Oh, and we also completely rebuilt, restructured, and redesigned the cupboard under the stairs. My material estimates were pretty good though - I was only short by two panels. Here's a couple more shots of in progress and the final product and new closet:









Looks pretty damn spiffy, eh? No? Well, we agree. Looked like crap, and had an unpleasantly splintery texture (especially in socks). So it was back off to the Home Despot/Rona to see what would could use to cover over it. The War Department had seen these neat vinyl planks that looked like hardwood in a restaurant, and she thought they would look good in our place. Well, like everything else in this project, we couldn't find them anywhere... oops. Sorry - I meant to say we actually found exactly the ones we had in mind, and they were very reasonably priced. (Yeah, it scared me a little too. I mean, that's just weird.)

Fortunately, the vinyl planks only took three days, but, seriously, what a TOUGH three days they were. My knees, back, hands, and neck were absolutely killing me by the time I finished.

Totally, totally, TOTALLY worth it. Damn, that is a fine looking floor... sad that I'm not going to post any pictures of it. No, really - it's all taped up for painting, and has cables and lights, and cardboard strewn across it. I'll wait until it's cleaned up a bit. Well, fine, one of the floor in progress, just so you can see what the vinyl planks look like and how much cleaner they look than the Sub-Flor tiles:



Anyway, I know I promised some shots of the finished bathroom, and maybe even some of my office with the furniture in place, but I'm missing the final episode of Canada's Worst Driver. So, nyaah.

More later.




For reals this time.




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The briefest of updates....

I was having a conversation (over Instant Messenger, of course) with someone the other day, bemoaning how long things seem to be taking now that we're close to being finished.

As I told her, we're finding it really hard to stay motivated.

So we don't.










New post and pictures to come shortly. I promise.
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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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