Guess we're finally there

Daddy went to the house to fix the small bathroom door this morning. The door won't close because the condensation line of the Central A/C System leaked into the door frame and caused either the door or the frame to swell up. It took a small hand-plane to shave the door off slightly in the upper right corner and a small brush to repaint the area a bit. It's a quick and easy 10-15 minutes job. Guess, we might be able to say, we're finally there.

But the A/C condensation line, how little we know about it. Even our A/C guy admitted that the darn thing escaped him completely when he did the "complete" maintenance in June. It might be worth mentioning that the upstairs A/C condensation line was also broken loose in our own house. Water dripped down into the first floor family room like crazy one night. It's a loose PVC coupling in the attic, that's probably been leaking slowly for months, if not years. The fix was easy. But cleaning out the wet stuff in the attic was somewhat painful.

And now, we might even have the answer to Daddy's question, why the small bath ceiling over the tub peeled off soon after his painstaking repair a couple of years ago. And we might also be able to solve the mystery why that small section in the dining room wall was also peeling off for as long as we lived there. The culprit? Maybe, just maybe, the condensation line of the 1st-floor A/C unit. Oh, BTW, did I forget to mention that the kitchen sink in our own house also needs fixing :-)?

Almost There

A lease contract was signed around end of May. Our tenant are moving in this weekend. So, this is the last week we can still enjoy the house, do some final touch up and clean up. Daddy still spent a lot of time there doing this and that. Sometimes, he'd just go there, do some reading, and enjoy a little quiet time. I guess after you devoted all your energy on something for a few months, it must be hard to let go. And there are always last minute things that surface from nowhere. For instance, with the summer coming, daddy found that backyard lawn was turning yellow. So he added a new line of sprinkler heads. The sight of the lawn dug up for a good 50-60 feet, with the PVC pipes laid down in the trenches, seemed to tell the world that this lovely project is still going pretty strong :-). Then last night, we noticed that the cabinet under the kitchen sink showed some dark wet pattern on the inside edge which might be the symptom of a leaky pipe somewhere inside the wall. The plumber was called in to attend to the problem next day. Two weeks ago, daddy did what was promised on his to-do list as the A/C Testing and learned that the central A/C unit was only blowing hot air, so there went another $850. In the past weekend, we were doing serious clean up in the garage. Piles of wood, boards, tiles, paint cans, tools, and extra material were loaded into our 12 year old minivan, then unloaded in our garage. Cleaning up our own garage will be something we will worry about later.

We decided early on that we were not going to sell this house, the first house we bought when both of us were still doing our graduate studies (3 years after Daddy started working full time). This is also the house where both our beloved children were born. I still remember the first day we moved in, when our neighbor Sonia from across the street knocked on our door and gave us a home-baked cake. It was the first time we experienced the American hospitality and we were so touched. The neighbors who lived there when we moved in 24 years ago are still there now. In the past several months they'd come by and chat a bit when they see us there. So, we will temporarily say goodbye to our old house. But we'll be back, when we are too old to climb the stairs in our 2-story house, where both our children grew up from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Method or Madness?

Is there a method in doing this little remodeling project? or it's sheer madness? We are really not sure.

Doing some of the work ourselves helped, in reducing labor cost, especially when it's hard to contract relatively small jobs out. If there is such a thing as a method in doing manual labor under time and cost pressure, it is this old mental exercise called relentlessness :-). With new method and material made available by the building material industry, it's a bit more feasible to do some of the work ourselves. As we learned along the way, some jobs are better left to the professionals. So it comes down to how to work with the contractors effectively.

A good friend of ours once said that one should get 10 estimates for each job contracted out. There is certain wisdom in that practice. What seems to be important for a job are the specification (material, method, design, and expected results, down to the detailed level), the timeline, and the cost. It's always useful to know the details about the job. The knowledge can be acquired online, from Home Depot, or any hardware store, or by talking to the contractors about the job spec. The time required to interview all the contractors might be a challenge in many ways. Getting quotes over the phone or via fax after allowing the contractor to take a look at the job site without the owner's presence might work in some cases.

Then it's time to collect the estimates and to negotiate a contract. It might be useful to know the basis of the cost, like hourly rate, or unit labor cost (e.g., $4/sq-ft for wall tiling, $3/sq-ft for floor tiling, $1/ft for baseboard moulding install), or cost breakdown into parts of the job. The more understanding about the job, the better, to allow comparison among quotes initially and to enable assessment of the results later. Finalize the job spec before the contract is signed. Any change afterwards might be costly. And then? How about the quality of the job? Reference? Previous or current job site visit? Contract out a small job first? ...

Sequence of Things

The sequence of remodeling activities seems to be intuitive mostly. But some of them deserve a bit more attention:

- Paint wall and ceiling in kitchen before cabinet install (Also make sure subloor is clean and flat before cabinets install. Cabinets, just like furniture, go in last!)
- Nail down drywall inside before putting up stucco wall outside (nailing will crack the stucco).
- Install wall and floor tiles before plumbing fixtures (such as toilet, shower head) in bathrooms, and dishwasher in kitchen (need enough vertical space for dishwasher to go in and come out for maintenance).
- Paint inside wall before carpet or wood floor install.
- Install carpet or wood floor before baseboard moulding install.

Landscape?

We really didn't do much in the yard. The newly added French door needs a step to go down into the backyard. 12 pieces of concrete blocks (8-in x 8-in x 16-in) were lined up side by side (with the 8-in x 8-in side facing out, 8-in x 16-in side facing side) on top of weed-blocking fabric and sand, the same way we fixed the patio brick floor. And then, 4 rows of new bricks were laid down in front of the row of concrete blocks, surrounded by an area of river pebbles. It turned out to be a nice little patio area in its own right, outside the master bedroom. (Note: The concrete blocks are hollow. Daddy put some wood blocks in the hole; see the rightmost block in the picture. Guess daddy was afraid that some day a rodent or raccoon family might make the holes their little home :-)


We planted a row of Wax Leaf Privet behind the garage and the 2 bedrooms on that same side, as privacy screen when they grow to reasonable height. Lily on the Nile were also planted in the back and the front, along with some annual flowers in front of the house. The Bamboo bushes were cleaned out as they were really growing too fast and too wildly.

Window Covering

Almost all our window covering were purchased or ordered at JC Penny. The ready made drapes are not wide enough for our big windows and we have to put multiple pieces together. In the family room above, we put 8 pieces all together. The khakei color drapes were used through out the house (see the master bedroom picture in the flooring entry), it looks simple and elegant. The tie-backs were purchased at Ross. Their prices are super good if you can find what you want.

The old style drapes or mini-blinds seemed to be replaced by some new material, as we looked into window coverings. We ended up getting drapes (not pinch-pleated, back-tabbed now) for the large windows in living room (12-ft x 4.5-ft), family room (12-ft x 6.5-ft and 8-ft x 6.5-ft, sliding doors), and master bedroom (6-ft x 6.5-ft, French door). For the other 5 windows (3 6-ft x 4-ft and 2 6-ft x 3-ft), we went with the cordless cellular shades. Two 35-in wide cellular shades go into the inside frame of a 6-ft window nicely. After some quite extensive search, we learned that super-long (anything wider than 7-ft) curtain rods could only be found from Home Depot. The place we usually go first, for building material, but in this case, the last place we looked, after JC Penny, Burlington Coat Factory, Ross, Wal-mart, and Target.

What about floor?

The traditional way of putting in carpet around the house seemed to have gone out of fashion by the time we looked at floor covering. Having decided and completed the jobs on ceramic tiles for kitchen, baths, and entry, it's time to worry about the floor for the rest of the house.

Believe or not we still had the Gray-Green carpet from who-knows-when in the 2 front bedrooms. And the carpet in living room, dining area, and family room was from 1983, when we first moved in. Only the master bedroom had new carpet from 1990. Daddy took all of them out in some late nights, all by himself, and came home dusty all over and worn out completely.

The family room and the master bedroom each had a small area of concrete floor, that came from additions in the 70's, we believe. That fact alone ruled out (solid 3/4-in) hardwood floor for those 2 rooms, because hardwood floor can only be nailed to plywood, which will make the floor in that area 3/4-in higher than the rest of the room. We ended up choosing laminate-wood floor mainly for its scratch resistant and moisture resistant characteristics, against engineered-wood (hardwood layer on top with plywood layers below). The fact that it's low cost, esp. the below $1/sq-ft ones, and it's easy to install (just floating on top of a layer of foam) didn't make the decision any harder.

Daddy did the family room install (about 300 sq-ft) and left the rest of the house (about 950 sq-ft, and 350-ft of new baseboard mouldings) to our tile man. Now we have wood floor throughout the house. Oh, BTW, he did try to clean the carpet glue from the old hardwood floor in Living Room, Family Room, and Hallway, but failed rather miserably, for the wood was permanently stained by the glue and the old floor was only 3/8-in thick.