We’ve been picking up some momentum and a lot of our cosmetic work is getting close to finished. We have rooms that somewhat resemble their normal function now! You can walk into the kitchen or a bathroom and recognize it as such. Sounds simple, but it’s definitely exciting to see cabinets in the kitchen and showers in the bathrooms. We’ve been slowly getting all the “holes” in the house closed up, which has made a lot of things easier. Because we’ve been working on the electrical, we’ve had attic accesses open. Those have made the electrical work possible, but also means the heat and smell, especially in the afternoons, have been almost unbearable. We finally put new garage doors on as well, which has helped to keep the house a bit cooler.
Highlights
-Removing walls around the staircase, opening up the kitchen and dining room
-Installing garage doors
-Major electrical progress (between the two of us we’ve only been shocked three times!)
-Master bath tiled and drywalled
Notable Mishaps
-Garage doors. Y’all. Do not EVER try to install garage doors yourself. I am obviously all about the DIY, but I will never install another garage door myself again. Not worth the savings. I spent three full days on this project and STILL ended up hiring someone else to do it. To be fair, we had headroom so low in the garage that even the “low headroom adapters” wouldn’t work, so we needed special ordered parts to get them to actually function. The instructions on installing these things might as well have been in another language and I spent a lot of time unbolting things I had already bolted together. The guys we ended up hiring to do this didn’t even charge much more than it would have cost to do it ourselves. Lesson learned.
– Plumbers. I would say the opposite from the garage doors. Better to do it yourself. Probably not always the case, but we hired a gentleman that had been working on the mold crew downstairs to help us with the plumbing. The first day he showed up late, explaining that he was in court. He had told us about a child custody dispute going on, so I assumed that’s what it was, but he went on to volunteer that he was in criminal court for a felony attempted murder charge. He told us the story about how he strangled his ex-wife because he was trying to “calm her down” in an argument and went on about how ridiculous it was that they were charging him for it. He seemed to think that of course we’d agree that his ex must be crazy and it was totally normal to put your hands around someone’s neck while arguing. Obviously I was pissed, but Wes and I decided to still allow him to assist in the plumbing work, as his quote was about half of the others we had gotten. He proceeded to not show up the entire rest of the week, and although we have to find a new plumber now, I was almost relieved to not have to pay him a dime. Hopefully he’s in jail.
-WE STILL HAVE RATS YALL. It’s been two months, there is no food anywhere, and we’ve had traps and professional rodent control out twice. These things are persistent little buggers. If I never smell rat pee ever again, it will be too soon.
Goals
-We still have a collapsed driveway. Dealing with insurance has been a pain, and we’re still not sure if they will cover the work or not. Hoping to at least get answers
-HVAC has been hired out and starts today!
-Plumbing. See above.
-Trim. Lots of new windows, doors, and walls have been placed, it’ll take awhile to get trim and baseboards everywhere!
