Home Work

Home improvement projects can be interesting and take on a life of their own sometimes. A job you think will take 1-2 days can take much longer, especially if trying to do in between work.

For instance, my husband decided we would redo our own concrete stairs and replacing the subfloor in our bathroom at once. Both ended up taking longer to do than we thought they would.

The stairs was the easier of the two jobs and only took longer because the bottom step, which had fallen apart in the middle, was worse off than we originally thought. When he dug out the sides to creat the box to pour the concrete and fix the problem, both sides fell off. Then when he started brushing off what was left, most of it crumbled easily. We ended up having to take a hammer and break it up until it wouldn't break anymore. To keep the cost down we used three cinder blocks. It still took 6 bags of concrete to fill the whole and a 7th bag to fix the chips in the other two steps and make the three look uniform.

The bathroom was a whole nother problem. It started out as the floor needed to be fix, and of course that meant the vinyl flooring had to be redone. It ended up taking a week to finish. After getting the old flooring out, the subfloor was bad in two spots and had to be recut. But neither wanted to go back in easily. The tile took longer to lay than we thought as well. But the sink and toilet were a pain to get back in as well. We didn't touch the tub so that was a problem that didn't exist. The toilet didn't want to match up bu finally did. The sink was about 3-4" farther away even though the floor had only been raised 1/4" from where it was before, so that the entire thing was level. This job took until Fri (starting Sun) to finish due to work schedules.

Then there was the linen closet that fell apart as it was being taken down. It came with the house and really was home made with no doors. So that was an expense we weren't expecting. The medicine cabinet was new, since we only had a mirror before, and where the old lighting fixture attached to the wall had to be repaired first.

The bad part is we thought this job would be done on Sun and it took most of Sun, over half the night with the floor not wanting to go back right, several hours on Mon, Fri and Sat to finish. It gave my husband a greater appreaciation for those that can do one in a single day.

Home owner ship is so much fun.