Changing the Door Handles

Sometimes the small things make the biggest difference. I am working my way through the house changing the door handles from the old clear glass knobs...

To these simple round knobs (cheap and cheerful!)

And now we know: do not buy the cheapest kit to drill the holes for door handles. The pieces get stuck together and the project gets stalled while your husband treks over to his grandfathers to use a vice to separate them.

Installation of Hardwood Floor

The back room sat empty for 4 months with nothing but plywood subfloor. It was still a useful space, plenty of painting and wedding projects got done in this room. Come October we were really getting antsy to get some flooring down. Before the basement problems, it was planned to be our only summer house project, but plans changed.

My parents gifted us hardwood as a generous wedding present, lovely light maple in 1 ¼” wide boards. This would darken to match the existing golden colour of the hardwood in the rest of the house. A friend with experience (and tools) spent one Saturday helping us install the floor and baseboards. Although it took 3 months longer than anticipated, the result is gorgeous and this room has fast become our favorite.

And now we know: Friends with knowledge and tools are great! Hardwood is a project that we can actually do.

And Then Water Rained Down...

One day water randomly started coming through the kitchen ceiling. The bathroom is directly above that area, so we deduced that this was were it was coming from. Not having any plumbing experience we called in a pro. The plumber cut a hole where the water was coming in and took a look. A pipe had cracked. So he replaced it and no more water problems.

I proceeded to patch the ceiling. A very crappy patching job; likely because the ceiling is ¾” plaster and I patched it with ½” drywall. Before I even got it finished, water started coming through again. Since the patching was going badly anyways, we opened it up again. We checked the toilet and monitored the drains. No source could be found.

So back came the plumber. He pocked around the pipes and looked at the bathroom. Nothing was wrong, he suggested it might be from the tub leaking behind the wall. So we cut a hole behind the shower fixtures from the second bedroom wall to monitor where the water came from.

Turns out my husband had re-caulked the tub recently. This was the cause. I re-caulked it and that was the end of that water problem.

This is how our kitchen ceiling currently looks and it will stay this way until we redo the bathroom. It feels like tempting fate to patch it at this point.

And now we know: just cause you have one giant house problem does not mean another is not around the corner. Also that my husband should not caulk.

A New Furnace is Installed

The existing furnace was oil and dated from 1963. We replaced it with a high efficiency gas furnace.

This was the most painless of our home improvements, likely cause it was done by a team of professionals. It took 2 days, the men where very nice and there were no problems. Not really the prettiest investment in your home though.

The Problems Begin

The day after we got possession of the house we were down in the basement and noticed a pool of water near the floor drain. Concerned we called in the big guns (my dad and a carpenter friend) and started investigating where the water was coming from. We followed the water flow further and further south-east in the basement, demoing walls and floors as we went. Over the course of a few weekends, we finally trailed it back to the concrete block walls.

By this time our finished basement was no longer finished. All the items we had stored down there were relocated to the 2^nd bedroom and there were piles of building material on our driveway. We were the ‘white trash’ neighbors whose house is an eyesore for the whole street.

All the demo work meant long days in the stifling hot basement. It meant finding mouse carcasses in the ceiling, cursing the crazy building techniques where someone had used nails and screws on every board and discovering that someone had applied tar to not only the interior walls but the floors as well. Most of all it meant stress and lots of time lost.

What we discovered was that there was water rushing in through our concrete block walls in a couple of locations. The water ran under the finished floor, out into the unfinished laundry room and into the floor drain. There was rotten wood, but luckily no mold.

And now we know: old people may seem sweet but do not trust them, they are evil. Don’t bother with a home inspector, they are not responsible for anything so what do they care if they do a thorough job? What you think is the worst that can go wrong can always get worse.

Free Bookcases

The previous owners left quite a few items in their move to an apartment. Some were good; an outdoor swing, outdoor chairs, and some were bad; a creepy portrait of a man, a plastic birdbath. Upstairs they left three wood laminate bookcases with gold trim that were too rickety to move.

A good sand, a couple of coats of paint and a few nails, and they looked good as new. Saved us having to buy bookcase as they were built-in in our apartment.

And now we know: paint can give a new life to any piece of furniture, even if it is stuck in the 70's

Painting the New House

Paint really makes a space your own and we planned on painting the main rooms from the start. Before even moving in, we got a crew of family together and spent 3 days painting and cleaning the house.

Funny that there are only images of myself and my father in law working!? In reality my mother and brother spent 4 days helping us.

And now we know: actually this went pretty smoothly…rare

Moving in and demo of the closet

The back room really sold us on the house. The light is amazing; sun streams in all morning and afternoon. The view is facing west out onto the backyard with only the train tracks along that side of the property.

Immediately after getting the keys we ripped out the existing carpet. Once orange it was now grayish and the under pad was merely dust. The other thing that had to go was the huge closet on the north side. Running almost the entire wall, they seemed to think it was a good idea to end it 18” from the wall leaving a lovely unusable space in the corner

Ripping it out was easy, patching it back up took a lot longer than expected.

And now we know: patching is hard, drywall dust is a huge mess and don’t hire your friends

How It Used To Be

Besides the old people smell, the house was dated and had a lot of ugly going on. There was disintegrating carpet, floral borders and brass floral light fixtures. The basement was a 70’s wet dream; knotty pine paneling, orange shag carpet, mirrored bar and dead animal pelts hung strategically. The shower was accessed from a separate room and featured a fan directly in the stall as well as brown water.

The front room was okay, just needed some paint and the removal of the lace doily curtains.

The dining room was plain. Again needed simple updates including a new light fixture.

And the back room, with the great windows.

Overall the house was plain, a little dated but with good bones (or so we thought). Hardwood floors throughout and a massive backyard were some of the best features of the house. So began our adventure in home ownership.

Our First House

We bought this house in May 2009. Its previous occupants, an elderly couple, had decided the stairs were no longer manageable for them.

For 2 years we lived in a downtown 2 bedroom apartment. Like many apartments ours had both positives and negatives, and it was when those negatives began to become unbearable that the decision to buy a house was made. Cigarette smoke coming up through the floor boards, a tiny kitchen, a laneway that was only 4 inches wider than the car, shared parking that often required a 20 point turn, loud upstairs neighbors, no hot water and no heat were some of the more pressing issues that began to grate on us. So we sadly said goodbye to the great location where you could walk to amenities and told ourselves that life in the suburbs would be great.

This house hit most of our must haves; easy access to transit, under 30 minute commute to downtown, outdoor space and 2 bedrooms. Naively we looked at the rather dated interior and thought only of adding value to the property over the years as we updated the little house. We planned to take on a few projects a year, gradually improving the place while enjoying time with our friends and traveling. We thought that buying a house 3 months before our wedding would be easy, I mean none of the repairs had to be done right away? So what could possibly cause us additional stress over the summer?

We were so wrong.

So we are learning and working hard. Some days we love our house and some days, when yet another project takes ten times longer than planned, we wish for the carefree life of apartment living.

At least now we have an awesome collection of tools to play with!