Went to Lowe's tonight to get supplies for tiling my laundry room floor. I don't like to lay tile at all. Just being on my hands and knees is pretty hard for me and I'm just not good/patient enough to do it properly. And, I don't have any tile tools anymore, so I would have to get all that stuff - tile cutter, trowel, etc. Turns out Lowe's does this for about 3.75 a square ft. I have about 50 sq. ft. to cover so I'm going to go ahead and get them to do it. I'm running out of WIM to do stuff myself. I will do all the prep work, though.

I was about to post something about using color matched caulk instead of grout between the stone and Hardie board because of the difference in expansion. But then I was like, yo, it's fiber reinforced cement. It should expand and contract pretty much exactly the same as the stone and mortar, right?

I don't know the answer to this question. This bugs me.

Except the hardie is nailed to wood. Geez, now you went and made me re-think this. I doubt I could match this properly. I'd have to take a piece of the wall in to Lowe's and even then.... My color matching skills are nonexistent.

I guess if I see small gaps later I can go back and caulk. Some of the current gaps are pretty wide and I think it would look better with grout.

Wow Bigger, that stone looks awesome!

Just got caught up on the last couple of months, you have way more WIM than me.

They'd have something in the tile section that would be a pretty close color match, but yeah, after sleeping on it I'd just grout it and deal with cracks later if they happen.

Thanks JD!

Today I reminded myself why I don't do masonry. Because I suck bad at it.

I pretty much failed at every aspect of attempting to mortar those gaps. Starting with mixing and ending with about 12 inches of gap mortared and 17 lbs. of mortar on the ground.

I sent an email to Joe to see what he'd charge me to send one of this guys out.

Ho Ho Holy **** what have I gotten myself into.

I started demoing the laundry room. I figured it would be about a half day job. Ha. First problem was the closet was tied into both walls at the top plate. Ugh. Thank goodness for sawzalls.

The tile was really really difficult. I thought I could just scrape it up with a pry bar but no such luck. Then, after getting off a decent portion of it I've discovered I can't find half the screws used to screw the backerboard to the subfloor. What you see in the next pic is cement backerboard around the washer dryer and un-demoed tile under the washer/dryer. I think tomorrow my game plan will be to just demo what's left of the tile from the backerboard since I can't really find screws anyways.

This was a LOT more difficult than I could have imagined. I'm absolutely exhausted.

Finished up the demo of the laundry room. Prying everything (tile and backerboard) at once proved to be significantly more effective and bloody.

The first pic is dark I know. But it's a pic of my dining area which consists of a stack of lumber, washer, dryer, just about every tool I own, and a dusty mess.

The second is the laundry room sans flooring.

A lovely way to spend your Christmas...

Merry Christmas bigger!

Thanks Zayana!

I thought I'd spend a little time today looking for someone to do the baseboard and door trim. I actually bought all the materials years ago and never got around to putting it on. Anyways, I looked at various reviews on Angie's list. The reviews always have a price and what they did. Holy crap! I didn't see a single price less than $7,000 to do the baseboard trim in a house. I guess I'll be doing this myself.

I have, however, decided not to try to do the master bath myself. This will probably cost as much as everything else I've done to this point.

Not to rain on your parade at all, but considering your neighborhood and everything, are these improvements going to positively impact the value of your house?

It seems based on the few times you have mentioned neighboring houses that it will, but curious if you are doing this basically for 100% personal enjoyment, or because it also offers value.

You aren't raining at all.

I really rolled this decision around for quite some time because the improvements probably won't pay off monetarily. Although it may be close since I'm doing most of the work myself. However, more than likely this house gets bulldozed when I sell it. The land values in this neighborhood are crazy and all the small houses are being replaced.

This is primarily a "for me" decision. As painful as it was to accept this, I'm probably going to work where I'm at for at least 5 years. More likely 10 or 15 (shoot me now). This neighborhood is fantastic but the house has been a mess for as long as I've lived here and I just want something nice for a change. And, I've paid it off so there's that.

There were some other non-house related reasons too but that's for another blog.

This will also give me the option of keeping it and renting it out if I decide to.

I've undecided this. Why stop hitting myself in the head now?

Here's my tentative plan.

Currently the bathroom is a jack and jill (sort of). There's a door into the bathroom from both bedrooms. The second door really limits what you can do with the bathroom even though it is pretty big.

Current gripes. The shower is too small. I'm a big guy. I need a big shower. I have a big tub already so I'm keeping it. But the sink area is a bit small. And the whole bathroom looks crappy. I'll post pics when I get closer to tackling this.

So, I'm going to seal the door to the second bedroom. Take the tub out. Put a much bigger shower where one end of the tub was. Move the toilet to where the other end of the tub was. Get a bigger sink area. Then move the tub back in where the old shower and toilet were. This way I'll always be able to at least take a shower and I have the second bathroom if I need a sink.

yeah, that's it

I went to Lowe's to get some thinset for the backer board. I wasn't planning on doing this but pretty much everything I read strongly suggests you do this. I was just going to screw it down to the subfloor.

Anyways, while looking for stuff I started talking to an older guy that was working in the tile department. I sort of told him everything I was doing and was asking questions. He seemed super knowledgeable and was really helpful.

I told him that I was going to have Lowe's do the actual tiling. He strongly suggested that they do the backerboard too. For several reasons including eliminating them being able to blame me if there were problems. He made sense so that's what I'm going to do. Even though I already spent all morning cutting it and prepping the floor.

Finished up the day caulking. Ugh. I almost finished one side. There is a gap I need to fill with something other than caulk and I still have a couple of things to do on the windows. There's more and more "almost finished"s on the house. It's starting to wear on me a bit. I'd really like to have something completely done.

New Year building related Resolutions. Probably too ambitious for one year but we'll see.

[ ] Finish exterior of house(remaining siding and paint)
[ ] Finish laundry room
[ ] Get sheetrock repaired inside
[ ] Build front porch
[ ] Repair clean and stain deck
[ ] Remodel master bath
[ ] Landscape front yard including sidewalk
[ ] Build pond
[ ] Landscape back yard including stone walkways

seems overwhelming

Help.

My dad has a house with a flat roof. Some guy put a polyurethane foam roof on quite some time ago. It's held up remarkably well. But, he's got a leak or two now.

We called the guy that put the original roof on and he gave a pretty outrageous bid. It was an all or nothing thing - do the entire roof or none at all. There are other issues with this particular guy that my dad wants nothing to do with.

The leaks are in one small area but it's pretty impossible to determine exactly where.

I'm trying to figure out a fairly painless way to fix this. Almost no roofers want anything to do with this. They are looking at a tearoff but there's rotten wood and some wiring issues to deal with. It's a really old not well built house and nobody wants the risk.

Is there some sort of coating or something I can put over the existing roof? I'm guessing the area is about 300 sq. ft.

Once again, I'm not looking for a bulletproof solution. It just needs to hold up for 5 or so years.

There may be a bodge you can do, but my understanding is that flat roofs need redoing surprisingly often and that they cost a bomb.

I certainly understand that but there's extenuating circumstances.

Not to be morbid here but....

My Dad is pretty old and he's going downhill both physically and mentally.

I'm just trying to get the immediate leak fixed so he doesn't have to spend a fortune or deal with water coming in.

Learned a new word today - "bodge".

There's no easy fix that's going to be much better than a coin flip at solving the problem. You could try dumping 15-20 gallons of cold-applied roofing cement and mopping it all over the place. IF that solves the problem, it MIGHT hold up for 5 years.

Without doing a complete tear off, you really need to be able to find where the leaks are, or at least have a pretty good idea where you think they are, and then patch them as best you can.

Spray hose on roof, check for where it is leaking, patch it up?

So, the sheetrock guys are here. I called Lowe's to set up the tile work since the sheetrock guys will be done soon. A little background. I've talked to the Lowe's flooring department several times. They came out and measured and gave me a bid. I've picked out the tile. After they gave me the bid I asked how long the bid was good for. They told me 6 months. Then I explained that it would be a couple of weeks since we needed to wait on the drywall. They were fine with this.

Anyways, I call today to set up a time. They guy tells me there isn't anything set up. I told him the whole story and he tells me, "oh yeah, here it is. You rejected the bid." I explained that I did no such thing. "but it says right here in the system." To which I replied "well fix it". He was not amused. After being on hold for about 10 minutes he comes back and says they have the paperwork and they would have to re-enter everything. Resisting the urge to say "well, get started" I just said OK, thanks.

The sheetrock guys (well, there's only 1 guy) are very clean. They have brown paper everywhere and this tent to prevent dust. I'm pretty impressed since if I was doing it, it would be a colossal mess.



Laundry room and bathroom. He says he'll finish up tomorrow. Looks good so far.

Lance came by to borrow $20. He'll be helping me out Monday. He said he's been interviewing for jobs - as a cook. I then showed him the sheetrock work and he told me he does sheetrock. He then told me how he would fix the living room stuff. It involved a lot of caulk. I hope he's a better cook than a sheetrocker.

Sheetrock guy done. A++ job. He gave me a bid for the living room/kitchen area. yikes! But, I'll have him do it anyways. It may be more expensive than someone else, but he does fantastic work. Worksite clean. Job well done.