Good morning all. This is the DailyKos Saturday morning Home Repair Blog. I am your host James, also known as exlrrp.
this is where the DailyKos community comes to talk about Home repair, Remodeling, building and any other related (and unrelated) topics
Feel free to discusss any projects or questions you may have
Fixing Stupid----thats what I call working on my house. The guy who lived here before me thought he knew everything about remodeling but the truth is he didn't know diddly, Bo or otherwise. It is the classic example of The Man Who Knew Too Much Or Thought He Did.
To begin with, my house is a rambling old thing that was built out of 4 littler houses that were "trainwrecked" together (it's apt!) Some of this house goes back to around 1900 and its been continuously remodeled by a committee ever since so the Quality of Work runs from B+ to F. Photo illustrates but the big trees on the right are now no more
I'm not sure who did the trainwrecking or how long it took, but the last part was putting House #4 on top of the other three and then opening one side of the roof that creates a "gallery" (?) thats two stories high.
There's some unique architectural features, like a bridge across the top of the gallery (See picture below)
And some downright weirdities like the Marilyn Lips on the doors. picture below illustrates, they're on about 6 of the dooors.
So whenever I start, because of the quality of the previous work, and the off the wall decorations, I have to go back and fix the basis of whats there to start with, on almost everything.
Case in point. My latest project was to paint the #2 guest room (you could call this a 5 BR 4 Ba house with several bonus rooms and lofts) Previous Guy not only thought he knew more than he did, he also had horrible taste in color---this was a gaseous lime green, with a mostly blue rug, yet.
I had been putting this off because we really only use it for storage most of the time but it's rainy season now and time for indoor projects.
One of the reasons I had been putting it off was because the light was on a pull string and I knew I'd have to fix that, which meant cutting into the wall, sheetrock patching and retaping.
Now, why would someone put a pull string light in a bedrooom? I mean who wasn't an idiot? This had all been redone so he could have changed it. He had this in the master closet also which I redid last year. It's the kind of thing that makes you pull your hair and gnash your teeth while working on this house but even more so: One of the ways you can tell right off that the person who worked on the electrical previous to you was a real bozo is if they don't leave enough wire sticking out of the electrical box to attach outlets and switches to. Code says must be 6" but real amateurs, for some reason, think it must be as short as humanly posssible. So there I was, working with wires that stuck MAYBE 3/4" out of the box. Arrrrrggggh!!
So anyway, after repairing the electrical, then I had to tape off all the trim because, as you can see in the photo above, all the trim in the house is stained, which of course, makes life hard for the painters. Then I discovered that the paint from the last job I had planned to use had hardened beyond useability.
Unfortunately, I can't find my camera, which had pictures of all this on it so today I have to rely on old pictures. I'll post pictures of the finished project (still hhave to put the baseboards on) next week. The decor loooks like this, which is the same shot of the gallery above, after I painted it and added that wall on the end.
So thats what I did on my house this week with the addition of normal maintenance like carrying and stacking wood. What did you do?