Category: The House

Renovation progress is grudging here at the Manor. The lack of progress means we’re now fixing things we’ll end up renovating. It’s highly annoying. That frustration does bring home the reminder that we need to prioritize house projects in the big scheme of our schedule because we’re getting nowhere. And if you’ve followed along here for any length of time you know I do not like being stuck.

Bane of my existence

I detested the laundromat days that ran our life when we set out on the road. My dear man didn’t mind it as much but it seriously frosted my flakes. For over four years we were without our own laundry machines. For those four years as full-timers and home renovators, our lives were dominated by laundry day. The process of gathering everything, traveling to a laundromat, washing, drying, folding, traveling back home, and putting everything away took many hours, not including travel time depending on where we were camped. When we were on the road, there were times a laundromat would be over an hour away. Not fun. And certainly not the best use of our time.

Once we settled into the house, our laundry scenario became much more predictable. We got it down to the most efficient routine possible but it still took about several hours all-told. The glitch is that I have a lot of demands on my time and calendar. Scheduling those chunks of time to manage the whole laundry process were insanely problematic and a great source of stress. I worked hard to make the best use of that time in the lulls while the laundromat machines were performing their duties, but it took a lot of mental cycles to do that.

And yes, I realize that’s a very first-world problem. But since I live in the first world, well, that’s my context.

Are we there yet?

We’ve been in the house for 3 years at this point. We designed the kitchen and have had the cabinets here for two years. We simply haven’t been able to carve out a dedicated window of time to take on the project. What we don’t want is to demolish the kitchen, get sidetracked with other work and life issues, then have it take a year to get it renovated and be without a kitchen that whole time. The idea is to block a window on the calendar to take the project from “old kitchen” status to functional-if-not-entirely-complete “new kitchen” status in the shortest time possible.

So you’re probably asking, “Val, what the ever-loving shit does the kitchen remodel have to do with not having laundry machines?” Well, I’ll tell you.

Laundry machinations

The Manor was built in the 1970s and in true 1970s style, there’s simply no other place to put laundry machines except the damn kitchen.

The house was designed with the laundry hookups at the far end of our galley kitchen. Along the way in the house history, someone moved the laundry setup to the garage. They simply closed up the plumbing in the kitchen and opened it up in the garage just on the other side of the wall.

Unfortunately, that puts the machines right in front of the overhead garage door. The depth of the machines, along with space for hoses and cords, means having the machines in that position renders the garage absolutely useless for vehicles. Not even the two-wheeled bikes would be able to roll in, much less the sidecar.

Having a least a one-car garage for the motorcycles was one of the reasons we bought the house so clearly we have to move the laundry machines back to the kitchen. With that in mind, we designed the new kitchen with space for European-style front-loading, under-counter machines. They’re smaller than typical American machines and we’ll still have to go to the laundromat on occasion to wash bulkier items but that’s a reasonable compromise under the circumstances.

But of course, here we are, a full two years with the kitchen project laying in wait and no progress on the horizon towards making this all come together.

Temporary fix

One day back in December, we got a text from our lovely and amazing neighbors. They had decided to upgrade their washer and dryer and were wondering if we knew of anyone who could use some free laundry machines.

I couldn’t think of anyone off-hand but thought, “Damn, I would fucking love to have those machines.” Initially it was a lament. But in fact, it planted the seed for progress. My mind raced. What would it take to install these machines, even if they were temporary?

The machines are the standard, top-loading washer and front-loading dryer with the control panels on top. The most obvious obstacle to shoving them into the kitchen was that we’d have to remove a couple of base cabinets along with a large section of countertop. In our small kitchen that would be a pretty big sacrifice, but it wasn’t a deal-breaker.

The next obstacle would be converting the hookups back into the kitchen from the garage. I did some quick poking around and realized that wasn’t actually a big deal at all. It was really only a matter of reopening the wall on the kitchen side and closing up the hole left behind in the garage. We’d have to turn the outlets around, but the plumbing connections were still agreeable.

Obstacle number three was the dryer vent. Our plan is for a heat pump dryer that won’t require a traditional vent to the exterior. So, of course, when we had the house re-stuccoed, we told the contractor to cover the vent hole in the side of the house. “Are you sure?” they asked with a puzzled look. “Oh yeah, we’re sure!” we replied enthusiastically. Joke’s on us, right?

So close

Those obstacles all together felt a bit daunting but eventually my dear man saw the wisdom in overcoming them. He really didn’t want to do the project but he realized it was the right thing to do given how far out we still are from the kitchen renovation, my intense hatred of laundromat runs, and the constant stress it was putting on me to constantly ram those days into my busy schedule.

We told the neighbors we’d take the washer and dryer and began planning the conversion process. In actuality, we couldn’t do a whole lot until our neighbors new machines arrived and we took possession of their old ones. We didn’t want to make logistical decisions like how much counter to remove with some of the question marks we had surrounding exactly how they would fit.

Once we were in possession of the machines, my dear man dug in and figured out everything we needed. Being in a fairly remote area, we couldn’t source all the parts locally, particularly to craft a proper dryer vent so there were some delays in waiting for bits and pieces to arrive.

I was practically salivating over the machines sitting in our dining room in the meantime. The delays were emotionally taxing given how badly I wanted those machines running. When we had to do one more laundromat day in the transition process, I wanted to bawl like a toddler who dropped her ice cream cone in the mud. And I’m not a cryer.

The glory of in-house laundry

And then—finally—the glorious day arrived. My dear man got everything running and we did laundry at home for the first time in over four years. After being stuck for so long, the bliss of relief washed over us. (Pun entirely intended, by the way.) Even though it was a weird, temporary half-step forward, it was forward. And it was an extremely powerful momentum-builder.

Six months later I still get verklempt thinking of that day. And I will forever be grateful to our amazing neighbors. We have the agreement with them that once we’re done with the machines, we’ll pass them on to someone else in need of the same glorious relief.

Hindsight

So now you’re asking yourself “Why the hell didn’t they just get some machines from the beginning?”

Well, first off, we never thought it would take this long to get the kitchen done. We also didn’t want to bring in machines we’d have to move and store in our limited space during renovation. Plus keeping the shiny, new treasures from getting damaged in the chaos would be nearly impossible.

The allure of free, temporary machines shook us out of our rut, though. Realizing that putting some effort into a temporary scenario would be a net positive was a game changer.

And it’s been totally worth it. The loss of counter space has taken some getting used to but it has proven to be the reasonable trade-off we thought it would be.

What’s next?

So how do we move forward on this beast of a renovation now that we pressed the laundry relief valve? Well, we should probably get the damn kitchen renovated! That’s locked behind a few dependencies—carving that elusive block on the calendar and the need for electrical work that has to happen first.

One of the bigger revelations we’ve had in recent months that we hadn’t accounted for is that we’re hobbled by lack of space to work. Since we downsized so tremendously from our life in Dayton, we’re packed to the gills in the house. We don’t have any wiggle room to move things around and create the work area we need to take on such a big project. That was definitely not in the brochure.

More on that next time. Stay tuned.

Cheers! Keep moving forward, y’all.

On the house project scale of refresh—remodel—renovate—rehabilitate, we fall squarely in the renovate category. We’re not ripping everything down to the studs but we have to do pretty much everything just short of that. We’re certainly well beyond a remodel.

When you take on a renovation project, you know you’re in for a wild ride. There’s the stuff you can see before you start. And then there’s the stuff you can’t. You know there will be surprises—that’s a given. You just don’t know what they will be, when they will turn up, and how much it will cost. In my experience, those surprises are usually must-be-addressed issues, not optional ones.

I call it Renovation Roulette. The ball is in play. It will land somewhere. How much you lose is the unknown.

If these walls could talk

In the case of our little shit show, over the last couple of years, we’ve learned more about its history. As far as we can tell, it’s probably been a rental for most of its 49 years. That means it hasn’t been molested, as my dear man puts it. In other words, it hasn’t had a lot of ridiculous “personalized” things done to it by previous owners that need to be undone. But the rental mentality also means that any maintenance that has been done has been the cheapest, most minimal fix possible.

As a result, it has a lot of little quirks and it’s clear no one has ever invested in this house. It’s never been loved. It’s been a place to live, not a home. You have to have a lot of vision to look past all of its shortcomings—like the ancient cat-piss-rancid carpet, failing stucco, paint-splattered fireplace brick, mismatched doorknobs and kitchen cabinets, missing door hinges, barely-functional windows, built-up grime, and general disrepair—to see what potential this sad little house has.

Knowing that all those little, visible issues disguise bigger problems beneath, you brace for impact when you begin to inspect below the surface. Anyone who has taken on a house project knows the drill—you begin a new project only to discover all sorts of new (i.e. expensive) problems.

Renovation forensics

Part of that discovery process means becoming a renovation detective to understand the history of events and repairs. Because sometimes why previous repairs were done leads you to even more discoveries and informs your path forward.

Some of our discoveries so far include:

Major bathroom leak

A large section of rotted subfloor was hidden beneath the nasty old carpet we ripped up. We knew there was a substantial bathroom leak that had been repaired in the typical unloved-house way so the subfloor wasn’t really a surprise exactly. The extent was certainly an unknown. We just added that project to the to-do list. Fortunately the decking is still solid so that project doesn’t seem horribly onerous.

Knowing how this house has been treated, it does mean we need to be extra diligent about inspecting the previous plumbing repair to make sure it was adequately addressed before we seal walls back up post-renovation.

Furnace closet encasement

The furnace closet lacked proper encasement in the ceiling. That creates a negative pressure scenario that pulls in air from the attic. No bueno.

Sewer line failure

Not long after we moved in, our sewer line stopped draining. Let me tell you, that’s a true code brown moment!

Turns out our old pipe had collapsed some years past near the sidewalk. After the renovation forensics realization of “Oh, that’s why there’s a sunken sidewalk section!” we moved on to being horrified thinking of how long raw sewage had been seeping into the ground here.

Several months and many, many (did I mention many?) thousands of dollars later we got that resolved and enjoyed flushing with peace of mind again.

Too much water pressure

I know that’s hard to imagine. I’ve never lived in a place where you had to manage too much water pressure before. The implications for pipes, faucets, and appliances was a new-to-us phenomenon. The short version is that too much pressure causes these crucial house-bits to fail. We were already seeing the effects in the existing hardware so we decided to be proactive and install a pressure regulator well in advance of replacing faucets and appliances.

Sewer line failure—part 2

Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Do you hear that? Why yes, renovation roulette strikes again!

In the process of digging up the water shut-off valve to install the water pressure regulator, we discovered a hole in the sewer line and a horribly leaky joint. So what started as a small proactive project turned into an unexpectedly large repair involving replacing yet another section of sewer line. This is the curse of renovation roulette.

Laundry hookups

The laundry facilities had been moved from the kitchen to the garage somewhere along the way. And, of course, poorly. They were simply swapped from the inside kitchen wall to the garage but with the layout of the house, that means two big honkin’ laundry machines sit right at the garage door entrance.

I don’t know if you’ve ever measured the depth of laundry machines but if you have, you know a standard machine is about 27 inches deep. Add in room for hoses, cords, and walking space to access the machines, and we lose half of the entrance width of an 8-foot door making the garage completely unusable for any vehicles.

You might have noticed we have two motorcycles and a big-ole sidecar that need the garage. So yes, we’ll be moving the washer and dryer back into the kitchen.

That’s not a roof, that’s a sieve

It appears roof leak stains had been embraced as a decor choice by previous owners. It was the dry season when we bought the house and we had no way of knowing which were still active.

Cue an epic monsoon season and we certainly found out. We attempted fruitless spot repairs to buy us a little time since any roof budget had been eaten up by the pricey sewer line repair. Eventually we had to just bite the bullet and do a full replacement.

Swamp cooler

The swamp cooler was an old piece of shit just like everything else in the house but it was functional. Until it wasn’t. Its failure coincided with the roof replacement during which we discovered that the cooler jack—the vertical sheet-metal duct the unit rests on—was too short. It was installed with one side of the cooler resting on the shingles. It would have to come down to address the roof replacement.

Since it suffered a catastrophic failure at the exact time it had to come off the roof anyway, it was sort of good timing. But piling on the mega-bills all at once was super un-fun.

Moist mystery

When we ripped up the afore-mentioned nasty carpet, we found that about a third of the subfloor had been replaced in the bedrooms on the south and west sides of the house. What hadn’t been replaced still sports some epically vintage 1970s linoleum. Classy.

There was also an awkwardly placed floor joist across the crawl space access that was clearly not original to the house. With the help of a contractor, we were able to piece together a history of water damage that he assured us was repaired adequately.

Our detective work came to full enlightenment when the monsoon season began and we saw just how much water pools up on the east side of the house. Let’s just say it’s a lot and explained the need for such extensive repairs. So we’ve added gutters, swales, and French drains to the renovation plan to manage the substantial drainage issues that have never been addressed properly.

But wait, there’s more!

Later we noticed that the master half-bath door was a bit off-kilter. There was a normal amount of space at the top and close to an inch at the bottom. After poking around and even removing a large section of drywall to inspect for unaddressed rot, we discovered that in the water damage repair, no one thought to re-anchor the exterior wall to the foundation. No shit—we could wiggle the exterior wall.

Pleasant surprises

It’s not all bad news. When we closed on the house all the utilities had been turned off for at least two years that we’re aware of. That means we had no idea if the appliances were viable before buying the house. That was one of the risks we took.

We got lucky on that one, though. They all worked. Mind you, they completely suck but they function at an acceptable level for now. That saved us from having to buy new appliances right away and keep them from getting damaged through the renovation. We’ll certainly take one small win in this whole process.

Progress

Of course there will be be more surprises but we’re chipping away at this massive project. So far we’ve made it through an electrical service upgrade, exterior window and door replacements (with the exception of the front door), re-stuccoing, re-anchoring the exterior wall, and reroofing without anything catastrophic rearing its head. Expensive, yes. Catastrophic, no.

The specter of starting any new portion of the project still looms large, though. Even though we know the renovation roulette game, we still have to mentally prepare for the unknown. It’s a brace-for-impact scenario and we have to be sure we’re in a good position to handle the surprises.

What we’ll tackle next, I’m not quite sure yet. Stay tuned.

Keep moving forward, friends!

“The Manor?” you ask with a puzzled look on your face.

Well friends, that’s what we call our small and currently supremely ugly house. Our street has a stately British-sounding name that belies the entirely not-stately reality of a modest neighborhood in a small New Mexican town. We plan to bestow royal titles on our guests when we can finally have visitors in post-renovation life. Entry may require a top hat, monocle, and English accents.

We have a strong tongue-in-cheek game here at Val in Real Life HQ, what can I say?

Good bones

We didn’t look at all too many houses before jumping on this shit show of a foreclosure. Between a real estate market that was sprinting like an over-caffeinated Olympic runner hopped up on steroids and our dire need to be done with full-time life, we moved quickly.

This place ticked a lot of boxes for us. A smaller house, a decent-sized lot, and—most importantly—good bones. If you judged this book by its cover, you’d likely be tempted to burn it to the ground. But this little house, while in need of some TLC, is solid. Ok, it needs a lot of TLC, but it’s livable enough as we tackle the backlog of love it has been denied over the years.

Our new sanctuary is a whopping 1100 square feet, with a one car garage, because that’s how things were done in 1974. Finding a house that even had a garage to begin with, much less one that had not been converted into living space, was a very tall order in this town. And now we’re basking in having 1-1/2 bathrooms, which feels luxurious compared to the toy hauler, even in their less-than-glamorous state. We have a small galley kitchen that’s more than a “meal prep station” which is a tremendous relief. The Adventure Dog has his very own yard again in which to enjoy his golden years. And we have our very own apple tree.

Eating the elephant

I know, it’s a gruesome metaphor. But it gets the point across. We’ve been doing some pretty advanced mental gymnastics on how to section off this huge project into manageable chunks. When you have to overhaul every space in the house, it’s sometimes overwhelming to figure out where to start.

Right now the path is the main bathroom first followed by the kitchen. In tandem we’ll have contractors working through windows, exterior doors, re-stuccoing, gutters, and roofing. Those are the hardest projects with the most return on investment so we’re hopeful by summer’s end this place will be infinitely more presentable and comfortable.

After that, there’s the half-bath, interior doors, and finish work to contend with. Floors will be the last project before we move outdoors to create the miniature native plant botanical garden we want. You can see this is a long play. We’ve accepted it will take several years to build our little sanctuary.

Embracing the process

The good news is that our time living in the toy hauler more than prepared us for being creative with small-space living, storage, etc. If you’re doing the math, this place is about half of the space we had in Dayton but about six times what we had in the trailer.

In a way, it’s been beneficial for the process to be moving so slowly. With more time to live in this space and understand its quirks, we’ve avoided mistakes and given ourselves time to discover ways to improve its shortcomings.

Of course, there will be surprises. So many surprises. It’s what we call renovation roulette. You know that ball is going to land somewhere. You just don’t know where, when, or how much it will cost you.

In the end, what we’ve taken on is the potential of this house. We’re embracing our Goldilocks Zone—creating our space largely on our terms while not starting entirely from scratch or having to live with previous homeowners design choices. And we have a place to live in the meantime that isn’t the toy hauler.

Cheers, friends! Keep moving forward.