Five mistakes to avoid

Whew! I wish I could have avoided these five mistakes. It would have saved me weeks if not months and hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars.

Five Mistakes to Avoid

5. Clean the grout off the tile while it is still wet. This caused us many hours of hard work. In fact it took as long to clean up the tiles as it did to lay them.

4. Don't depend on your friends for critical parts of the project. Your friends are probably well meaning and want to help. But family and work get in the way. They hate to tell you no. You are better off moving along and hiring out the work or doing it yourself. If later your friend comes back and wants to help get them to come over and do something else.

3. Don't believe the material that comes with the sander from the "Big Box" Home Improvement stores. If your hardwood floor is clean and doesn't contain many finishes, they may work. Our floor contained decades of varnish and wax. The sander bounced and gouged. We ended up on the floor with varnish stripper stripping off the old finishes and then hand sanding them to repair the damage done by the big sander.

2. Be careful what you throw away. In our case we threw away bathroom fixtures. We were just trying to clear the junk out of the house. Now I wish I had those fixtures. Many of the fixtures in my house are original to the house and I could use the old parts for replacements (50 year old plumbing is not easy to find).

1. Try not to change plans. In our downstairs we had a bathroom. We decided to make it into a mud room. We removed old plumbing connections and moved doors. Then we went back to the original bathroom and had to rework plumbing and doors. Sometimes changes can't be helped but try to think thru everything ahead of time. This change alone costs us tens of hours and hundreds of dollars.

The process

How did we go about deciding what to do? I don't know that we sat down and said let's do 1, 2, 3. We looked at what needed to be done and what we could do. My wife decided that she could rip out the old tiles. I decided to get into the walls and discover what was making the smell. We just did what we knew how to do and what made sense to us at the time.

We just needed to get our feet wet and begin working in the house. We had that great enthusiasm that you always have at the beginning of a project so we worked hard then knowing that later on the enthusiasm would wane.

Later we sat down and made a list of things to do and put them in order (using project management processes that I learned in an earlier work life).

Would anyone like to know what I found behind the walls and how we dealt with it?

The beginning

My wife and I looked at this old 1950s house and saw our dream home. But a lot of work had to be done to get there. This house had what we needed, lots of room, a flat front yard with a sloping hill in the back, a creek for the kids to play in. But it also had this smell and all the rooms were dark, the roof was caving in along the edge and the carpet was nasty. You get the picture.

We got a good deal since the house was in need of repair. It was a little overwhelming to begin with. We decided first we had to get rid of the old carpet. We ripped it out and found underneath beautiful hardwood floors. We also had some old tile to get rid of in the downstairs. Walls had to come down, floors had to be replaced, celings had to be repaired, a roof had to be put on (I hired that out).

How did we get the job done. That's the story of another blog.

Ideas abound

Look around and ideas to help you are everywhere. We decided to put tile in the bottom level of our home. We installed about 1200 sqaure feet of ceramic tile and 5oo square feet of vinyl tile. Believe it or not the ceramic tile was easier to install and looks much better. It also was more expensive but I believe it was worth the extra money. It would have been easier to do if I had access to the information found at this site.
Tile Made Easy

One of the largest contributors to a sucessful project is having good advice on remodeling. Hire an interior decorator or use sites like these.

Ikea Kitchen Remodeling Secrets


Home decorating made easy

Most of all hang in there. Imagine what the final result will be.