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.