Home Renovation is So Much Fun
There are few things as much fun as home improvement jobs.
I’m not kidding.
It’s the greatest.
Other people may watch TV on the weekend, but me, all I want to do is
build something, fix something, or help somebody build or fix something. Call it crazy, I don’t care. Because of my predisposition for home repair, it seems I’m kind of the go-to guy for advice on older houses and causes that look so ugly, but do tend to come out okay in the end.
Once upon a time, it seems like years ago, I started a home improvement project with my brother.
Lots of mistakes along the way, mostly because we didn’t know what we was doing totally.
Sure I’d done lots of little things at the places I’d lived, but nothing like this place.
My brother got it into his head to do a total house tear apart and remodel.
I’ll tell you about a lot of the stuff you can learn doing something like that.
Maybe you can avoid some of our mistakes, but I also found out that some of the things just came with the territory when you do something like this. (Mostly it was me working, as my brother drives truck. How come I’m working on his house and he skips out? I guess that’s how it works with brothers.)
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Today building codes for most anything you can imagine have been standardized. This standardization has evolved over years. That is to say, some plumber or framer didn’t just sit down one day and decide that in our state, from now on, studs will be placed 16inches on center or that cables cut through studs have to be protected from nailing with metal cable protectors or shields.
Fifty years ago this standardization was not as comprehensive and at times more a matter of the way tradesmen worked rather than something mandated by an enforceable code.
Another situation you might encounter when tearing into an older house may be the work was done by the homeowner or a tradesman who thought it would just be easier not to do the project or repair “up to code”.
When you start looking at a part of an older house with an eye toward renovation there are some things to look for which can be telltale of an add on or prior remodel.
You may be lucky enough to have had a realtor tell you something like “this bedroom, bath and porch were put on about ten years after the house was built, or the same thing by a next door neighbor. But more likely you’ll have to figure this out yourself.
This all brings me back around to the renovation me and my brother did—renovating his old five bedroom, two bath house here.
I’ll share some of the surprises and headaches we ran into when we started to go behind the walls and under the floors of what looked like a pretty normal house in the suburbs.