I picked up two new additions to the Blogroll.
The first This Reluctant Soil is pretty new, and has more to do with building a fine urban garden, but in looking at their slide show, they also did a rather extensive renovation. I'm hoping that they find motivation to blog about the story of their renovation. In any case, a garden should be part of any urban reno, so this one is in. I like their style.
The next blog addition is Remodeling for Geeks . This one is a must-read for the DIY renovator and rehabber. I've gotten some good stuff from there already.
There you have them. Check 'em out!
8 comments:
Thanks for the compliments. I do plan to expand on the rehab stories. Stay tuned for more hilarity.
I knows good blog peeps when I seez 'em.
:)
Do you guys ever start planning a project, and then one party says, "You know, this is over-kill..."
Then you pause, look at each other, and say simultaneously, "Sounds good. Let's do it!"
It really cuts down on fights. ;)
lol
It's more like, Amanda says, "I've been thinking about something..."
And I run away.
I'm trying to think of a good story to match that scenario... Amanda thought me hanging picture molding in the front room wasn't a priority, and I did anyways. More than anything, I think we basically didn't see eye to eye on some priorities, Mark.
Well, we're working from a pretty hard and fast game plan. We have an instruction manual of sorts, so we know the basic order of things, and financing sets the priorities in a rather uncompromising way.
Otherwise, we'd definitely get off on different priorities. Not all of them rational. I go with it when the cost isn't too high. We put a lot of money and work into this and if one party just wants to have some fun or satisfaction doing something silly or out of sequence, what the hell?
But no matter what, overkill is our common ground. I like way "X". H prefers way "Y". Way "Z" is overkill. Instant compromise!
Mark
I think the plant boxes for the vegi garden was overkill. I'm trying to think what else was overkill at our place... nothing yet. Maybe stripping the woodwork of old paint only to repaint it again, but that was all me. Is there an example of overkill here on rehabordie?
Well, the best that I can think of was the repair of the joists.
http://www.rehabordie.com/2008/02/look-at-roof-boxgutter-and-floor-joists.html
What H ended up doing where the old trap door was (just a 30 inch span) was putting in joist hangers and hanging 2x 12 pressure treated lumber. Then I saw that the header didn't look so great, so I got some massive angle iron and ground a spot to slide it in.
Basically, there was a ply wood trap door there before for decades and it was fine. Now, you could put two grand pianos there without getting any movement.
When reinforcing those lapped floor joists, too in that post, I doubled up the 2.5"x10 that we salvaged from the ceiling and slid that under the joists, and then seated the doubled up joist in cement at both stone foundations.
Now, the entire furring job was ok to do with 1x stock or 2x2 but we used 2x4 on their sides. That was over kill. We don't just tapcon the furring boards up, we also glue them.
Pretty much overkill
The biggest relationship hurdle we faced in our rehab was deciding what the floorplan and materials were going to be. I remember a lot of ranting about different ideas, and then when we came to an agreement, and it was just a matter of execution. It was such a relief.
Most of our major unforseens happened while we were gutting the house, and we didn't decide on a final floorplan until much later. Things like huge amounts of termite damage just weren't a big deal, because we had the whole structure opened up and could take care of it.
Sometimes Kevin would win because it happened to be something that only he could do, so I would have less influence on how or when. I learned to pick my battles.
Most of the time cost vs. benefit has been the deciding factor, although what we see as a benefit might be a little skewed from what a bank might see as a benefit...
You know what the two biggest battles are for us: Communicating the idea, and defense of our approaches.
For two people who often don't even need to talk to know what we're thinking, it can be very frustrating to explain what we have in mind. Between new terms, talking to fast, not drawing well enough, mixing up terms that we should know (rafters, joists, cripples, studs, that vertical piece of wood thingy), and frustration of losing time, it can really get us into a snit. One of us often has to just back off and let the other guy do it. It's faster than getting on the same page. The key is to throw something validating out there once you see the plan, and then jump back in.
The other problem is that in the interest of expedience, sometimes we'll reject the other guys idea as it would take too much time, or it might not work, or it might make for problems later. The deal comes when one party or the other feels like their thinking is marginalized and we feel inclined to defend it. There's probably no way around this, as we're both amateurs and we don't have time to map every idea out and fully research it or find a pro to evaluate the idea.
I think it helps to just redirect and validate. E.g. "That looks like a good idea, but let's see if we can't cheat a little bit try to fit this in here this way. If you help me we might be able to save some time and a couple two by fours and get into a bottle of wine before 10:00."
One thing I like to remember is that it's not SUPPOSED to go smoothly. We'd probably end up doing (more) things wrong if they did.
Mark
P.S. Funny how we commented simultaneously.
P.P.S. I'm thinking about doing a kitchen design (on a dime) discussion. Things like form, function, placement, priorities, and lower cost alternatives. I'm no pro designer nor pro chef, but I do spend a lot of time in the kitchen and I THINK a lot about what I like and hate. It might be interesting to get yourself, some of the other bloggers and me discussing kitchen design and use generally, in addition to our attempt at shoe string elegance (early enough that we can make a change if we've screwed something up). What do you think?
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