Home Renovation — Page 3 — You are in My World Now

Our house is too hot!

July 1, 2010 by Tricia

Our house is so hot!

We have air conditioners, but it’s been cooler outside lately so we’ve had our doors and windows open, but sometimes it seems the house is warmer inside than it is outside.

I guess that’s because in the summer time we have three windows blocked up with air conditioners. Plus … our houses are close together here and it seems that the breeze or wind is always blowing on side of the house that either doesn’t have windows we can open or that doesn’t have windows.

Grrrr!

I think we need to get another ceiling fan or two. That will help. At least we can keep the air moving in the house. I was actually looking at some ceiling fans the other day and I liked this one by Minka Aire.

I think we might install a ceiling fan in the upstairs stairway. Hopefully it will help push the hot air that builds upstairs down and cool it off.

Is your house warm too due to lack of air flow? Do you use ceiling fans? Does it help?

I’m getting sick of these four walls

January 13, 2010 by Tricia

I think I’m starting to go a little stir crazy! I’ve mostly been stuck inside the house for the last couple of weeks and I’m tired of the view! LOL

As my regular readers know I have Crohn’s disease and I’ve been on medical leave from my job as an ER nurse for five years now. Unfortunately I can add a bad back into my list of woes now too. I found out about a year ago that I have a herniated disc in my lower back so the last year I’ve had a lot of back pain and a numb left thigh.

My back got really bad on Christmas evening. I’d spent the previous two or three days cleaning the house from top to bottom in order to prepare for three rounds of house guests during the holiday season and then standing cooking all day on Christmas day must have just been the last straw for my back.

Sitting during Christmas dinner was excruciating. You see when I stand too long it seems to make my tailbone go out and sitting or moving around becomes extremely painful. To top everything off, the next day I got new symptoms – my numb left thigh got even number and then my left thigh started burning – as if I was standing with my leg pressed against a radiator or something extremely hot.

So now if I stand for as little as 15 minutes my thigh starts burning! It’s an awful feeling! Luckily if I go and lie down on my side with my legs bent (sort of like a fetal position) the burning subsides.

Now … two weeks or more later I haven’t done a lot of sitting. I’m stuck inside the house because can’t stand or walk for long without everything getting worse … but, thanks to lying down a lot my back, tailbone and leg seem to be quite a bit better.

I did go out on Sunday … we bought a new front loading high efficiency washer and dryer set at a local furniture store. While we were there we looked at the new HDTV sets and some contemporary sofas. I know our TV is going to die sometime this year so we thought it would be a good idea to figure out which models we like … as for the sofas … well … if we ever do get around to renovating the basement I think I’ll bring our living room couch, sofa and chair set downstairs and get a new sofa for the living room.

We have NO money … but hey .. I can dream … and that little outing to the store- while it was hard on my back – was nice. It alleviated some of the boredom I’d been feeling by having to be stuck at home lying down all the time because of my bad back.

Have you ever been stuck at home for a few weeks (or months) due to illness or something like a bad back? I know for some people being stuck at home in bed for even a day or so can drive them nuts – so imagine weeks!

The boys were doing yard work today

August 30, 2009 by Tricia

My husband and his cousins were busy working outside today. They were digging a drainage ditch at his cousins house so that the backyard won’t flood anymore. They worked all day – until about 8 pm! Digging in heavy clay! Man, they won’t need any weight loss pills with the amount of calories they probably burned today!

The job isn’t done yet either. I guess Chris might go back next weekend to help too.

When we first moved into our house we had a bit of a drainage problem in our backyard too. When it rained we’d get huge puddles near the back steps and the back of the house. We have a dry basement, but if we hadn’t done something about the drainage problem shortly after we moved in (2001) we’d likely have a wet basement by now!

I can’t remember exactly what we did, but it involved digging a trench from the back of the house into the middle of the yard and making sure that the trench was on a slight downward grade away from the house so that excess water would flow away from the foundation. We filled the trench with screening (fine gravel) and then soil … after digging out the clay soil which was probably causing the problem in the first place. We haven’t had a problem since!

Hopefully when the guys get done with Chris’ cousins backyard drainage problem it will be as good as ours turned out to be!

Have you ever had to deal with a drainage problem in your yard? What did you do?

Don’t you hate when home repairs don’t work?

July 8, 2009 by Tricia

Darn! Darn, darn, darn!

In case you can’t tell I’m a little frustrated right now. I just spent some time writing a post on my other blog detailing how we tried to fix the constant drip from our basement shower head.

I thought it was fixed! My husband told me last night once he finally got the old faucet back on that it was fixed …. but, after a quick visit to the basement to see if the shower head had really stopped dripping I discovered that it’s still dripping. At a good rate too! The washers my husband put in didn’t help.

Darn!

We have NO spare money at all. I guess we’ll have to live with the dripping for a while longer (yes we do shut off the water supply to the shower, but it still drips!). It’s been dripping for years and I don’t want to leave it too much longer. I guess as soon as we do have a little extra money I’ll spend some time trying to Price Pfister faucets and Moen Faucets and try to find one that fits our budget.

It figures that when we can’t spare any money on household repairs something needs fixing! Has that happened to you?

Don’t do your own reno if you can’t do it right!

April 22, 2009 by Tricia

Being a DIY home renovation I can fully understand the desire to take shortcuts at times, but as you can see from the picture below … it’s better to do things the right way the first time around!

Why on earth didn’t they just take out the old windows and put the new ones in instead of doing whatever this is! That’s ugly! I’ll be the sale price of the home went down by tens of thousands of dollars after that mess up!