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Time to finish up our home renovation projects

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Now that the weather is getting nicer I guess it’s about time we get back to work on our home renovations.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time cleaning out our basement over the last few weeks. In a week, on April 13th, we’re going to have our oil tank replaced. What a pain in the butt cleaning out a basement that’s been used mainly for storage is! There are so many things we stored away thinking we’d use them once the rest of the house was renovated that have been sitting down there since we moved in, in 2001! I guess if we haven’t found a way to use some of those items in the past 8 years we probably won’t even when our reno is done.

My goal, for now, is just to make the basement usable. We have a sectional couch downstairs and if we can clear the clutter enough to make a decent sized usable space we could set up the couch so it could be used. It has a pull out bed as well – which would be great if we have a lot of house guests. The basement is so nice and cool in the summer that it would be nice to be able to spend some time down there. We’d probably save some money on air-conditioning too if we spent more time in the basement during the hot days of summer!

The next real reno I want us to work on is the kitchen! I hate the cupboards in our tiny kitchen. The previous owners obviously did a kitchen makeover a while before they sold the house but they did it cheaply. The cupboards are melamine and I think they’re ugly. I want to replace the cupboards and arrange them differently … well actually I want to arrange the whole kitchen differently as right now the only place to put our fridge is on the empty wall between the back door and the basement door and it blocks both doors! I also want to look for some cool door hardware online, something interesting that will personalize the look of our cupboards etc.

First we need to finish the living room/ dining room renovations! We still need to put up the tin ceiling tiles that we bought oh … 7 years ago! Then all we need to do is replace the baseboard moldings and quarter round trim and the job will finally be done. At least we have most of the materials for that … yes they are stored in our over-crowded basement!

Are you planning any home renovations this Spring? If so what rooms are you planning to redo?





Change oil tank or change over to gas heating? Which would you do?

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A couple of months ago we got a letter from our insurance company stating that by April we need to replace our oil tank or we’ll lose our insurance coverage. Obviously we have oil heating, and I guess that as an oil tank ages there’s more chance that it will rust and begin to leak. So one a tank is of a certain age, 15 years I think, insurance companies want their clients to get new tanks.

So we are faced with a few major decisions. Should we replace the oil tank and continue to heat our home with Oil? As far as I can tell it seems to cost about the same as heating a home with gas. The other alternative is to remove the oil tank and switch over to gas heating. We already have gas coming into the house as we have a gas stove, but if we switch to gas we’ll need to replace the furnace and possibly have some duct work done.

Changing over to gas heating will be more costly, but if we get a high efficiency furnace I believe we’ll qualify for a rebate from the Government of Ontario. I believe the rebate might be as much as $3000 so that would cut our costs quite a bit. Still we’d have to come up with the money for the new furnace and any other work that we’d need done at that time first.

The other dilemma facing us is the fact that we’ve been using our unfinished basement as a large storage area! We have our old sectional couch down there, plus some furniture that we got from my parents home when my mother died. We also have boxes that we never unpacked when we moved from our apartment as I’ve been waiting to unpack them once our living room/ dining room and other home renovations are finished.

Whether we just replace the oil tank or change our heating system over to gas we’ll still have to clear out the basement so that the work can be done. I think over the next few months I’ll take a few hours each week and go over some of the stuff we have stored down there and slowly put some of it out in the garbage. I’m sure there’s lots of things in the basement that we’ll never use. However, what to do with the rest of the stuff is a problem.

We have a very small house and there really isn’t much room in the rest of the house to store some of the things we have in the basement. In fact, some of the furniture we have down there we planned to use in the basement once we renovated it. So I think I might have to look into a self storage service. We could rent storage space for a month or so and keep our items in storage while the work is done in our basement.

Hmmm maybe having an almost empty basement will spur us on to quickly renovate the basement. Now that’s an idea. Of course money will be a problem. We don’t even have enough money for Christmas this year let alone changing the oil tank or replacing the heating system!

So anyway … if this was your house what would you do? Would you just change the oil tank to satisfy the needs of the insurance company or would you take a leap and change over to gas heating?

We’ve just got to finish our living room renovation

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We have to finish renovating our living room and dining room area soon. We started the renovations to these rooms in 2003 and then my mother died, my sister had an operation and ended up in a coma and Chris and I both got sick. Chris is better now, but I’m still sick so we just haven’t gotten back into renovating our home.

We probably won’t do anything now that it’s starting to get cold here, as it’s much nicer to do renovations when you can have the windows open or get outside for a break from the dust, paint fumes and so on. But … next spring … I mean it – whether I’m healthy again or not we just have to start working on getting the reno done!

We have people come to the door and they look up at our ceiling that’s covered in wood strapping just waiting for the tin ceiling panels to be nailed on to them and they say “oh you’re going for that rustic unfinished look, eh?”. Uh huh …

Plus I’m dying to get some new furniture. I’ll probably decorate with modern furniture. I saw this really cool couch at one of the stores on the Danforth that I’d love to get for our living room. I’ll have to go there again and take a photo of it so that I can show you. It would be nice to see if you guys like it as much as I do!

The furniture that we are using in our living room now is leather and it’s huge! I think that we’ll move that furniture into the basement (when we refinish that too) and create a home theater / rec room area down there.

Have you renovated your home on your own? Did you ever stall like we have?

Leaking shower head – drip, drip, drip

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Late last night after Chris had gone to bed and the dog was fast asleep I started hearing this funny noise … blop, blop …. bloop … I’d been watching TV in the living room so I turned the TV volume down and got up to investigate the sound.

As it turned out it was the the upstairs shower head that was leaking. That makes two shower faucets that we have to replace. The one in the basement has always leaked. Chris is the main user of the basement shower and he’s tried to fix that leak several times, even new shower heads don’t help.

So what he does for the basements leaking shower head is to turn off the water supply to the shower after he’s used it. Luckily the water control for that shower is easily accessible since our basement isn’t finished.

I think the upstairs leak will be easier to fix just by replacing the shower head or a washer, but the basement is a problem. We’re planning on renovating the basement sometime in the near future and we’ll be redoing the plumbing when we do it so we might be able to get by with Chris’ fix for a while longer.

Don’t you hate leaky taps and shower heads?

New neighbors finally moved in

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Well our new neighbors, the one that bought the house from our Karaoke neighbors and officially took ownership of the home sometime in May finally moved into their home last week.

They must have rented a small moving van, but I think that wasn’t enough as I saw several of their friends vans and cars loaded with moving boxes after their moving van was gone.

They still aren’t finished their renovations though. They currently have no ceiling in their living room, dining room and kitchen! They are waiting for their contractor to come and get the work done. It will be nice when it’s done though because they are putting pot lights in the ceiling. It will have a very nice modern look. Chris and I feel bad that their renovations are finished because it was us that suggested that they tear out their ceiling! Oh well … it will look nice when it’s done.

One of our other neighbors moved out of her house about two weeks ago and we’ve seen some people going inside the house a few times in the last day or two, so maybe the new people are about to move into that house soon too. Maybe they’ll be like T and C next door and renovate first before they move in.

Last Tuesday when T and C officially moved into their house Chris and I dropped by and gave them a box of deserts from a local bakery as a house warming gift. They were taking a break when we visited so we ended up talking with them for at least an hour. We both really like our new neighbors. Hopefully we’ll become friends as time goes by.

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