Act 1: Buying a House While Stupid

I got myself into a bit of trouble a few years back. I bought a house.

I thought I had good reasons: I could afford it. I needed the space. It offered stability for me and my partner. I chose a home that seemed to be right for us: 40 years old, good location, good bones, good layout. Slightly more than I wanted to pay but equipped with an apartment, which I figured would defray costs more than the price difference for a cheaper home.

I took it on knowing it needed a couple of fixes. I built those costs into my figurations up front. But you can’t know what you don’t know you don’t know, and I hadn’t owned a house before, so what I didn’t know was “all of it”.

The thing about a house, it’s like owning a body – you can break your life trying to make it what you want it to be. You start down a road – a new diet, maybe, or an electrical upgrade – and you find that it’s not quite right. Maybe you need a bike. Maybe you have asbestos in the stucco. If you have done this kind of thing before, it seems to me, you can see what needs doing with reasonable clarity, and plan accordingly.

If you haven’t, you can get into, in this case, serious cost overruns.

The house needed an upgraded electrical system in order to be insurable. The asbestos meant the ceiling had to come down before the electrical work could be done safely. I checked the price – 10 grand for the asbestos and 10 more for the electrical – and it seemed doable, so I booked someone for the asbestos and someone else for the upgrade.

Then a big chunk of the basement ceiling also had to come down for the electrical, because that’s how most homes are wired, with the big stuff running between floor joists. Which meant the basement ceiling needed replacing. Not all of it, mind, but enough to cost real money.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. I hired someone to reinstate the ceilings, and I threw in a couple of what I imagined were small jobs – reinsulate the attic, take out the broken-down fireplace and the panel board in the living room, pull up the carpet, lay hardwood instead, fix a couple of annoying electrical socket issues, move the washer and dryer to the basement. Small stuff, considering.

But I’d made a mistake: I asked for work without asking for a price. The last update to the contractor’s quote, putting the cost near $30,000, hit like a boxer, like a home run champ. The numbers left me senseless. My once-manageable renovation costs now extended beyond the visible horizon.

With the ceilings up but not finished, the carpet pulled out and nothing but subfloor to replace them, with plaster dust everywhere, I asked the contractor to stop work. The stress and the money involved in finishing were going to break me. So for a long time, I (and my partner) had no flooring in the living room, no mouldings on the walls, gaps at the corners of our ceilings.

Slowly, slowly, over years of payments and small spends and my own time and labour, I have fixed most of these issues. Lesson learned.

Act 2: Landlording While Dumb

Lesson not learned all the way, it turns out.

My home has a basement apartment in it, and I try to keep it in good condition. But I’ve had a run of bad luck in the tenant department. The first tenant, inherited from the previous owners, left behind hundreds of pounds of garbage as well as badly damaged walls.

Being new to the landlording business at the time, I rolled up my sleeves, trucked off the garbage, installed a bunch of new drywall, plastered, painted, and put it up for rent.

Time went by, tenants passed through, and at some point I discovered that the mouldings and carpets had been destroyed by a tenant’s pet. That particular tenant’s departure was rough, so I didn’t do my due diligence in terms of recovering the costs, but I knew it would be extremely difficult to rent the place as it was.

So I took on the task again, pulling up carpet and removing the mouldings. When I’d gotten the carpet up, however, I got a surprise: underlaying the carpet were commercial tiles. Some of these had broken over the years, and in the process of dealing with that damage I discovered that the “mastic” (tar glue, basically) under the tiles contained asbestos.

Suddenly my quick and dirty re-flooring job became a lot more difficult and expensive. I called the asbestos remediation company again, and they dealt with the tiles. They warned me not to touch our subfloor, which still has the mastic on it. As with most asbestos issues, it’s not a problem unless I have to remove or repair the subfloor itself. The costs involved for even minor remediation run to the thousands of dollars, so I’ll be leaving it undisturbed as much as possible.

Once that had been dealt with, I still had to lay 600 square feet of flooring. Below-grade floors have a lot of restrictions – no hardwood, because it never dries out properly; no carpet unless you have excellent floor ventilation; very limited options for other wood products. I found a laminate that looked good and which would not present too many issues if I ever needed to repair or replace parts.

Laying floors takes a tremendous amount of time. I had learned this lesson when I did our upstairs floor, but I expected things to be easier with laminate. I made bad decisions during the process, however, and I still live with some of them today. In particular, I decided to try to lay most of the floor as a continuous run instead of using gap mouldings. This means that all of the flooring has to be aligned across multiple rooms and hallways. Laminate does not work particularly well in this kind of installation because it’s not fixed to the floor and in this case it also was not joined together in any secure way. So now I occasionally see gaps between the floorboards.

Once the floor was down (which took several months), I still had to repair walls and paint the place again. I was better at walls this time around, but the damage was extensive enough that I quickly hit the limits of my skills. The average person might not see all of the flaws in my work, but there are a number of places that make me cringe even now to look at.

Act 2, Part 2: You Silly, Silly Man

I made another silly call before we put the apartment back up for rent. One of the most common requests I received during the rental process was for a washer and dryer. The apartment kitchen already had the necessary setup for a dryer, so I figured I’d just get a plumber in to install taps and drains for a washer as well.

It turns out that installing a washer is nobody’s idea of a fun time. Washers require large drains that slope down, so it’s best if they’re located close to the main pipe. Most walls are single-stud, and in a basement apartment they’re often load-bearing, so you can’t really drill a 3 inch hole for a drain pipe through several studs without doing a bunch of other work to compensate.

I didn’t realize any of this until I saw the installed taps. For extra bonus fun, the drain pipe had to run through the kitchen cupboards, which meant we lost cabinet space because we had to put the washer in front of one set.

I swallowed my disappointment and called it a day. I got ready to rent the place out again. And I’d learned a valuable lesson.

Act 3: Once Bitten, Twice Bitten, Three Times…Wait, What Am I Doing?

The apartment was rented again, and a relatively uneventful period of time passed with the new tenant.

Until.

August rolled around, and things went to hell again. The kitchen sink sprang a slow leak, and I had trouble finding a plumber. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the washer the tenant had brought with them was leaking as well.

This went on for at least a couple of weeks, at which time I received a call from a very upset tenant. I went to check on the situation and found the linoleum of the kitchen floor torn into pieces, with mold growing on its underside. The tile underneath, which we had not needed to deal with the last time around, was buckling with extreme water damage. I was, to say the least, not pleased.

I called the asbestos folks back in and bought some new, nice-looking vinyl to repair the kitchen floor. I installed a dehumidifier to deal with the residual moisture. A week or so after the issue was discovered, the apartment was back in livable shape. No problem!

That tenant left not long after the kitchen issue, which meant another round of rental discussions. The market had softened since the previous round, and I heard a lot more complaints about cosmetic issues with the apartment. But I’d learned my lesson.

Act 4: Nobody Should Feel Bad For Me by Now

It’s probably become clear that my lessons are not particularly well-learned.

As I said, I try to keep a nice apartment. One complaint that came up over and over again bugged me: The kitchen cupboards, folks said, looked terrible, and they were starting to fall apart to boot.

The washer wasn’t the only problem with the cabinets. During my earlier repairs I’d realized that the cupboards were ad-hoc constructions, most likely built in place by the previous owner, who was clearly not a carpenter. I’d tried to find nicer doors to replace the painted plywood, but it turns out cabinet doors are really expensive. Plus the custom build meant standard doors wouldn’t fit. Factoring in the washer, I concluded that replacing them entirely would be the better approach.

Which brings us to 2018. Kitchen renovations tend to reach into the tens of thousands, and cabinets are a good chunk of that cost. I found a set of cabinets for what I thought was a good price: $1500. Corner cabinets. Nice oak faces and doors, a huge upgrade from the painted plywood of the old cabinets. I figured I’d pick them up cheap, swap them out quick and dirty, and check one more item off my list of worries.

As you may have guessed, things didn’t quite work out that way.

A friend was kind enough to do the cabinet tear out, which spared me a lot of suffering. With the cabinets gone, I could focus on the things that needed doing. That process went something like this:

  • Move the washer against the wall.
  • Wait, I need to move it to the other end of the wall so that the corner cabinets can be installed in the right place
  • Well, if I’m doing that I should move the dryer outlet so that I can stack the two
  • Ok, so I need an electrician. That’s fine, there are some weird things going on anyway, probably because of the pre-upgrade electrical system
  • I’m going to need to tear out the walls so the electrician and plumber can see what they’re doing
  • If I’m doing plumbing and electrical work, I definitely need an inspector

I called the town building inspector. He came by, looked at what I had done, and started making notes. I started to get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It turns out that the building code had been updated significantly since the apartment was last insulated. The paper-backed fibreglass insulation behind the gyprock was no longer to code, and anyway it wasn’t in great shape after decades against cold, porous concrete. If I’d just left it in place, it could have stayed as it was, but since it was coming out anyway to do the extra work, it needed to be brought up to code.

So in addition to the electrical and plumbing and gyprock and plaster and painting, I needed to upgrade the insulation. I learned several things in quick succession:

  1. A below-ground wall must have a moisture barrier. This isn’t super difficult – basically you can hang a “curtain” of weather barrier or plastic sheeting from a small wood strip – but it means you need to be careful how you install insulation. It definitely should not touch the curtain.
  2. Insulation needs to be at least R17 in Canada, and batt insulation has to be 5-6 inches thick to provide that level.
  3. Our studs weren’t even the usual 2x4s – they were 3 inches “deep”, with another 1 inch between the stud and the concrete.
  4. Batt insulation wasn’t going to work

I explored a lot of different options for resolving this issue. I could have built out much bigger studs, losing a few inches of wall space and burning weeks on work I wasn’t confident I could perform myself. I could have built a second wall in front of the first one, but that sounded even harder than the stud upgrade. Or I could do spray foam.

Spray foam is pretty well-established these days, but just in case you’re not familiar, it’s a lightweight foam that you can inject into walls and ceilings to provide a good combination of thermal, vapour, and moisture barrier. It’s far better insulation per inch than any commercial batt on the market. You can even do it yourself if you feel comfortable (I did not).

The problem with spray foam is that it’s expensive. The first quote I got for the job was $3000, which I simply couldn’t afford. I calculated the cost of the wall upgrades at $600 or so, including insulation batts. I got another quote for $1500, which was approaching the realm of possibility. Finally, I received a quote from a company just outside of town for $900 for just the two exterior walls. I decided if I was spending $600 to do it myself, I could manage $900 to have someone else do it.

With the plumbing, electrical, and spray foam done in relatively short order (one nice thing about hiring people!), I needed another inspection. The edges of the sprayed areas were a complete mess, and I didn’t have access to the wires and pipes, but I figured I could cut that bridge when I crossed it.

The inspector came in, looked over the insulation. He seemed satisfied.

On his way out, he asked me what I was planning to do with the washer drain. I explained. He noted that we weren’t going to pass inspection, because the drain pipe was too small.

Cue Yackity Sax, a panicked round of re-plumbing with 2 inch drain pipe, and finally I was ready to reinstate the dang walls.

As I mentioned, I’ve done enough wall work now to feel fairly confident in my abilities. What I haven’t done before, however, is work around plumbing and electrical fixtures. It turns out that kitchen gyprock is the Nightmare difficulty of drywalling. That goes double for the case where you have a bunch of pipes basically nailed to the outside of the wall. I spent two solid months carefully measuring, cutting, and recutting gyprock, screwing it onto the walls, adjusting for out-of-true and unusually-spaced studs, carving out holes for various fixtures, and so on.

At the end of it I had what could probably be called the Ugliest Drywall Job Ever. Usually you can largely fix that sort of issue when you’re plastering, but it turns out that I’m even worse at finished plaster work than I am at cutting drywall. Weeks dragged by as I filled, refilled, sanded, taped, refilled, filled, resanded, retaped, and generally made a mess of my kitchen. A thick layer of dropped drywall mud built up on the floor along the walls. Knobby runs of mud undulated along the corners. Thick berms grew around those damnable pipes.

Finally, I managed to hide the worst of my sins. I’d bought the cabinets in spring, and by now it was getting late into the fall. Time to put the bloody things in.

Cabinet installs are hard, I’ve learned. There are a lot of different reasons for that – getting perfectly level in two dimensions is a genuinely hard problem, for one, and also if you’re not working in the room for which your particular cabinet layout was designed you may find that you run into quite a lot of difficulty trying to find mounting points. I know I did. Those weirdly-spaced studs and my weirdly-sized cabinets seem almost preternaturally adept at frustrating my efforts to secure the cupboards to the wall.

And let’s not even talk about the new oven, stovetop, in-counter cutting board, sink, and range hood. The less said about those, the better.

It’s taken too long, and my $1500 cabinet jobbie is pushing $10,000. Plus Winter has come in the interim, so everything is slower because I have to shovel and I got a lovely little case of winteritis in the bargain. But! I’m close to completion of the work today.

And, of course, I’ve learned my lesson.

Epilogue

There’s nothing less reliable than your own ignorant estimates when it comes to renovations. Costs grow so fast it’s impossible to keep track. The work required expands well past the point of filling the time available. The only way to win is to not play.

I do feel like I’ve finally learned my lesson regarding home improvement. I shouldn’t have taken on these jobs. Far better to save some money and hire someone to do it faster and better. I’m resolved not to make the same mistake again.

At least, that is, until the next time.