09_Renovation Plans

Renovation Strategies

During the process of buying the house, the major problems we encountered were old roofing and plumbing system. For roofing, we contracted MND Construction to replace the old one. While for plumbing, my husband planned to fix it by himself. However, fixing the plumbing could be done when we had moved to the house; it wasn’t urgent.

Meanwhile, we would still having an apartment for temporary living until the end of August, or around 10 weeks. If we wanted to do any renovation, it would be better to do some major ones; so we didn’t have to sleep on a construction site.

We listed the renovations that we wanted to have. Naturally, it ended up as a long list, which included kitchen and bathroom remodels, master closet expansion, and back door broadening. We looked again and put priority on each renovation. We then came up with 3 priorities: first, we wanted to create an open space that connects the living room, kitchen, and the dining room. Second, since these rooms would become one big space, the floors had to be uniformed. Right now, the living room had hardwood flooring, the kitchen had tiles, and the dining room had laminate flooring. Third, likewise, we wanted uniformed walls. We wanted to replace wood paneling walls in the kitchen and dining room with dry walls similar to the living room.

The walls in our house. Left: one can see walls to the living room and dining room from the front door. Above right: the living room is enclosed with a folding door. Below right: the wall in the kitchen.

Left: The wall that separated the dining room and the kitchen. Right: The gray wall in the dining room.

Different floors in the house. Above left: hardwood flooring in the living room. Below left: laminate  flooring in the dining room. Right: tiles in the kitchen.

Different walls in the house. Left & right: wood paneling walls in the dining room (left) and kitchen (right). Centre: dry wall in the living room.

These 3 renovations would create a lot of mess e.g. dust and debris everywhere. We had to take advantage of the time before our furniture from Germany comes on July 20^th. This meant we had only less than 5 weeks to do it with all the resources that we had.

Manpower Resources

The first thing we considered when we planned for the renovations was manpower. Obviously, between me and my husband, it was him who had more knowledge on home renovations. Not only he knew, he could also do. In an alternate universe, he might be a construction worker or a carpenter. Of all the 3 tasks, the hardwood-flooring installment was my husband’s specialty; so he would do it completely. For installing dry walls, my husband could do it be he didn’t enjoy such kind of work; so to cut down our renovation expenses, he would install the dry walls but not the finishing works. We would hire a professional to do the finishing. While for opening the space, this was mainly a demolition work; it didn’t need much skill to do so. This meant, I could help; beside, I was good in destroying things. Thus, our early renovation plans were determined.

Anyway, the 3 renovations were also planned according to my husband’s time. He could use the lunchtime for 1.5 hours and after working hours he would pick me up for working at the house for 5 – 6 hours. In practice, we ended up coming back to our apartment at around 11PM and went to bed around midnight everyday. Our ‘rest’ time was on Sunday night where we would be home by 9PM to watch Fear the Walking Dead.

The distance between our apartment, house, and my husband's office.

Tasks Distribution

As mentioned earlier, my husband would work on the skillful tasks such as measuring, cutting, installing, etc. I had no experience on construction working at all, so I got to help on laborious tasks. These tasks were varied, from simple to tiring ones. An example of the simple tasks was holding a long piece of lumber on one end while my husband sawing the other end, or holding a sheet of drywall to the wall while my husband put screws on it. A sheet of dry wall sizes 4 x 8ft, or 1.2 x 2.4m; I had to spread my arms, and sometimes in a weird position, to hold it. I also had to help in lifting construction materials such as dry walls, lumbers, beams, etc. Luckily, my Cross Fit training had prepared me for it. I didn’t find any difficulties in lifting heavy stuff or feeling sore allover my body every morning. Last but not least, another task that I should do was cleaning the construction site. I had to sweep and vacuum clean the dust and debris, and load them to the dumpster.

I didn’t just do the laborious tasks all the time. Along the way, I learned some new construction skills such as using various kinds of nail and screw guns, scrapping, or pulling out nails. I guess, now I am at level one of construction work.  

Financial Resources

The second consideration on doing the renovation was financial resources. We had spent more than we budgeted for buying the house. We needed to count every penny in doing the renovation. This also meant we had to limit our spending for other things such as food. So during renovation time, no more fancy fruits and salads for us; it was all cheap carbs to provide us energy for the construction works such as Mc Donalds or instant noodles.  

Instant noodles were part of our staple food during renovation.

For all the 3 renovation works, we had $10K in cash, and $8K of it would go for roofing. So with limited cash, we had to look for other financial sources without burdening us too much. Paying with credit cards was an option, but if we paid them by installments, we might end up with high interests. We browsed the big home improvement stores such as Lowes and Home Depot, and found out that they had financing support programs with 0% interest. However, such programs were varied and available only for limited times; so one had to carefully learn about the terms and conditions before applying. For example, our Lowes credit card allowed us to have 0% interest for 18 months. If we couldn’t pay off in 18 months, we had to pay the next installments with interests. However, with HomeDepot credit card, we only got 0% interest for 12 months. Again, these credit cards had different offers from time to time, so one might get 2 years of 0% interest and others might only get for 3 months.

With credit cards from Lowes and Home Depot, we secured our financial support for buying construction materials and appliances. With time span until 18 months, we should be able to stay paying the installments without interests. However, not all construction materials and appliances could be bought in those stores due to limited supplies, or sometimes, we just preferred other types or models; hence, we had to buy from different stores.   

Nonetheless, before we started buying anything for the renovation purposes, we needed a vehicle to carry whatever we bought. Our current car was a Mitsubishi Eclipse; not suitable for carrying construction materials at all. So the first priority was buying a transportation vehicle.