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.
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| 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. |
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| Left: The wall that separated the dining room and the kitchen. Right: The gray wall in the dining room. |
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| 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. |
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| 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 20th. 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
