The House Chronicles
Aug. 9th, 2016 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIn writing about goings-on last night, I forgot to write about our newest handyman. K. found him on Yelp! and then stayed home on Saturday while he worked. We are now another $700 poorer (which seems to be the standard cost for getting anything done lately), but hopefully several problems lighter.
We now have two working bathrooms again. Hopefully. The handyman resealed the whole tub and the troublesome wall in our downstairs bathroom. This was to resolve leaking under the house, and we hope it did. I say hopefully because we'll need to monitor that area for more leakage, since we were never able to definitively spot the origin.
The ultimate culprit here was probably our old contractor T., who renovated that bathroom for us. Ironically, it's when we decided to stop working with him, after he electrocuted the bathtub and then told us we had bad electricity.
We now have a working front door. Hopefully. Our house constantly settles back and forth, but the front door has been particularly troublesome, with the dead bolt first going awry, then the whole door getting so it wouldn't shut unless you carefully popped it upward. I have no idea what the handyman did, but it now closes and latches again.
The ultimate culprit here was probably our old contractor T., who used cardboard to pad out the hinges on the door. And cardboard contracts, causing the door to settle much more than the house. And I say "hopefully" here, because that cardboard is still there, so I'm not convinced that the problem won't recur in 2-8 months.
We now have a patched foyer door. There's always been a big crack in our foyer door. Our handyman patched it up and sanded it down, but the whole thing needs to be painted (or at least the center panel does).
We now have shelves over our laundry. We used to have shelves over our laundry before we ripped them out to reinstall a window there (replacing a bigger window which had been knocked out and built over some decades ago). Since, we've been storing laundry detergent under our microwave. But now we can keep them right by our washing machine, and not have them get nuked.
So at this point I think we aren't needing anyone else to deal with any of our house problems — though I still need to resand parts of the deck and refinish the floor; paint some or all of that entryway door; and cut down acacias with our neighbor.
We now have two working bathrooms again. Hopefully. The handyman resealed the whole tub and the troublesome wall in our downstairs bathroom. This was to resolve leaking under the house, and we hope it did. I say hopefully because we'll need to monitor that area for more leakage, since we were never able to definitively spot the origin.
The ultimate culprit here was probably our old contractor T., who renovated that bathroom for us. Ironically, it's when we decided to stop working with him, after he electrocuted the bathtub and then told us we had bad electricity.
We now have a working front door. Hopefully. Our house constantly settles back and forth, but the front door has been particularly troublesome, with the dead bolt first going awry, then the whole door getting so it wouldn't shut unless you carefully popped it upward. I have no idea what the handyman did, but it now closes and latches again.
The ultimate culprit here was probably our old contractor T., who used cardboard to pad out the hinges on the door. And cardboard contracts, causing the door to settle much more than the house. And I say "hopefully" here, because that cardboard is still there, so I'm not convinced that the problem won't recur in 2-8 months.
We now have a patched foyer door. There's always been a big crack in our foyer door. Our handyman patched it up and sanded it down, but the whole thing needs to be painted (or at least the center panel does).
We now have shelves over our laundry. We used to have shelves over our laundry before we ripped them out to reinstall a window there (replacing a bigger window which had been knocked out and built over some decades ago). Since, we've been storing laundry detergent under our microwave. But now we can keep them right by our washing machine, and not have them get nuked.
So at this point I think we aren't needing anyone else to deal with any of our house problems — though I still need to resand parts of the deck and refinish the floor; paint some or all of that entryway door; and cut down acacias with our neighbor.