Home Improvement

Have been working in the house almost every evening after work since last week. Very tiring, seriously. After 8 hours of work and still have to fix the house until like 9pm and then go home and sleep and get up in the morning to go to work again the next day. Good exercise but exhausting.

So far, I got the front porch all cleaned up with a lot and a lot of scrubbing. Next thing to do for it is to paint a protective layer to it so that it won't get so dirty and to protect the wood to make it last longer. However, it has been raining all week and painting can only be done when the wood is totally dry. Argh! What a bummer. Probably have to clean again before I can paint it when the weather gets nicer.

JJ has cleaned up the backyard a lot. The backyard has NOT be taken care of at all in years. The weeds are as high as my waist. It's probably too late this year to try to rescue it but we will try to partially remediate it so that we can start to grow something next year.

Another thing was to improve the kitchen floor. The kitchen is very dated and hasn't been having much upgrades. Considering that it is a rather old house, this means that the cupboards are very ugly and dirty and we just got a plumber to fix the drainage last week cos the sink was leaking. The kitchen floor is ok but some of the tiles on the floor are loose and cracked. The original plan was to replace those few tiles for now cos it was actually not too bad. Doesn't look good but it's functional so we thought that we would just leave it. But of course, we couldn't find a matching tile and apparently, whoever did the tiles before used wall tiles on the floor and that's y there were so many cracked ones.

And we happened to find some laminated floor on sale so we decided that we would rip up the floor and put in the new floor ourselves. And the mission started. Once we actually start ripping up the floor, we realized that whoever did the floor put a wire mash underneath the tiles and 'glue' the tiles to the mash with something like quick sand or something. This means that we have to rip up this quick sand thing and the wire up also. The wire was really sharp and we were all cut up. And then we found that whoever did the tile floor was lazy and only put the new stuff on top of an old flooring. So there's another layer of linoleum flooring which we had to rip up. AND THEN we found that there YET ANOTHER layer underneath the linoleum. This time it was vinyl tiles. And the vinyl tiles has nails all over them. So basically, we have to rip up the tiles, the wire with the quick sand thing, linoleum, nails and vinyl tiles. Took us a lot of hard work and sweat and time and muscles to do it ourselves.

We've learned that flooring is very hard on your back cos you pretty much hv to bent over all the time. Normally, ppl would pay someone else to do this back-breaking work but since we are very broke right now and we still haven't got a window guy to fix our windows yet, we had to do it ourselves.

The ripping finally finished yesterday and we started to put down the new laminated floor. Thanks to JJ's frd who has quite an extensive workshop in his garage and lent us a lot of his tools. Otherwise, we won't be able to finished ripping the floor so soon and will have to buy the tool to cut the planks. We have put 1/3 of the new floor down already and are hoping that we will finish today (1:30pm right now and still haven't started yet cos JJ has to go to work). Although the color of the floor totally doesn't match the stupid ugly orange wall, we are still very very happy about our 1/3 new kitchen floor already. We are quite proud of ourselves!! :D

I definitely learned quite a bit from this little project. For instance, I've never used a crowbar in my life before. And there's also this other tool called bear claw nail puller that is used to remove nails. Very neat indeed. Not the fastest tools to use to pull out easy nail but it's very effective on those ones that are pretty much impossible to pull with a crowbar. And there's the jig saw, scroll saw and all those. Quite fun actually.

But then at the same time, it's so much work that I doubt that I can handle it in 5 years. I'll probably break my back for real if I try to do it again 5 years from now. Hopefully, I'll have enough money by then to have someone else to do the labour.

Maybe I'll post some before and after pictures when I got time to download them onto my computer.