House Reno

Again.

This time is the 2nd floor.

Hired someone to do it this time cos we can’t do it ourselves this time – need to level the subfloor.  There are a few little things that need fixing as well.

Trying to get this done before the arrival of #2.  Took this chance to do it since 小J needs to switch room anyway.

My mom is not impressed by the fact that we are doing reno while #2 is still brewing. Pure superstitious-ness. She said that we should wait till #2 is out. But honestly, that causes more practical problem. We kinda had that happen when 小J was out when we decided that we need to change the main floor flooring before 小J became mobile and hurt himself over the popped nails. I ended up turning into 遊牧民族, taking 小J out of the house everyday to avoid the dust and noise, while 小J needs to nap somewhere in the library and places like that. And because we were out, 變相小J瞓時我都無得瞓. 攰爆.

We would like to get it done end of summer but unfortunately, the contractor delayed the start date a few times and it’s finally getting started this week. If we didn’t ask again and again abt the possibility of getting it done in September, the contractor was going to do it in the beginning of Oct… Was a bit annoyed by how he drags on and on over the start date.

In the rush to clear up the 2nd floor, it was a good time to toss some useless stuff away. One of the stuff that got into the ‘give away’ box is a digital photo frame that I gave 詹占 as an xmas present one year… It was something that got looked at every time we went to stores like Future Shop and stuff. So I bought one. But then we have only used it less than 5 times all these years. Most of the time, it sits in its original box. 詹占毫不留情的說要 get rid of it. I wonder if he rmbs how the frame came into existence. Oh well… it indeed is useless to us tho so it’s good that someone is 狠心 ar.

Sleeping in the basement these days, with 小J sleeping down there, too. It’s kinda fun. Almost feel like we are in a hotel. Heh.

Hopefully, the reno will be done on time. We still need to move everything back up (poor 詹占 had to do all the heavy lifting all by himself, with the ‘help’ of 小J) and to buy 小J a new bunk.

And hopefully, our new floor will not be squeaky no more, which will help to sleep train #2. Fingers crossed.

爆牆

屋企的地板舊到死咗，d釘成日都突出黎勾腳跟，都不知幾多對襪就係咁死咗。一直都想換，但就一直因為無錢既原因一直拖，但依家唔可以再拖，因為一旦小J變得 mobile, d釘就會由 annoying 變成危險。

但換地板，牽涉到好多嘢，其中一樣就係屋門口既走廊都廳中間嗰幅牆，we had to hire someone to get rid of it. We couldn't do it ourselves cos we don't know if it's a supporting wall or not. Since we were hiring contractor, we got him to get rid of the mantle piece for us as well. The fireplace is non-functional and it's taking up precious space of our living room.

又一破財事件。都仲未計買地板既 cost, 遲d仲窮。

Altho this is costing us too much at the moment, we are very pleased with the result. Now that our living room felt a lot bigger (I know, it's still very small compare to the new houses but we are happy with it). There's finally enough space to set up a little play area for 小J downstairs (we have been using the 'office' room as play area before).

The problem is: 塵土飛揚，everywhere. 成屋 all the surfaces were covered in dust. We have been trying to clean up for almost a week already and still, dusty dusty dusty. Not so good to have 小J breathing in all these dust.

Here're the pictures.

Before

 After (Sorry all the crap has been in place b4 I remembered to take a picture)

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.