FYI: Remodeling sucks

Little or nothing to do with distillation.

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Single Malt Yinzer
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FYI: Remodeling sucks

Post by Single Malt Yinzer »

I've been remodeling a commercial space for the last month or so. Work day job, then 2-3 nights a week go to storefront and work til 11, then one or two weekend days spend 8-10 hours there. I've managed to save the tin ceiling. Worked with an electrician and got all new lighting in, tore down old bead board and cleaned up the front windows. I am getting ready to do drywall now and paint around Christmas. Hopefully done by New Year's.

This being Pgh there was a 1/2" of coal dust on top of each of the tin ceiling tiles. Of the 20 or so I took down only 1 didn't dump all the dust in my face. I looked like a characture of a 1800's coal miner.

What's your best remodeling story???
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raketemensch
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Re: FYI: Remodeling sucks

Post by raketemensch »

At least you’re not living in the Space you’re remodeling...

We bought a 1910 multi-family, and moved into the upstairs apartment. We used the downstairs kitchen while completely gutting our own, ripping out every inch of plaster and lath, plumbing, electrical, a whole wall... Then we repeated that with the bathroom.

My favorite moment was taking out the lath in the bathroom ceiling and having probably 5 pounds of old cat litter come through onto my head.

I’ve never worked so hard in my life, but now it’s 13 years later and it’s still paying off. We were able to hang onto that building and move to another, and still collect rent.

I wish people had told me when I was growing up that landlording is generally the easiest money there is.
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Still Life
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Re: FYI: Remodeling sucks

Post by Still Life »

Helping my pop renovate an abandoned hippie house.
Piles of hypodermic needles under the clawfoot bathtub.
This was pre-AIDS, but still a contention.
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cranky
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Re: FYI: Remodeling sucks

Post by cranky »

My wife and I once bought a house in Kansas that predated the town it was in. We could date the second addition to 1872. The original 2 room house still had a flint stacked stone foundation and was very solid, the rest of the house was nothing but a series of poorly executed messes. It was 5 bedrooms when we bought it with no dinning room. 3 days after moving in a storm cam through and carried half the roof off to Oz, my wife woke me up in the middle of the night screaming about it raining in the kitchen. I took one look at the water pouring down around the ceiling light, that had a short and couldn't be turned off, and turned around to go back to bed. My wife screamed "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!" I told her "going back to bed" but she didn't like that answer and screamed at me to "DO SOMETHING!!!" So I found a big sheet of plastic and stapled it around the perimeter of the kitchen ceiling, letting it sag in the middle to form a funnel down to the sink, then went back to bed. In the morning I set to work stripping off what was left of the back half of the roof.

The back half of the house was the 4th or 5th addition and had a "flat" roof. It wasn't really flat it was more concave due to being more than 50 years old and consisting of 16ft long rafters made from actual 2x4s with nothing supporting them in the middle, 1x12 sheathing on top of the 2x4s, then 3 ft long sections of stove pipe flattened, crimped together and nailed down, followed by years and years of tar about 8 inches thick, followed by a layer of rolled roofing, more tar, more roofing, more tar and finally a tarp held down by 1x2s. I knew about the tarp when we bought the place and the previous owner was very proud of it.

It took about 2 weeks to get that mess off there and rebuild the back half of the roof to the point of being ready to shingle, then I had to go back to work. While I was at work my wife called a roofer who immediately set to work ripping the front half of the roof off, which consisted of 4 or 5 layers of shakes and another 4 layers of shingles on top of black walnut boards that ranged from 6" wide to 18" wide. When they finally got to the point of nailing shingles down I came home one day and would hear the nail gun fire followed by cursing, then fire again and more cursing. I asked if something was the matter and was informed that the 130+ year old black walnut was turning the nails and spitting them right back at them when they tried to fire them into it :lol:

Eventually the roof was finished and we set to work completely rebuilding that house which had just about everything wrong with it a house can, bad plumbing, rotten floors and wiring that was a miracle hadn't burned the house down years before. The previous owner somehow came up with short scraps of Romex that he connected to existing bare and deteriorated wires by twisting them together, wrapping electrical tape around them and then sealing them into the wall that way. I would open up a wall and there was a 3 ft section of rotten bare wire, spliced to a 3 ft section of Romex, spliced to another 3 ft section of antique wire, then another section of Romex all held together with nothing but electrical tape.

8 years later we finally finished that house, living in it the whole time while rebuilding it, then I got a job near Detroit so we had to sell it and move :(
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fizzix
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Re: FYI: Remodeling sucks

Post by fizzix »

My story's nothing like blown off roofs and going back to bed! That's hilarious.
But the electrical reminds me of the previous owner who couldn't be bothered hooking up the ground wire to the new basement outlets when "remodeling."
He ran romex with ground alright and had the right outlets, but just cut off the bare ground without hooking up. That was a pain to remedy. WTF??!!
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