How we have spent our summer so far……………

Sara and I had a wonderful winter spending the month of January in Southern California in the San Diego area. We visited Mexico, spent two weeks in the LA area, and circled the Salton Sea. Then we moved on to Arizona and Nevada. February included visits to Death Valley, Lake Havasu, Quartzite, Phoenix, Tucson, the Green Valley and Tombstone. Finally in March found us at White Sands New Mexico, then Carlsbad Caverns, Albuquerque and Sante Fe.

We arrived home from our winter trip the first week of April this year. Sara would have put the house up for sale and keep on traveling but reality soon set in and we started doing the taxes, pruning trees and cleaning the RV.

We did however ask a realtor to take a look at the house and give us some suggestions on how to make the house more saleable. The house is over 27 years old and in need of remodeling. The realtor suggested a new front and side door and new patio door. Also it was suggested that we put the majority of our resources in the kitchen and the bathrooms. Or we could just put the house one the market as is but expect to take a hit on the price we could get. The realtor suggested that if we could do the work ourselves and save the labor cost we could recover our investment easily.

So we set a budget for materials and were off to Home Depot, Menards and Lowe’s. A new front door, side door, back patio door, kitchen cabinets, kitchen sink,
two banks of track lighting, three new bathroom vanities, a new whirlpool tub, two new commodes, 97 yards of carpeting, 18 gallons of paint, ceramic tiles and several tools we will never use again later, we were on our way.

We decide to remove a wall between the kitchen and the family room to open up the area. Calling our builder to find out if it was safe to remove the wall (we have a two story house), he suggested that we “stretch a line between each end of the wall and when you knock out the last upright if the ceiling sinks below the line, you shouldn’t have taken out the wall!!!!”

It was at that point we learned what a “Lamibeam” is and purchased a 14 footer to keep the second story where it was. We hired a guy a local bar to help lift the 175 lbs beam in place.

Then it was on to the “Wall from Hell”. The hall wall was covered with vinyl wall paper with six times too much glue underneath. After removing the wall paper the glue was so rough, we had to rent a wall sander to remove the glue. Only the sander would melt the glue before it removed it and plug up. Scrapers would pull off the glue AND the drywall. After 3 days of frustration, we purchased 10 gallons of drywall mud and covered the whole thing to make a stucco like surface in three foot sections at a time. It only took two more days before painting.

The drywalling required three coats of mud with sanding in between. Each sanding would produce clouds of fine white dust which would float through the rest of the house……………..At one point Sara left to live with our oldest daughter Amy in Madison but after a lot of begging returned to help finish the project.

Most days we would work about 8-10 hours with a few 13 hour marathons. We kept track of our hours and at 92 days we had somewhere between 650-700 hours into it. At the going local rate of $40-$60 an hour we have well over $28,000 in “sweat equity” into the project. We hope the realtor was right.

We wish to thank our good friend Gary Graper; without his technical support this project would have never been possible. Also we wish to thank Van Valaskey for his advice and the use of his diamond tile saw. We thank Mike Henderson in LaCrosse for his advice on installing the kitchen cabinets.

BUT MOST OF ALL, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY LOVELY WIFE SARA, WHO FOR THREE MONTHS ENDURED NO SINK, CLOUD OF DRYWALL DUST, MANY NIGHTS OF SWEARING (@#$%^*&!@#!!!!). SARA CLEANED UP EVERY NIGHT AND HAD FAITH IN THE FACT THAT SOMEDAY THIS ALL WOULD BE OVER........WELL EXCEPT FOR THE TIME SHE LEFT ME OUT OF TOTAL FRUSTRATION...............

And that is what we have done with our summer so far

Now it is done and Don bought a fly rod and swimming goggles. He has gone fishing and swims three days a week.

Sara says “we will never remodel again” and but the house is a lot easier to clean.

And we are enjoying the new digs so much that we probably aren’t going to sell out for awhile but enjoy the fruits of our labor.

By the way, Don works so slow that nobody could afford to hire him out.

And that is how we have spent our summer so far…………