This old money pit

Every time I visit my family I usually feel like an alien visiting from another planet as they have 2 enthusiasms I don't share; children and home improvement. Modern science has made it easy to avoid the first but home improvement caught up with me over the past two weeks since the house painters are going to leave me bankrupt and I have a limited time to get the house ready for sale.

The only reason I bought this house instead of renting was due to my having a large dog which made it nearly impossible to rent in Cambridge and it was cheaper to buy in the long-term. Over the past few years I have tried in vain to hire contractors to do various jobs around the house and I think I have finally found the secret to getting one to return your calls; tell them you are selling your house. They hear the 'ca-ching' sound right over the telephone wire when you mention this tiny detail and call you right back. Not only do they hike up the prices on this sort of job, they don't have any long lasting accountability for the job thus making it the ideal job for maximizing profit.

Since the painters are going to take as much of my cash flow as they can I took a week off of work and have done several of my lifetimes worth of home improvement in less than a fortnight.

Painting

All of my dislike and general misanthropic tendancies are fed by the cheap and the stupid. There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, more aggravating than giving woodwork that has already been painted, a crime in its own right, a fresh coat of paint only to find the motherfuckers before you painted a single coat of water-based latex paint without primer over oil paint. To the uninitiated this seems harmless but consider what oil and water do in a container; they separate don't they? I would like to sentence these idiots to an eternity of painting a house which has walls that chip and peel since the latex paint won't ever adhere properly.

Unless you plan to die in the house you currently own, don't paint small and dark rooms deep colours. The dining room in my house was painted a deep, dark navy blue which I renamed "What in the fuck were they thinking" blue or WITFWTTB. It required 3 coats of primer followed by 2-3 coats of linen white to cover it. It's amazing how different and how much larger the room looks with lighter paint. Instead of being the light-sucking WITFWTTB hole, it exudes light and shows off the natural woodwork they had refinished and then slopped WITFWTTB on the edges. For the crime of painting dark colours in a small, dark room I sentence these people to an eternity in a dark cave while painting it with WITFWTTB.

Bathroom tile

Grout isn't waterproof. We can land on the moon but we still use grout on tile which is meant to be innundated frequently with water. Somehow this seems unfair. At some point during the 70s the bathroom was remodeled and hasn't really been touched since. A coat of latex over oil paint was about the only thing the previous owners had been able to manage.

The bathroom tile was, fortunately, mostly good but the grout was going and 6 tiles buckled from the wall a while back. I caulked the crap out of them thinking that maybe I could get a contractor in to fix them but that never happened. So I removed the nasty looking caulk, pulled off the buckled tiles and cleaned them up and restuck them to the wall. This sounds easier than it is as the margin for error is very, very small so getting them to fit perfectly where they were requires patience, patience and more patience. A putty knife and a rubber mallet help a bit too. Once the mastic is applied you have to let it cure for 24 hours. Then take a grout tool to remove the old, loose stuff and hoover the dust so the new grout will stick. Applying grout isn't rocket science but it is a refined and distilled pain in the ass. You have to work with a substance that dries quickly yet washes away with water before it sets. This means you have to use the float to apply it to the tiles and squeegee it off before it sets while being careful to not wash off the newly applied grout.

The grout then has to set for 24-48 hours and sealed with a silicone grout sealer which also has to cure for 24 hours. Do not try to hurry this process out of the need to bathe. Enjoy how rank you smell and think of how good that shower is going to feel after 5 days when the tile is ready! :)

The finishing touch is caulking around the tub and in the corners. Practice with the caulk gun before you do this as a) bath and tub caulk is some seriously sticky shit that even acetone will not remove and b) it's really hard to get a nice even bead of caulk. Keep a razor blade widget around for the inevitable need to remove bits of it once it has dried in 24 hours or so.

Painting the outside of the house

I had to go next-door to ask the neighbour if the painters could use his driveway for their ladders since one side of the house abuts his property. He agreed then started telling me in his thick Irish accent about how "that house has never held a coat of paint". I pointed out that the house had only been painted by cheap bastards without a primer over the last 30 or more years but that didn't seem to convince him that this paint job would be any different than those that came before. I had to resist the urge to smack him and hoped that I could at least feel like I was making an earnest attempt at having a quality paint job applied to the house. They've replaced a large number of the cedar shingles and are scraping every inch by hand since power sanding isn't allowed in this town. They are also going to scrape, glaze and paint the old windows too. That sucking sound you hear? That's the sound of my bank account being emptied.

What's left

While I really love my manicure of broken fingernails from the solvents and a combination of grout, caulk, white paint and primer as nail polish, I'll be thrilled to be done with the home improvement phase of moving. I'm even looking forward to going back to work.

I still have to touch up the woodwork in the sunroom since, like all the rest of the painted wood baseboards in the house, the guy who refinished the floors slopped polyurethane on most of them making them look gross. The contents of the basement need to be moved out to the garage for the moving sale extraveganza. I may paint down the stairs to the basement but, at this point, I may just say fuck it and leave something for the new owners to do when they're bored. I'm about to hire a handyman to fix one of the garage door springs, fill cracks in the foundation with hydraulic cement, replace one of the wooden steps on the side entrance and whatever else is left that needs fixing.

In conclusion I think that people who dig Bob Vila and his kind are part of an alien conspiracy, though to what end I've not yet determined. To be sure to get a ring back from a contractor just mention the magic words, "I'm Moving". I guarantee that phrase will work like a charm or your money back. Owning a home is pain in the ass, especially if you aren't Bob Vila with his workshop filled with tools and buddies who are professional contractors.

On the bright side at least I'll have something to talk about at Christmas when my sisters start yammering on about the stuff they've fixed in their homes over the past year. Hmmm, nah, I'll just get loaded on wine and talk about our new apartment/condo in downtown Helsinki with a resident handyman :)