Bad Blogger

So it seems that I am one of those people that starts a blog and never updates it. At least that seems to be the case so far. I had every intention of keeping it up to date, but then things got a little rushed. I had a month to do some demolition and re-configuring before I moved into the first floor apartment. I also had to pack and move in that month. To make things worse, I got sick in the last week. On top of that, my tenant for the upstairs apartment moved out a week later. 

I've done a lot of work since the last update. I'll see what I can list off the top of my head

Before, during (with smaller archway shown) and after removing front-room closet.

I removed the closet in the (currently) downstairs bedroom. This room will eventually become the living room...again. The closet had two problems. First, it wasn't very deep. It had one shelf mounted at about six feet high. When combined with the standard height door, this meant that the rest of the wall up to the ten foot tall ceiling inside the closet was not usable. Next, the swinging door took up about half the remaining width of the room when it opened.  To make things worse, it only opened halfway before getting stuck on the floor. 

Behind the drywall behind the closet, I found another hidden doorway. From what I could tell, it was actually an arched door-sized entryway built from an older, wider arched opening. This room has at least one more hidden door to the original front entry and stairway, but if I tear into that, I won't have a separate apartment from which I can make some extra money.

This wall will eventually be removed, so I patched up the whole hole with some large pieces of drywall and filled the gaps.  Since this is in a bedroom I expect it to be less than two years before the wall is removed, I passed on painting it. I plan on hanging sheer, white curtains around the new closet-like configuration to make it feel a little more closet-like and hide the extra paint colors on the wall.

I installed a dual-flush kit in my toilet. While the box claims no tools are needed, what it means is that no tools are needed for the installation. Removing the old hardware definitely needs tools. Still, it only took about an hour to install and another half an hour for adjustments. After using it a few weeks, it seems I need to adjust it more. The heavy flush works fine, but the light flush doesn't always go down all the way. When it works, however, I think it reduces the water consumption to somewhere between half and a third of what it used to use. If I can get it adjusted correctly, I may install one in the apartment upstairs.

I removed the ceiling above the first floor bathroom. I found out that something (I now know it was the shower upstairs) was leaking. A few days later I heard what sounded like a squirrel in the ceiling. I was a bit worried that a squirrel was going to jump out at me, but it luckily didn't happen. Since my tenant moved out, I took extra days in figuring out how to remove a shower drain and installing a new one. Now, I need to re-install the shower tile from the upstairs shower. Apparently there were some cracks that allowed the material underneath to get damp, causing more cracks, etc.

I examined the crawl-space. It was dirty. There were some animal remains that you don't want to hear about. The important part is that the foundation looked fairly good from what I could see. Some joists look like they need to be replaced, but I kinda knew that from the sloping floor in the front room. Another important find was an air duct that was going halfway across the crawl-space to nothing. Apparently I have been heating the crawl-space. Since this duct also ran through the access hole (you can see this hole on the left) and made it difficult to get in and out, I removed it and duct-taped the remaining duct extending from the furnace. 

I patched and painted the bedroom closet in the upstairs apartment before installing new shelving. In this 4'x6' closet with a nine foot tall ceiling, there were only two shelves totaling four feet. I decided to install two six foot wide shelves and a couple more two-foot wide shelves. It bothers me when closets have lots of head room and no cargo room.

That's all I can think of at the moment.  Hopefully I'll keep things up-to-date here.