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| May 2004: Scope Creep, or How I Got From Re-Hanging Two Doors to Ripping Three Rooms Completely Apart |
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 It's
just silly to plan anything. That's my new mantra. It all
started with the innocent task of taking down paneling. The big
plan for this spring was to restore the second floor sun porch and the
french doors, and if the budget stretched that far, to paint that room
and the ones leading to and from it. How I got from there to
completely ripping out the first floor floors, rebuilding the living
room and replacing the godawful front entry door as well is a classic
Old House lesson in Scope Creep. I'd
been on the prowl for some time for a reliable GC with an eye towards
finding somebody to work with in the next year or so on Nuking The Kitchen.
Good contractors in this part of New Jersey are like gold, and tend to
charge accordingly. I've had reasonably good luck as I do my
homework and supervise like a pit bull, but at some point, you really
have to take a giant leap of faith. My leap of faith was going to
be the second floor sun porch.In getting estimates for the work, I rapidly found that I had underbudgeted by several thousand dollars (what else is new?), but the estimate that I was happiest with in terms of material recommendations and attention to detail led me to the conclusion that if I wanted the room done right, it was time to make the rounds of my local financial insitutions in search of funding. I was not going to live in a pepto pink master bedroom for another year, and I darn well was not going to get that room painted until I could do all three connected rooms.  Home Equity Line Of Credit firmly in place, I signed on the dotted line and went on to taking down more paneling.  The second floor sleeping porch turned out spectacularly. But once I discovered the Fireplace Mutilation commited in the name of paneling everything in sight, we had to adjust the project spec a bit: the first floor doorways couldn't be simply re-trimmed for the restored french doors
until the fireplace is fixed. But fixing the fireplace requires
that a new mantel be built, and since the legs of the new mantel will
sit on the floor to either side of the fireplace surround, the living
room floor has to be dealt with first... And, of course, either
repairing or replacing the living room floor has to include the first
floor sunroom (where I spent the better part of a year hand-scraping icky old linoleum),
and the dining room. At that point, the baseboards in the living
room have to be dealt with - can't hide them with strategically-placed
furniture anymore... And while we're at it - hey, might as well
go ahead and replace the front entry door - that hideous, warped thing
that has plastic for lites. The
decision on the floors was that there just wasn't enough life in them
to make it worth a sand and refinish, so I bit the bullet and agreed to
rip out the old floors and have new oak being laid in all three
rooms. As of this morning, the floor guy has just about convinced
me that since I'm going to be moving out for a week or so to have the
first floor done, I might as well suck it up and have him do the
staircase and the second floor as well. Those are pine and have
taken a beating over the years, but they should come back nicely with a
good sand & finish.The very good news in all of this has been finding a reliable GC who does great carpentry and doesn't think I'm crazy. He's also hooked me up with a new painter as I'm less than thrilled with the ones I hired for the three rooms upstairs. The total budget for this year has now been exceeded about threefold, but I take comfort in the thought that once this is done, I'm pretty much left with the kitchen and bathrooms.  One of the hardest things about redoing an entire house while living in it is trying to break the work up into manageable defined pieces that keep the chaos as localized as possible. Trying to keep this now-expanded project (if you can even call it anything so trivial) under control is about to push me over the edge. It will be spectacular once it's finished, but in the meantime, I'm camping out in my bedroom, my office is the repository for the complete contents of two closets, all the first-floor radiators are living in the kitchen and the entire contents of my first floor are relegated to the garage. Turns out that replacing that roof last year really did work to my advantage! |
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This page last updated on May 22, 2004. © 2004 PGE, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. |