POWER TOOLS!!!

From the start I was working with a small budget for purchasing a house. While the market had gone down significantly it was not finished. This meant that I was looking at lower costing and for the most part older houses. Therefore I expected to have to do improvements. In fact, I actually hoped to have to do improvements. I wanted a place to make my own and what better way than to actually get in there are change it up with my own two hands?! Yep, my own two little hands!

When I told people of all the things I wanted to do to the house I usually ended up with a conversation that went something like this:

"...and then I'm gonna tear down a wall and I'm gonna take out kitchen cabinets and I'm gonna remodel my entire back bathroom and I'm gonna replace the back door and paint the entire house inside and out and install carpet..." [note: very fast, very excitedly speaking]
"Wait, who is doing the work?" [note: very skeptical]
"ME!" [note: even more excited]
"You mean you are going to make the phone calls and write the checks to pay the person that does the work." [note: tone of voice I very much dislike!]
"Nope! I mean ME, I am going to do the work." [note: believe-it-buddy attitude]

You get the point I am sure, but this usually lead to many reasons given to me as to why I cannot do it on my own. Of course I would not do it on my own, I would have help, but I wanted to have a hand in it as well! I wanted to use POWER TOOLS!!!!

To boot, Christmas of 2008 shortly after I bought the house Dad sent me my very own POWER TOOLS!!! They are awesome!! A Skil brand circular saw, a reciprocating saw, an electric drill, an awesome heavy duty flash light, battery pack and charger and even a carrying bag for them! And to boot, they are pretty red!

I love my POWER TOOLS!!!

An open door...part 2

old door handle

Sunday after church and after an excellent lunch at Texas Roadhouse (thanks Mom and Dwight!!)  Dan, Kaylee and I went to Lowe's for the necessary trimmings needed to finish my door. We ended up spending a long time in the store thanks to my indecisiveness and love for browsing their aisles. But in the end I found the trimming I wanted and even priced out the materials I would need for another project coming soon to my house!!

tools!

Due to the uneven lines of the house where the door has been placed; the gap between the house and the door frame is uneven all around. In some areas it is a small barely noticeable gap and in others it is about an inch. The trimming I chose is about 1 and 1/2 inches to ensure complete coverage of the gaps and to overlap the door frame a bit as well. It was $5.90 for 1 10 foot long strip. I also needed spray foam to fill the gaps from the outside of the house. After the spray foam is set a vinyl casing bead (vinyl strip with holes down it) will be places on the outside of the house and stuccoed over to repair the damage done by widening the hole. And to finish I needed a silicone caulking to line the outside bottom part of the door for airtight and weather resistance. The total for all of this was $54.43. And I am hoping to not use one container of stucco and hopefully be able to return it and recoup the $6.96. Every penny counts when you're working on a budget!

new and improved handle

Kaylee is 10 and thus very easily bored when it comes to the "boring adult things" as she has referred to them. But she was great! She entertained herself and us multiple times when she used her young imagination to invent something we could make with whatever was down the aisle we were on at that time. We had a pretty good time all in all. And hey, when you spend about 2 and 1/2 hours in a home improvement store that's asking a lot!

Dan was able to borrow a miter saw from Dave and we're ready to add the trimming.

An open door

It was installation weekend at the Christy-house!

old door

The sliding back door that my house had was the original from the 1973 construction. I suppose it may have been a mighty little door in it's day, but it now is a tired, over worked, rusty, ugly, energy-wasting, bug-lettin'-in, loud, hard-to-open, nuisance of a thing. And with the big dog I have and the little one my roommate has, it gets used many times throughout the day. It's only gotten worse throughout the course of time living in the house. In fact it had gotten to the point that about once a month I would inevitably get stuck outside unable to pry it open. The solution was to simply lift it off the casters, let myself into my house and realign the entire thing. (glad a burglar didn't realize this simple little trick!) It was time for a new door!!

So, the budgeting, bargaining hunting and pricing of doors began. At minimum I found I might be able to spend $400 but the prices went up from there. I did what I do...saved and kept my eyes open for deals. And I guess it's a good thing I've got big eyes; as the shopaholic wolf might say, "better to see the good deals with, my dear."

After work one day I went to Lowe's just for the fun of it (and yes, I really do find it FUN to walk around the home improvement warehouse stores!) and came upon a nice sliding glass door just like what I would need with an impossibly low price. So of course, as is human nature I assumed there was something wrong with it and asked a store associate as much. To my delight the only thing wrong was a missing screen door! I didn't even want a screen in the first place for surely, if my dog didn't go busting through it, I would. After measurements and phone calls I bought the door and the Lowe's employee even threw in $25 shipping (usually $79) my grand total was $224!

[Money saving tip: While of course everyone knows it's smartest to shop around and compare prices; another idea is to look for the things you need before you actually need them. What I mean is if you're planning a project, keep a list of things with you and when you're out and about take a few extra steps down the aisles housing those items. You may be surprised to find a great sale you may have otherwise missed if you waited until you began your project to look.]

Mom and Dwight came from Tallahassee and on Saturday (10.23.2010) morning they came to my house as well as Dan and the kids. Mom loves being Abuela (grandma) to the kids so she gladly took the job of entertaining them while me and the men folk got to work.

We take to heart the saying, "measure twice and cut once" with all the cutting and measuring we've done to this house. And I've yet to have a project be completed without some sort of complications. So first things first, we measured. Thanks to Dwight's construction savvy and skills, I know he'll get it done right and that he knows what to do; so I usually just do what he tells me to. He has been dubbed my personal contractor! (And don't tell Dan I told you, but I've often called him my worker bee.) But he always lets me get in there and do all I can to work on my house myself!

It really wasn't too difficult to take the old frame out (ask the boys, they might have a different thought on that) with a power drill to take out the old screws and a crow bar to pull the frame away from the house it came out and we were ready to put the new one in. And that is where the problems arose. The new door frame was a bit bigger than the hole it was being put into. And the door was made for a wood frame house, not a concrete block structure such as mine. The word "saw" was mentioned and next thing I was cutting vinyl off the side of the new door. At least until my poor little Popeye pre-spinach arms got tired, then Dan and Dwight took turns cutting.

Once that was completed, the boys lifted the door into place. (I was too paranoid to try that; I felt like I would drop the heavy thing every time!) This is where problem #2 showed itself. Even with the leveler showing my door as level, it would not fit into the gaping hole in my house. My house was crooked?? Solution? Saw off the plastic strip on the other side. But alas now the door fit on the sides, but was too tall. You guessed it! The door went under the knife again. However, this third time was not quite good enough. The top of the door was still too tall. So Dwight took chisel and hammer to the outside structure and made room.

With the door in place Dwight used the leveler time and time again to ensure that the door was completely straight and level within it's spot and shims were put in place and screwed into the door frame and wall. The process was long but fun and without Dwight's expertise it would not have happened or at least it would not have happened like it did. Because of removing the plastic stripping on the sides to make it fit in place, there is a gap all the way around the top, left and right sides of the door. Unfortunately there was no more time on Saturday to complete the trim work to close this gap, so the temporary closure was newspaper. That's right, the good ole' Central Florida Future (Go UCF Knights!!) is as we speak within the walls of my house holding my new addition in place!

The beginning

On October 28, 2008 I signed an enormous stack of boring papers legally binding me to the purchase of a house. A 1973 three bedroom, two bath shoebox shaped house in Palm Bay, Fl!

I decided in 2007 that if I moved back to Florida I would look into buying a house to see if it was even a possibility. I had been renting places for 6 years and had moved 9 times and I was tired of seeing my money thrown away never to be seen again. The idea of buying seemed a smart investment, but based on my income and savings and lack of credit, a highly unlikely one.

On one short visit home to Melbourne, I called a mortgage broker who told me that no, it wouldn't be possible for me to buy a house. He said that he would be able to approve me for so little that he believed the house I could get for that amount would be unsuitable for living in or in a neighborhood that was. So, for the moment I let it go and waited until I moved back to Florida from Virginia (moves #6-8) where I'd been living and working as a flight attendant.

However, almost immediately upon moving back (move #9) I knew I needed to pursue this buying idea a little more. So after starting my new job and next part of my life, I began making more phone calls. I was connected to a realtor that was often surprised that I wanted to see houses that were below the amount that I had been approved for and (sometimes) tried to hide her cringes as we walked into houses that were clearly below the standards of most people. So we kept looking. I knew that if I wanted to have financial peace of mind I would buy something costing less than I'd been approved for. After all, I know how I spend and save better than mister-suit-jacket-bank-executive. I also knew I wanted safe and livable.

I found a house online that looked good, very good and I called my realtor. We decided that since the price was so low it was possible there was something hugely wrong with it and that I would go to the house and take a look and if I liked what I saw she would meet me there. After feeling like a bad person for trespassing on well, no one's property and looking through the windows I gave her a call and drove around the neighborhood while waiting for her.

The purchasing process was started and before long I was signing paperwork at the bank on my lunch break. (Big things happen on my lunch breaks! I paid off my car on a lunch break too.) And oh, by the way, it cost less than the amount I was told would get me a "scary" place in 2007. God is GOOD!