Paulette

Sure it’s cold outside but why do I feel chilly inside? The addition to the house is built on a cement slab. We installed in-floor heating to take away that basement cold floor effect. It works wonderfully when it isn’t broken. You have that warm fuzzy feeling as heat radiates from the floor up through the room. You feel chilly when it doesn’t.

We called in the repair guys. Our expansion tank (in red) is leaking. They pointed out several things wrong with the initial installation. This was done by a professional who our contractors claimed was the best. I guess he had a bad day.

1) The expansion tank (water!!) should not be near the electronics.

2) There are no shutoff valves. It would be much easier to replace the tank if they could simply turn off the water.

3) There is no pressure gauge so we have no idea whether the system is operating properly or not.

4) The pink box needs to be rotated 90 degrees. We found the instruction manual given to us when it was installed (Dave keeps everything). It specifically states to NOT mount it as it has been done in our case. It even has a picture of what NOT to do with a big red X through it.

The price to fix it seems high. Dave is contemplating doing it himself with the help of my Dad. It might be worth the $$$ to get it fixed sooner rather than later. There’s also the hardwood floor to be installed. Add to the list the fact that it’s snowing like crazy.

I think skiing will win out this weekend over heating & flooring. Besides, it’s not our only source of heat and we’ve been walking around the extra wood planks all week without injury. Snow on the other hand, is here today and gone next week (are they really calling for rain again?).

Our house has hardword floors.  Yellow birch mill run floors to be exact.  Our last big project is to redo the kitchen.  Now that we have an open concept we want to extend the hardwood.

We had quite a few bundles of leftover flooring.  We spread it out over the living room and realized we were about 20 sq. ft. short.

The good thing about real hardwood floors is that even 54 years later you can buy new wood that will match.

Once it is in place and the whole floor is sanded and refinished, it will all look new again.

We have laminate wood over our heated cement slab.  It’s only a few years old and already we cannot match it if we need to.  Good thing we aren’t renovating those rooms again!

We bought a cool HD plasma TV about one and half years ago. We mounted it on the wall. It looks great. All we needed was a credenza to store our DVD player, PVR (I love that thing) and the Wii.

I have been looking for the perfect credenza since we purchased the TV. Brian recently found this one on-line.

We went to the store to check it out. Dave and I both like the colour, width, 3 drawer, 3 shelf configuration and we decided to buy it. I’m always thinking how things could be better and this day was no different.

Me: “It would be perfect if only it had legs. If I buy legs can you install them?”.

Dave: “Legs?”

Me: “Yes it’s a little low to the floor. It needs a little height.”

Dave: “Sure, piece of cake, it will only take a few minutes”.

If you look closely you’ll see that it was not a few minutes kind of job. Once we got the unit home and flipped it over there wasn’t anything to attach legs to. So Dave made some wooden blocks and glued/screwed them in place.

Here it is with 8 legs. As always Dave did a magnificent job. I think it balances out the drawer pulls nicely and gives it just the right height.

Why didn’t we just buy one with legs? I couldn’t find one. We now have a unique credenza. I’m sure Dave wishes I would stop trying to make things better!

OK time to do the other half of the patio. We can’t put it off any longer. Oh my gosh the driveway is filled again.

This half of the patio is a little more challenging. We have the curve of the cement surrounding the steps of the pool to contend with. We are also adding a circular step down and a little extension sitting area outside our bedroom french doors.

The curves are not as bad as I thought they would be. One trick is to make sure the gaps are even all around. It gives the illusion that the stone is actually curved when it isn’t. Another tip is to rent good equipment. We found the wet saw worked as though it was cutting through butter.

So was it worth it to put in a patio ourselves? We saved over $10,000.00. We got a really good workout. We also ended up with exactly what we wanted. Perfect!

Our pool pump has been exposed to the elements since we installed the pool in 1991.  That’s 13 years in the sun, snow, wind & rain.  It still works.

Now that we have a nice base to put it on we decided to give it a home.  We like to refer to it as The Dog House.  Not that we own a dog or that anyone has ever been sent out to it but the threat is there…

I’m not sure why we had yellow Caution tape but it worked great to map out the dimensions we needed to store all our gear in winter and have room in summer to change in.

We looked at buying a kit but found they weren’t as sturdy as we wanted.  They tended to use 1 X 3 instead of 2 X 4 so we made our own plan.  I designed it and Dave built it.

I decided to stain the boards before it was completely assembled.  It gave better coverage and I hoped it would help preserve the wood.  Luckily we could match the stain used on the fence.

That’s a pretty nice dog house.

After many years living with an old deck and bumpy back yard we finally decided to put in a patio. We had contractors come and quote us for the work. We needed a small retaining wall along the fence and another one at the other end of the pool. Quotes were over $20,000.00.

When we hear numbers like that we start pricing it out. If we did the work ourselves we could do it for half that price. How hard could it be? We decided to do 1/2 this year and 1/2 next year.

Here is the before:

When the materials arrived I was overwhelmed. I felt sure we had ordered far too much. Oh well, maybe we are doing the whole patio this year.

We recruited the kids to help. Here we are dismantling the old deck. It didn’t take much to knock it down. It was rotting away.

Next came the big dig. We had a dumpster and filled it with earth or whatever that was we dug up.

We spent every evening and a few weekends getting this 1/2 of the patio done. Yes we did use up all the materials in the driveway. That means we need that much again next year.

Oh my gosh I have to do all this again.

Dave is pretty good at plumbing. Every once in a while we let the “pros” do it. The shower controls needed to be installed. Rather than open up both walls they decided to do it all from the back.

After they left we tested out the pipes. They leaked. By now the ceramic tile is up on the other side. Do we let them come back and try to fix it?

Dave went for it. He couldn’t remove it all and didn’t have room to manoeuvre so we ended up with what we call “Plumbing Art”.

Good thing this beautiful precious art work is hidden inside the wall.

I wouldn’t want someone to steal it from us.