The Good News of Home Renovations

When renovating a home, you have to be aware that there will always be unexpected twists and turns as things are uncovered and you start to bring the house up to the level it needs to be.  Most of these end up costing you money, but some end up not costing you as much as you were anticipating.

Remember the whole radon mitigation problem?  Go HERE to read more about that.  Well, this week we started in on the process to allow for better mitigation and I hired someone to start putting in french drains.  The cost was not cheap.  While I wasn't holding out much hope for there to be gravel under the foundation, I still wanted to be sure, so I had them start in an area near a spot that had to be repaired anyway in the basement.  This is what they found:

That looks like a whole lot of gravel to me!!!!  HAPPY DAY!!!  I was so thrilled.  Since we found rock in this area of the basement they went close to the radon mitigation pipe and dug there to see how far we needed to come before hitting rock.  Lucky again, it was within a foot from the pipe.

Here is the floor filled in after they dug and found gravel near the mitigation pipe.

The basement literally had no rock in the one place they stuck the radon pipe.  You know what though, I'll take it.  It saved us money overall and that is a happy place for me.

Of course the same day I found out this wonderful news, my contractor called to tell me the garage door broke - as in no going up or down (fortunately it was stuck in the down position).  

If it's not one thing, it's another.  Luckily I was already budgeting for new garage doors.  I was just hoping it would have lasted a little longer.  It's a trip my friends.  Luckily it's a trip I'm still enjoying.

Happy Tuesday!!

Underwear

“It’s way more fun to buy a 

necklace than it is to buy underwear.”

-Greg Tilton

I love to make places beautiful.  I love being in beautiful spaces and I have quite the vision for this house and what I want it to eventually be.  Unfortunately, I’m a long ways off from being able to do everything I want in terms of décor because this house needs a lot of what I’m going to call “underwear”. 

I think we all would agree that picking out a new area rug or furniture piece is much more exciting than spending the same amount of money on paying to have your chimney swept or your house mitigated for radon.  But the chimney needs to be swept and the radon needs to be mitigated because in the long run no area rug can make up for your house burning down or your family member developing lung cancer.

While I have done a lot of work trying to estimate costs to the best of my ability there are always those costs that will sneak out from behind a corner and getcha.  I had one said cost present itself today.

Radon mitigation can be fairly straight forward.  Dig a hole, put in a fan, vent to the outside, done.  But of course, our radon mitigation is not quite so straight forward.  When digging your hole in the slab, ideally you have rock under your slab.  Less then ideally, you have dirt.  I’ll let you guess what we have. 

Since we are planning on putting a bedroom in the basement, properly venting the radon is important to us and when you have dirt, it makes it more difficult to do that.  A way to help that is by installing French drains.  A French drain is basically a trench dug out all around the inside of your basement slab which then has rock poured into it, then a pipe, then more rock, and eventually concrete repoured over the top (if I understand correctly from what the guy was telling me).  It’s not cheap.  It’s expensive "underwear".  

So with each new piece of necessary "underwear" a "necklace" gets crossed off the list.  But we all know that if you’re not comfortable on the lowest layer, it won’t matter how cute your necklace is because all you’re going to be thinking about is how uncomfortable you are.  And we also all know, necklaces come and go in the fashion world, or in this case the home decor world, so I know there will always be one I will love.  I just might have to wait a little longer.  But at least I’ll be comfy while I wait.

{Digging the Hole}

{Venting to the outside}

{This is incomplete.  The guy wasn't done when I left,

 so I will add on more pictures once I get them}