DIY- a Kitchen

If your house is like ours, a few years old then you will understand when I say that everything is falling apart here. I’ve written before about our lives as the DIY’ers, and the (mis)adventures.

Our house is 18 years old, just old enough to be newer but old enough to be falling apart. In the past few months we have replaced the garbage disposal after I found that instead of the debris going down the drain it was actually flying off into the cabinet and a couple of weeks ago the dishwasher. Oven went out several months ago.

For 30+ years I’ve wanted a Viking range, I’ve gone to our local appliance store just to see them and touch and drool on them. Now we were planning to get a new stove this year but when we saw how much our tax return would be we decided to go with a 30” Viking. I walked into the appliance store and the sales guy offered to sell me the floor model, I mean really how could I say no to that?

I’d love the 48” but I’ll make do with the 30” as the 48” would bring lots of other problems. So I was thinking that we could just cut out the cooktop and its cabinet then slide in the Viking. Sounds easy right?

Guess again! Now, having pulled up the specs the clearance to the right is not enough, 4” instead of 6”. There is a built in oven to the right of the cooktop which we were going to remove and turn the full cabinet space into shelves, but instead the cabinet must be cut in two and a counter top put in. But then the top of the cabinet will be too deep so that must be altered.

Unfortunately we were not planning to put in new counter tops until next year as we only have so much money to work with here. But now we will have a cabinet with no countertop only a hole and just a board plopped on top is not going to look any good at all. I wanted a composite countertop for most of the countertop but those are special made so I don’t think that we can find just a piece somewhere like we could maybe find with granite. So do we get the countertops now? What project do we give up for that?

Oh there are no easy answers.

Maybe we should just take the extra money and go travel!

A Property Claim to Gag Over

In my line of work, sometimes we get to see the best, the worst and the saddest in people in this line of work. One of the last claims that I received was for an apartment which turned out to be 12 duplex units about 2 hours away. The complex is generally rented to those with not many resources so that the rents are heavily subsidized. But my philosophy has been, and still is, that a person can still be clean.

I got a call from the manager that more damage had been reported to her so we set up an appointment for today to inspect the additional damage. We were to see 4 units but it turned out to actually be 8 units. As I say all of the units are rented to very low income people, many of whom are disabled.

Some units are as one would expect to find from any group of people, very messy, some downright dirty. A couple of people apologized several times for their mess when in fact the apt was so clean it was difficult to find dirt.

The apartment just before the last one had damage reported by the tenant on the A side, not on the B side. I took one look at the roof, which had an AC pipe leaking still with a puddle of water on the rear of the roof. The roofing was in horrible condition with patched areas lifting. I advised the property manager that it is likely that the B unit had damage as well.

While I got off the roof the property manager knocked on the unit door and finally an elderly woman opened the door just a few inches. She told the property manager that she was sick but the manager told her that we really needed to check for water damage. By that time I was standing just behind the manager.

The manager stepped into the unit with me right behind and the smell was beyond bad, worse than almost anything I’d ever smelled before. I took a huge gulp of fresh air before entering completely but we were only looking at the hall when my breath ran out. The manager and I ran from the apartment gagging my husband and the maintenence man said that we were white as sheets. We decided on the spot that we didn’t care about the damage in that apartment, let the person who repairs tell us what they find.

After sufficiently recovering we inspected our last unit.

My husband and I were feeling dirty and drained so thought we’d stop for lunch before the 2 hour drive home. We found a little cafe we’d not been to before but it was really clean, something we needed at that second. We went in and finally when someone came into the dining room she said that the restaurant was closed. We were disappointed but too tired to care. As we were stepping into our truck we saw the person, at the window, signaling to us to come back. They had decided to let us in after all even though they were closed.

It was so pleasant to sit in a clean place and eat some decent food after our eventful morning and we so much appreciated the fact that the staff let us in after closing. Never fear, we left a nice tip!