Renovation Update

Renos in the suite are moving forward, albeit slowly. We didn’t want to wait until we were completely finished before putting an ad out, because then we would likely have to wait until April 1st to rent the suite. So we cleaned up as much as possible and put an ad out. The suite shows really well even with the living room unfinished. We’ve had five inquiries so far: a 50-year-old landscaper with her 26-year-old son living with her for six months (she also has a dog and three cats); a young couple with a four-month-old baby; a single mother and her six-year-old son; and a retired man and his still-working wife whose house they rent is being sold. An interesting cross-section of people, and three out of four have pets. I’m slightly reluctant about dogs, knowing how dirty they make this house after being outside. I bought carpet yesterday, and it’s light beige! I wanted something neutral, and now I’m thinking damn that’s going to look dirty fast.

I have to tell you, it’s emotionally taxing on me, all these renovations. I want to learn and I want to do as much as possible myself, but I don’t have any experience at all with homes. I’m finding myself trying very hard to plan ahead, but I keep making mistakes, or miscalculations. And then I feel stupid and inadequate and why did I think I could ever do this? It’s almost a DIY disaster around here some days.

We took down a wall, and now of course getting heat to that room properly is near impossible without cutting dozens of holes in the TEXTURED ceiling. There is an electrician here this morning, trying to solve this problem. We’ve managed to figure something out, but I will have to fix a few holes in the wall, and the baseboard heater isn’t in the best spot. Hopefully it heats up the room enough. I’m sure carpet was the best flooring solution now, as laminate would have been too cold on the feets.

Am I worried too much about the comfort of my tenants? We’re spending $900 to put carpet into 300 square feet. And I even bought pretty cheap carpet at $1.50 a square foot. Then there’s underlay, installation, tax. It all adds up to much more than we wanted to spend, but we didn’t really budget or prepare very well before taking the wall down. Should we have left the room as storage? Should we have put in laminate? Should we have tried to match up the very thin flooring (which sits right on top of concrete!) and thrown a rug over the tiles leftover from the wood stove we took out?

Sure, I’m concerned about how much $ we are spending on our rental suite, but I also feel good about it. It’s just in my nature to do things as right as possible. The room needed heat and it needed to be a long-term solution. The rooms needs flooring and it must be comfortable. I learned an important lesson once, from the landlady at my Metchosin home. It was such a lovely house. She told me that she designed and built it thinking how she would feel if she was living there herself. I always appreciated her sentiments — afford others the same respect you would give yourself. It’s simply a good way to be.

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Rewind: The Lead Up to Look

Let me just preface this little story by telling you that I love houses. I can spend hours looking at MLS and real estate sites for interesting houses, and I even have a peek around now that I am settling into my own house. (I like to keep an eye on the market.) Being a passenger in the car is a great pleasure because that allows me to check out houses and the landscaping, roofs, driveways, etc. around them. HGTV? Pleasantly addicted. Some days we spend the afternoon just watching home reno or real estate shows. Don’t even get me started on how many magazines dedicated to interior design I own…

I’ve wanted my own home for many years. Perhaps it’s a nesting instinct. When I was single, owning a house was too expensive (don’t like roommates), and living in a condo did not appeal to me in the slightest (I want LOTS of space). Near the end of the first year that Tyler and I lived together, we rented the top floor of a house on a busy street while I went to photography school. It was a nice enough house, but much too small and I hated the busy road. It stressed me to no end. And it just never felt like a home to me. We decided that once I finished school in June 2006, we would move. We wanted to buy a house, but that was in our two- to three-year plan, and we needed more space immediately.

We looked for many months for a house we could afford. We found the perfect house for us, outside of our budget of course, near Willows Beach in Oak Bay. And what a house! Beautiful. After one viewing, we went home and decided we couldn’t afford it, especially if we wanted to buy our own house in the future. And then the landlord called, and told us he would lower the rent for us by $200 because he liked us so much and knew we would be great tenants. We accepted. We couldn’t resist. The house is around 2,000 square feet and you can see the ocean and beach from the front deck. The location is excellent. Oak Bay has its dissenters, as it’s an area for the well-heeled (and sometimes snobby) for sure, but after being there for just a few weeks I realized why it’s a desirable place. It’s a nice place to live. I loved living in Oak Bay almost as much as I loved living in rural Metchosin. And the house always felt like a home. That space has a good feeling about it, an energy that I can’t really describe, but thinking back to it makes me feel warm inside. I feel the house needs a lot of updating, but it still has so much charm. (We even tried to buy it, despite its close to a million-dollar price tag!)

I feel as though our lives were leading up to buying our first home, we just hadn’t realized it. I was constantly crunching numbers and trying to see how we could afford a house. With a boatload of debt and student loans, and prices in Victoria rising faster than a rocket to outer space, it seemed so out of reach. And then in July 2007, a friend of mine and her husband bought a house for over $500,000 on the outskirts of Victoria. I was stunned. If they could afford it, we should be able to as well! She gave me the skinny on their acquisition, and so I made an appointment with the same mortgage broker she used. He looked at all the numbers and set about to show us our options. We could do this!

And with a budget in mind, we set about to look for a house to buy. I was beside myself. We didn’t know if this was actually going to happen, so we didn’t tell anyone. We were especially concerned about our landlord, since we had told him we would stay for at least three years. He was also planning on going back to school in Toronto and wanted tenants he could trust to take care of his house. He told us he would never sell it. I didn’t want to leave him high and dry, but we also had to move forward with our own lives.

And so we looked at houses, and looked, and looked…

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Renovations in the Suite

I write this on a sunny but cold Sunday afternoon. Miraculously, it seems, it’s not rainy here in Sooke. Before we moved here, we lived in Oak Bay near Willows Beach. It was awesomely windy there and sure it rained, but I never noticed the weather to be much different than the other eight areas of town I’ve lived in. Forty-five minutes west we moved, and it rains like the devil. The weather here just seems so different. And so I am thankful for sunny, dry days. (My toes, however, feel like they were dipped in the Bering Sea.)

We aren’t doing much work outside in the yard yet. We’re working on renovating the rental suite on the lower level in hopes of finding a tenant for March 1. Our previous tenant left in December, and we’re feeling the pinch from the lost income. The suite had quite a large unfinished room (drywalled, but not mudded and taped) that was being used as storage. A middle area between all the rooms seemed too small to be useful, and we’ve decommissioned and taken out the wood stove that was housed there. It made sense for us to take down the wall behind the wood stove and open up that entire space. That way there can be a more defined living room, and two bedrooms instead of one. (Also, more square footage = more rental income.)

After much consultation with friends and family as to whether the angled wall could be bearing or not, Tyler started taking the wall down. After a twinge of uncertainty and a little Internet research, I was instructed to call the builder who moved the house and ask him. We needed to know for sure. He told me it was a partition wall and okay to knock out. Yahh! And so the demolition continued.

For the past week I’ve been mudding and taping and mudding and mudding the drywall, while Tyler works on other jobs in the room. He’s framed in an area at the back of the room for storage, and we’ve realized that a baseboard heater should be installed now on that wall before the drywall goes up, so we’re on the hunt for an electrician in the area. Ty also cut out a length of drywall in the ceiling last night so that we could stuff insulation in there. Not sure why there wasn’t any in there already… but we need to do something to help with the noise transfer between our living room floor and the ceiling in the suite. It’s a bit ridiculous, actually. Tyler has also taken out the stove pipe and capped it at the ceiling. Today he bought the tools to drill into concrete so the storage space wall can be secured to the floor and he can install the door.

It seemed like it would be such a simple job, finishing that room, but now sometimes it seems it will never end! My goal is to have the room ready for primer and paint by next Friday. I’ll be so happy when this is all done! Then I have the fun job of finding a tenant…

More to come on my adventures as a mudder, as well as the other wall and door we’re installing by the shared laundry room.

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