Hi there, Mrs. 1500 today, asking about your best or worst home remodeling story. The best story wins a set of beer cozies* from Ree Klein over at Escaping Dodge.
But before we get into that, let’s go over your best weight loss/exercise tips from last week.
As you recall, Mr. 1500 took a work trip to Chicago a few weeks ago, which led to his overindulging on donuts, pizza, cookies, pizza, Italian beef sandwiches and pizza. He came back from his gluttonous adventure close to the highest weight he has ever been in his life, and decided to try an all-soylent diet for a week.
As I am also close to my highest non-pregnancy weight, I asked for your advice, which came in spades. Thank you!
Refinerr recommended “Keep track of everything you put in your mouth! Just like the first step of FIRE you have to know what you’re spending so you keep track of your money. When you start to track your caloric intake you find out … how many calories you’re eating…” Such an excellent point.
Jen from Jen Spends says “…Portion control was the big game changer. I could eat pretty much anything I wanted, I just made sure to eat less of it. …”
Frugal Buckeye advised “I think the best advice I can give is to plan ahead for your meals.” If I plan ahead, I can make sure I have salad things, healthier choices like chicken, etc. If I don’t plan ahead, we have Macaroni and Cheese, because that is what is in the fridge…
The Roamer from Traveling Wallet said “…Keep the bad stuff out of the house…” So true. I won’t drive to the store just to get junk food, but if it is in the house, I will definitely eat it.
Mrs. SSC recommends the My Fitness Pal app (free for iPhone and Android) and I cannot agree more. If you are trying to lose weight, this thing is worth your weight in gold. It is so easy to use. You set it up, entering your current and goal weights. It calculates how many calories you should be eating in order to achieve your goal. Then you enter the food you ate and the exercise you performed each day. There is almost no food out there that their database doesn’t already have in it. You can even scan the barcode directly from the packaging for easier entry.
The downside to My Fitness Pal is that you can see just how quickly calories add up.
Thank you all for your suggestions. Implementing them is the next step, although I have started logging food again in My Fitness Pal. I need to make that a habit, and to make something a habit, you need to do it every day.
So now for today’s question, what is your best/worst home improvement story? Last Thursday, Mr. 1500 told you about finding beer cans in the cement wall that separates our yard from the neighbor’s. There were some amazing stories in the responses, including one from Mrs. Frugalwoods where she tells of 9 layers of carpet. Yikes!
Please, tell me your story! Winner takes home beer cozies…
*If you just can’t wait to buy a set (maybe for stocking stuffers!), you can enter code OCT20OFF during checkout to get 20% off through the end of October.
Join the 10s who have signed up already!
Subscribing will improve your life in incredible ways*.
*Only if your life is pretty bad to begin with.
Wow… I think you’ve been reading my mind Mrs. 1500. I’m trying to work up the energy to write about this on my own site, so here’s a sneak preview…
We’ve been in the middle of a month long remodel of both bathrooms along with various other projects. The biggest project by far was ripping out the previous, crappy shower and rebuild it to a beautiful, ceramic-tiled model. Everything went smoothly – mortaring the Kerdi membrane to the greenboard, mortaring in the ceramic tile, grouting etc…
When I finished sealing the grout, we had a shower I would’ve only dreamt about before, and that’s the high point. The low point was 4 days into using said shower when I realized I had grout coming up. A quick push on a couple tiles confirmed that mortar was indeed seeping up through the cracks with an exquisite “squish squish squish” sound.
Several quick Google searches and a call to a friend that I remembered did flooring confirmed that the store had given me pre-mixed mortar to use for the shower floor instead of the junk you mix yourself. It’s very likely the whole shower floor needs to be replaced, if not more. We’ve stopped using the shower – it’s still hard to tell unless you look specifically for it.
None of this covers the fact that our house is now on the market for prospective buyers. Yes, I could replace it myself, but I’m done with it. 125-150 hours spent working on the entire project in a matter of 3 weeks has me completely exhausted.
What we’re doing to take care of it is we’ve disclosed the problem with the shower on the seller’s sheet, and will make an allowance into the final contract for them to have several thousand either taken off the final price of the house, or returned to the buyer in cash at closing. Until we move into a new house, we’re without a shower.
This brings me to my huge problem with DIY (which don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on board with it up to this point), I don’t know what I don’t know.
I don’t remodel showers for a living, so unless I specifically knew to ask what kind of mortar to use, there’s no way I could’ve foreseen the problems we’ve had with it. As it is, we have a shower that is beautiful, but completely non-functional.
Heck, I probably could’ve written a guest rant about this!
Big Guy Money recently posted…Luxury’s Curious Effect On Decision Making
Oh wow, this is horrible. That premixed stuff costs way more and is absolute garbage. I made that mistake once in a kitchen. Never, ever again. I’m so sorry. I cringe for you.
“…I don’t know what I don’t know.”
I think this sums it up. You don’t know what you don’t know. And sometimes, the people working at the home improvement store are just as clueless. I didn’t know you couldn’t use pre-mixed mortar either, until I shared this story with Mr. 1500 and he cringed when I told him. He knows you can’t use it, but he only knows that because he looked something up about it. And I totally feel your pain, you have already done it, and now it needs to be redone, all because you didn’t know you were using the wrong product.
We had to re-tile the entire kitchen and entryway because we used the wrong tile. We didn’t know the wooden subfloor would suck up all the water in the mortar, causing it to fail spectacularly. We had to lay new tile as we were getting it ready to list, just like you.
Thanks for bringing back those happy memories! 🙂
Great point – this guy that sold the premixed stuff to us seemed extremely knowledgeable. He stayed with us all morning making sure we got everything we needed for the job. How am I supposed to know that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either?
Thanks for the cringes. In some small way it makes me feel a little better. At the same time, my apologies for bringing up painful memories! 😉
Big Guy Money recently posted…Luxury’s Curious Effect On Decision Making
Wow, Mrs. 1500, you’ve already solicited a doozy (rhymes with “cozy”) of a home-improvement horror story! Can’t wait to see what other stories pop up and find out who wins the cozy set!
Cheers 🙂
Ree
Ree Klein recently posted…Income Lab 1.5: Writing a Killer Amazon Listing Just Got Easier!
I totally feel his pain, Ree.
Being a renter ever since I graduated from college and moved to NY, I don’t do a ton of home improvements myself, so my story is of a much younger version of myself.
When I was in 1st grade, all I ever wanted was a treehouse. My parents weren’t the handiest people in the world, and I was, of course, 6 years old, but they liked the idea of the project and figured we would all learn together.
The treehouse was simple. In fact, it was actually more of a tree platform. We found a cluster of 3 trees, nailed boards between them, and then nailed floorboards across those beams.
For safety, we nailed 3 railing boards around the outside of the three trees. It was a nice, triangular “treehouse”.
Of course, I was young, so my parents made sure that this was less than 6 feet off the ground. They could peer in at me without climbing a single rung.
A few months after completing the treehouse, I learned something very important about safety barriers. They work WAY better if they are nailed to the INSIDE of the tree. Yup, I was up there doing my homework, leaning against a barrier when the nails popped out and I went toppling.
No problem, right? It was such a short fall. Second lesson. Short falls can still be bad.
I happened to land directly on my head. I fractured my C3 vertebra (broke my neck) and was VERY lucky to only have done damage to the bone. After a prolonged time in a halo brace, I turned out to be back at 100% with no long term damage, but that treehouse was promptly dismantled.
Dave @ The New York Budget.com recently posted…Why Are You Saving?
Holy s***! Wow. Crazy. Close call brotha!
Mr. 1500,
The best home improvement project I took on was a total gut and remodel on our hall bathroom. I had never done a bathroom or any tile previously. It took a while to learn, but it looks good and I got a nice discount on the tile. Still needed plumbers, but mostly to install the cast iron tub.
My worst project was an HVAC replacement. I had purchased a place with the HVAC unit in the attic in a very small space. On top of that, it was a special kind of unit (water source heat pump) which limited the choices and increased the price. Many installers quoted me $8,000-10,000 to do it because it needed a lot of custom duct work. Finally I found a company to do it at $5,500. But it was a mess. They had to haul this lift up three flights of stairs to be able to lift the thing into the attic. The custom duct work was in such a tight space it nearly ruined the knees of the poor guy that did the job. It was a full two days to do it in 100 degree third floor unit with no AC. Every bit of it sucked. Thankfully I found a good team of professionals to do it.
-RBD
Retire Before Dad recently posted…Investment Income Update – Oct 15th 2014
RBD,
Doesn’t it seem like those attic jobs always happen on the hottest day of the year?
Our current house has a 3 foot tall crawlspace. (Or as our littlest one calls it, a crawl-o-space.) The furnace is in there, along with the hot water heater. Can’t wait to replace those…
Wow, between Dave breaking his neck and BGM not having a shower, it’s tough competition. I think one of our best worst home repair stories was when we (well, mostly Mr PoP and his brother) replaced the roof over our patio. We knew it was bad when we bought the place, but not really sure how bad (just bad enough the chubby inspector didn’t want to stand too close to the edge). Turned out they had just shingled over the last repair instead of doing it right the last time and the wood at the edge was completely rotted through. We have no idea to this day how the gutters and lanai screening were still there as they were attached to such rotted wood. I think the lowest point was when they were knocking the soffit down to replace more of the rotted fascia and a snake fell down out of the roof onto the patio. Mr PoP and his brother were terrified and I got to confirm it wasn’t a poisonous one and feel useful. =)
But the wood was replaced, tarpaper laid, shingles nailed… the inspector gave his stamps of approval and all is well with the world. Though the snake had to find a new home.
Mrs. Pop @ Planting Our Pennies recently posted…He Said She Said – Blogs We’re Reading Lately
Oooh snakes. No thanks. Unless someone has a spider story akin to Arachnophobia (the movie), this is the grossest.
Even though I’m not eligible for the contest, I’ll toss my story in the ring. I’ve owned my little 1,123 sq ft home for 20 years. Early on my neighbors wanted to “go in together” to replace an original fence splitting our two properties (in CA every neighborhood is divided up by fence).
I considered these neighbors friends so I trusted them. The Mr. had a guy to do the work. Okay. He also worked from home so he could “manage” the job. Sounds good. The work commenced and off to my job I went.
I came home to discover that the neighbor had told the contractor to move the fence line so he wouldn’t have to cut part of the cement patio he’d poured some years ago that caused the fence to bow into my yard. He made this decision on his own without consulting me. His argument was that he got some of my yard in the back but I got some of his in the front.
If you look closely, you’ll still see the steam coming out of my ears. As you might imagine, we rarely spoke after that. I learned a valuable lesson and never again trusted anyone to “manage” a home improvement job for me; when left with the opportunity, people will often err in their own favor.
Ree Klein recently posted…Income Lab 1.5: Writing a Killer Amazon Listing Just Got Easier!