If I sent you an email pointing to this page, you probably know we're
remodeling our house. Or at least catching up on 24 years of
things we didn't do. We replaced siding, windows and things like
that but hadn't done as much inside.
We decided to sell the house. To do this we had to get a lot of
work done inside. We found a handyman company willing to do the
work. They had a lot of good ideas and had ideas that seemed fair.
We wanted to replace all the doors, paint, upgrade the bathrooms and fix
odd and end issues. They gave us a price that was fair enough to
let them do the work. The deal was that we'd buy the stuff with
choices (doors, tile, etc) and they'd buy the nuts and bolts stuff with
our money. That seemed fair and safe. Actually it turned out
OK. We spent somewhat more than we expected but that was our own
fault. We also hauled they old stuff away. Ripped up door
frames, etc.
As we went through the house, we had a lot of old stuff that wasn't
worth taking to storage or keeping. Just because its old doesn't
make it an antique. We have less furniture and tables than we've
had for a long time. Even with that, we've filled up two 10x7
storage units. Between that and the dump, I was pretty busy.
Oh yeah. Two trips a day to Lowes or Home Depot was not unusual.
I even figured how to keep doors from slipping out the back end of the
car after losing two on Fairfax County Parkway (no one and no thing was
hurt).
The crew doing the work was Spanish speaking. For the most part we
communicated and all got along. Even Bugsy seemed to understand
Holla and Que Pasa after a while. The supervisor was here from
time to time but not constantly. They did have someone here every
day. Some days we'd have benefited from having the supervisor
around but we got by. We all agreed to have the work done on a
Friday. We had someone stay at the house to make sure they could
get in. When we got home Sunday there was still a lot of work and
a pile of carpet in the driveway.
There had been some cleaning done and rather than clean the carpet they
removed it. They new we had new carpet coming so maybe it wasn't
that bad. At least not until the carpet people on Monday refused
to take it. It took me four trips to the dump on Tuesday to get
rid of it. Two other trips got rid of the rest of the junk.
Wednesday the house was to go on the market. On Tuesday, the guy
working here left at 4:30 with much to be done. Sue called the
supervisor. She was about to give up when he showed up with 5
people at 8:00. They got the remaining issues with doors resolved
and saved the day. I could have done without the drama though.
The house is on the marked with Long and Foster. No telling how
long it will take it to sell. We're told it looks better than
other similar ones in our neighborhood.
You can see pictures of it now by clicking
here.
There's no pictures of it along the way. That was too painful with
all this stress this caused us.
Our Refurbished House
