On having renters 4

   July 15, 2011  Leave a Comment on On having renters 4

By Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)

This is the next part in my renovation story. I am working on getting my mom’s rent house back into shape after the previous tenant really screwed the place up!

On the weekend of July 2nd & 3rd I did a two day work weekend since my wife was working and I basically had the weekend free to myself. On this second day I set out to do more ‘little stuff’ to the house because as I have said it’s the little things that eventually end up getting things done.

I came up with a solution for the uneven joints where the newly repaired floor and the old floor met. I used some wood filler (which will really get hard once dried) and built up the lip of the support boards so that the new plywood floor would be close to even with the old flooring. I messed with this for a while then left it to dry. This will almost make the floor joints even but it will require more wood filler to smooth it all out next time I work on it. Next visit I will screw the new floor down and use that filler to smooth and fill gaps.

I retouched up more of the holes I patched (the patching stuff will sometimes crack if there is a lot of it). I also took a good long look at the all the gaps in the living room where they guy put new drywall up but never finished it out. I decided that I needed to use caulking to fill in those gaps (where are pretty big… see photo).
That’s a good quarter inch gap between the ceiling stud and the surrounding drywall (this is the after pic).
 I had used up a whole tube of caulking and I only got like 1/8th of the work done. I considered just leaving the gaps there but a small detail like that looks good when you don’t notice it. Once I get it all caulked I will paint it all white. I am ditching all the different colors they painted the place and will just go with all purpose white.
After that I did a little cleaning up and some sweeping. I am trying to stay on top of everything by keeping it clean as I go. I tried to get some more of that do it yourself wall paper off the walls but gave up quickly. I also disassembled the living room lights, added the proper bulbs (60 watt max in a mobile home), cleaned and put them back.
My next set of goals for the upcoming visits are to get measurement for the living room floor. The guy started putting down wood tiles but stopped so like 80% of the floor has 1/2″ thick wood tile and I can’t pull it up without a hell of a lot of work. I am going to basically put 1/2″ plywood in the places he didn’t finish to bring the floor up flush then it’s getting carpeted. I will also start painting and trying to figure out what the hell to do with the kitchen walls. They need to either be sanded down and re-textured or just built up for a thick wall texture, either way it will be hideous.
One final note on the weekend. It seems like everything there is broken. The bath faucet has a crack in it and when you turn on the shower it sprays out the crack making a big mess. The kitchen faucet hand hose thing has a crack in it and when you just turn the kitchen water on it sprays out of the handle too. Jeeze.

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