Category: Rentals, Remodels, Relocations and Real Estate

Remember the fuck tile post? Right. I was not a happy camper. So here’s the newest idea:

Brick floors are very common in rural New Mexico. They have a casual, warm, authentic feel. Here’s an example from the house we are currently renting:

Although even brick comes in too many choices! Different colors, sizes, and levels of hardness.

Some brick are proportional (the width is half the length) so you can do fancy patterns like herringbone or basket weave. Others are not proportional and will only work for the regular “running bond” style like in our rental.

We have a subfloor issue though. You remember the non-value-added (useless) general contractor we had?  We asked him to raise the living room floor to the same height as the rest of the floors (it was a one-step-down living room, a dumb idea that was popular in the 1980’s). So he built a wood subfloor, but totally messed up one side of it. It’s not level enough to lay tile, brick, hardwood, or anything on it.

Our brick guy (Sam) says he needs to take it out and completely redo it. Apparently Sam told our general contractor this awhile back, but our contractor ignored him. Grrr.

Sam is going to take out the new (useless) living room subfloor and pour cement rather than build another wood subfloor. That way, the entire downstairs will be on a cement slab.

The total now for overt mistakes (not to mention minor wish-we’d-done-it-differently), but things that simply need redone, is $1,500 (in materials only) for non-matching tile, $3,000 for chocolate colored exterior paint, $2,000 for new interior doors that look identical to the old ones, and now another $1,000 for a living room floor redo.

Yes!! I was 😕

I was going to leave on August 1, and drive to San Diego to see my brother and my niece and nephews. Then I was going to drive up to Pleasanton to see Laura.  Then John was going to fly out to California and meet me there, and we had reservations on the beach up in Fort Bragg. Then we were going to drive to Boise and see Darren, and then on to eastern Idaho to see the eclipse. And then all the way back home again.

But…I didn’t have the 3rd rental rented by the beginning of August. And our remodel wasn’t going well (understatement). So I decided to skip the San Diego section and just go straight to Pleasanton. But a week later I still didn’t have our rental rented, and our remodel was getting worse, not better. So I gave up on the entire California part of the trip.

The new plan was to leave on Monday (August 14) and go straight to Boise. But then the company building our courtyards called and said they had a cancellation. Could they do our courtyards starting on August 14 instead of the end of September? Hell yes. I was not looking forward to moving up there with 3 dogs and no courtyard. So we figured we’d get the courtyards started and then leave.

But then on Friday, the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) called me and asked if I could interview on Tuesday. Uh, sure! We figured we’d definitely leave by Wednesday morning at the latest.

Meanwhile John was way, way behind on all the cool upgrades he’s doing to the camper van. This guy is really handy – but not so speedy. So we were still here on Wednesday afternoon when someone from a different part of NMED called me and wanted me to interview for a different job. So ok! We scheduled the interview for as soon as possible – Thursday morning. (They were very accommodating.)

So new plan – we drive straight to eastern Idaho and meet Darren out there, rather than going all the way into Boise. Then I got back from my interview this morning and John informed me that he was still way behind, and there was no way he was going to be able to leave today. So now we’re going to try to leave tomorrow morning and hopefully make it to eastern Idaho by the time Darren gets there on Saturday.  After all, the eclipse isn’t until Monday, right?

I haven’t said anything about the sustainability of our remodel project. But as an environmental scientist, it’s been on my mind.

The main thing we’re doing is we’re going to install solar panels and batteries and go 100% off-grid. It takes about 50% more panels to go off-grid then grid-tie, because we have to cover our power use during nights and cloudy days. Plus we also have to buy a lot of expensive batteries, which are not needed for grid-tie systems.*

Everyone we’ve mentioned this to thinks we’re stark raving mad to go off-grid and they strongly push us to do grid-tie instead. I’ve gotten outright hostility and have been laughed at, to the point where I’m now not even telling anyone we’re going off-grid. I have no idea why there is such hostility toward going off-grid rather than grid-tie (“they” being every vendor, contractor, and supplier I’ve ever mentioned it to, including solar panel suppliers – you’d think they would be happy to sell us half-again more panels). It’s as if I said something REALLY un-PC. I just don’t get it.

Our house is already 100% electric, so going 100% solar isn’t going to be too difficult. But it means I don’t get to run a gas line from the street for a gas stove. I infinitely prefer cooking on gas, but I’m bought into the idea of 100% renewables, 100% off-grid, so I will deal with cooking on an electric stove (sigh). Out of concern about me giving up my gas stove, John briefly tried to argue that if we installed a small propane tank it would count as off-grid. Hmmm, nope. Just because the delivery method is a truck instead of a pipe, does not mean it’s off-grid. Plus, propane is still a fossil fuel.

We will also need to replace our old, inexpensive and power-hungry electric baseboard heaters with a more efficient electric heat-pump. It also means that we will keep our evaporative cooler rather than upgrade to refrigerated air. Evaporative coolers require far less energy than refrigerated air, because evaporative coolers are just a fan blowing air over water that’s recirculating through a filter. Refrigerated air is generated with a compressor, and compressors use WAY more energy than a simple fan and water pump.

I’ve also looked into using some reclaimed materials. As a rough rule of thumb, almost anything reclaimed is going to have a smaller environmental footprint than things newly manufactured. Unfortunately, I’ve been very time-limited, so I haven’t tried very hard to find reclaimed materials. But reclaimed flooring is something I’ve been looking into.

Initially, I looked into using reclaimed brick for the flooring downstairs. I love the traditional brick floors in this region.

Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s very hard to install brick flooring after the house has already been built. Real brick is thick, and it would have to go on top of our existing cement slab. The height of it would completely mess up our doorways, our cabinet height, etc. Our sliding glass doors would have to be reinstalled, and it just wasn’t worth the expense.

Although at the time that we decided against brick floors, we did not have ANY IDEA of the TILE tribulations we would be encountering, or we might have opted for brick after all. But it’s too late now, because we’ve already installed our accidental new doors, at the wrong height for a thicker floor. So tile it will have to be.

For those of you wondering about my idea of putting wood floors downstairs as well as upstairs (Plu-ee-ee-eees??) – it’s a little more complicated than I realized. Apparently it’s difficult to adhere solid wood floors to concrete slab, and best if you build a subfloor. But with the addition of a subfloor, we’d have the same height issue with the doorways as we would with brick.

However, we are currently looking into using reclaimed wood for the upstairs floors. Reclaimed wood runs a little bit more expensive than your standard new oak floors, but it has great character. And being reclaimed, it means we’re not cutting down new trees for our project.

We are also considering mesquite for the upstairs floors, if we don’t go with reclaimed planks. Mesquite is a bush, rather than a tree, and it’s invasive, and it is sourced fairly locally (Texas and Mexico). So for those reasons, it is a fairly environmentally-friendly choice. It is also more expensive than oak, which may seem surprising for what is basically a local trash-bush, but the reason is, it’s not a common choice for floors. So you don’t benefit from economies of scale.

*Grid-tie is when you buy solar panels but not batteries, and you connect (tie) you system to your local electricity supplier. That way, when it’s cloudy or dark you can draw off the regular grid, and then during sunny days, your system feeds into the grid. This is by far the most common use of solar panels in the US. If you see neighbors with solar panels, you can bet they’re tied to the grid. Usually people size their system so that the amount they generate and the amount they use averages about zero. But with grid-tie it doesn’t really matter how big your system is. You can undersize it and pay a small electric bill, or oversize it and sell small amounts to the electric company. It’s more complicated to go off-grid, because you’re on your own and you really need to have a sense of how much power you’re going to want. In order to be completely off-grid, and not tied to the local utility, you need to install a big enough system for your heaviest use times, and lots of batteries, so you still have power on rainy days and cold dark nights.

The title says it all. While on our hike yesterday, when every rock looked like tile to us, we got this text:

“Unfortunately due to personal issues my wife is going to finish the duration of this project with you most of it’s down to just numbers and she does all of that part with the company anyway her phone number is…thanks for everything take care”

I don’t know what those personal issues might be, but this text came fairly soon after he had requested extra funds, and instead of a check we had submitted a spreadsheet detailing how we’ve paid him significantly more than he’s actually paid for contractors and materials (he’s behind in paying them), and that we weren’t going to pay him any more until the project is complete.

We were supposed to have only paid 50% at halfway, and 50% when the project is complete. But we paid extra because we weren’t being careful enough keeping up with the exact numbers, and we knew we had added a number of items to the original scope.  It made sense to pay additional since we had increased the size of the project.

But then recently we could tell he was starting to struggle with the project, so we removed a lot of the extra items that he had not yet started. (We’ll still do those items, but we’ll handle them ourselves.) Removing the extra scope made the percentage we’ve paid go up to 80%. (50% or 60% of a larger project = 80% of the original project). At 80%, we are very vulnerable to him simply taking the money and walking off the project.

I don’t think we mind having him gone – turns out he wasn’t really value-added. But he owes his suppliers and his labor. We need him to continue to pay for the materials and labor that we’ve already paid him for, so the work will continue.

I started out gamely chronicling the tile saga. Then I started showing some frustration. Then I stooped to using an obscenity in a blog tile. Final stage – we have now just gone stark raving mad.

John had Friday off, and in order to keep our sanity intact, we decided instead of going straight to Albuquerque to look at tile, we would first go on a hike, and then go look at tile in the afternoon (when the thunderstorms start).

We took a few beautiful photos of our hike, which I will post. We also took about 50 pictures of rocks (don’t worry, I’ll only post a representative few). “Why rocks?”, you might ask. BECAUSE THEY LOOKED LIKE TILE! I tell you, we’re losing it.

Here’s the standard scenery shots:

Here’s a few of the many, many rock shots:

When I started this blog, I was going to keep it light and happy, but I’ve decided that authenticity is a stronger value of mine.

To recap briefly: John and I spent an enormous amount of time trying to choose tile to replace the carpet downstairs. He wanted dark, I wanted light, and we had just about given up, when we discovered a store that carried our existing tile! So we gleefully ordered more of our existing tile, waited a couple of weeks for it to arrive, waited a couple of more weeks for our tile guy to have time to install, when we then discovered the dye lot was vastly different and it was a complete mismatch.

So we had him take back up the part he had just installed. The remainder of the tile was not readily returnable, so we ordered MORE of it, with the intention of eventually installing it in one of the rentals. So we’re now out a couple thousand dollars for tile that we don’t really like or need. Half of it is in the storage unit, the other half will be coming in soon, and will need moved to the storage unit. Have you ever moved tile? It’s like 50 lbs per box and there’s dozens of boxes.

So then we had to choose a different kind of tile (again). This consisted of us running around to every tile store in Albuquerque (again), except this time I just trailed behind John like a teenager saying, “Whatever. It’s fine. You choose. That one’s fine too. Yes! It’s fine! Can we go now?”

So we chose one. And ordered it. It was due in today. You see where this is going. No tile. Maybe in 2 weeks? Maybe not ever?

They do have it in 20 x 20 squares.

But John wants rectangles.

Meanwhile, we finally found a wood floor guy. Not the one who was allegedly run out of the county by the police when he was supposed to be measuring our floors for a quote. The one we went with is the one who tried to give our time slot away, even though we had accepted his bid immediately. Maybe I didn’t tell you about that. At any rate, we have our time slot back, for now at least. It’s a jungle out there! (As my grandpa used to say.)

So this morning it dawned on me that we could just do downstairs in wood. Our original tile is still intact in the kitchen, laundry and bathroom. The tile guy had been told to pull up all the old tile, but he hasn’t yet. So I quickly called him and told him, “Don’t do anything! We don’t know what we’re doing yet!”

I’m afraid John isn’t going to want to do downstairs in wood. He’ll worry about durability. Dogs. Entryways. Water stains. But I don’t mind dinged up, scratched and stained hardwood. It’s all about character!

In addition to dogs, we have houseplants. The only time I’ve ever damaged a hardwood floor had to do with a house-sitter overwatering the houseplants which were set on plastic since we were just moving in, and the water got under the plastic, unnoticed, and was trapped there for awhile. But that was an unusual situation, a very long time ago. Typically, my houseplants are up on plant stands.

I have dozens of houseplants, many of which are quite large.

This bird of paradise used to be on the front courtyard in California. It seems happy inside, it bloomed over the winter.

And anyway, there’s no way they would all fit downstairs. Even if there was tile down there, half of them would still have to be on the wood floors upstairs.

I’d do the kitchen in wood too, but I know John won’t go for that. Actually, it would look so much better to do the kitchen in wood too, because it’s just a little walk-thru kitchen with the living/dining area on one side, and the family room on the other. And there’s a long, slightly crooked threshold between the kitchen and the family room. So tile in the kitchen, with wood on both sides of it, would disrupt the flow of the house.

PLEASE can we put hardwood downstairs, including the kitchen? I’ve had wood in kitchens before and it’s fine. All you have to do is not start the dishwasher immediately before leaving for a 2-week vacation (that’s how the wood was ruined by the previous owners of a rental we used to own). Of all the times for the dishwasher to fail, it was immediately after they left for vacation. But what are the odds of that happening? Particularly now we learned from their mistake and know not to do it.

But even if we did somehow manage to ruin the wood in the kitchen (which is not going to happen) but if we did, we could just replace it with a few boards we saved in our garage. Or if it’s a catastrophically large area (really not going to happen) but if it did, we would just replace it with tile at that point. And we’d be no worse off. Plu-ee-ee-eees??

OMG you guys, I had such a crazy dream!

I dreamed that I got a full-time job and John quit his job. But in addition to my job, I was also still coaching my clients in the evening, and I was managing the rentals, and paying all the bills, and keeping up with the house, and the laundry, and groceries, and cooking, and making sure the dogs went to the groomers, and all these many, many things, and John wasn’t doing anything except for hiking all day long! He was just out by himself in the desert for days at a time. And when I suggested that he do some of the work, he said, “There’s nothing to be done, you’ve done it all.” I was so mad that I’m surprised I didn’t wake up and start hitting him!

So then I said (in my dream), “I want a swimming pool. And I want you to dig it yourself.” Which sounds terrible, but is actually fairly funny, because John always wants to do everything himself. I always want to hire people because he doesn’t have time to do it all.  But he likes to do things himself because that way they’re “done right.” And in real life I do want a pool, but John has been ignoring that impractical wish of mine, because there’s nowhere for a pool on that hill.

In my dream, he dug a swimming pool. And it wasn’t just a rectangle in the ground. He dug caves and underwater passageways. He installed underwater lights and different color tiles. And it was so beautiful that I wanted to become a fish so I could live there.

I wish I could post a picture. But taking photos of our dreams is something for a different generation to figure out.