Woo! Coming along, coming along...

Hang in there, my friend. :)

Did you have all that work in mind when you bought the house? And if so what where you thinking doing all that when schools starting soon?

Hah! Liza - I didn't exactly know the scale of what the house required. I did get an inspection report, detailing the old wiring, the old plumbing. And maybe I could have known by looking the place over better when I first saw it, spying a loose baseboard, not seeing any washer-dryer, catching the uneven plastering.

But I didn't have to swallow that all at once. First I saw a beautiful home. I knew I wanted to live there. Then I was able to buy it. Then I agreed to do all the repairs. Then the repairs multiplied.

People lived here before happily, and maybe I could have as well. But I had a recent experience that drove me to want to get all this work done -

I was living in a house in Oakland. When it came time to sell it and move out, I spent a bunch of money fixing it up - replaced the crappy kitchen linoleum, buffed up the wood floors, painted all the walls. And the place felt like a million bucks! Or maybe, like a half a million bucks.

And I thought, man, why didn't I do some of this stuff before I moved in? So when I got this place, I resolved to make it nice, to fix all the aging infrastructure (plumbing, wiring, foundation), and then spiff and smooth out the rest. School does start in ten days; I guess that's why I'm treating this remodelling project like an all-nighter.

A piece of advice. My father is a tile man. If you retile the shower/bath make sure they put up Durock or Wonderboard. It's a cement board. Green sheetrock is ok in the bathroom, that's what it is made for. But it's not actually supposed to be used on the shower/bath walls. Also have the framers or who ever is hanging the cement board in the shower to have it fur'd out an 1/8 of a inch so that the walls don't curve in toward the bottom of the shower. So that the sub wall will be as far out as the shower pan.

If the person protests about cement board, make him do it anyway, it will make the water fall to the pan. The sheetrock will asbord it and later in time rot.