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Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Action shot from my video, of a hunk of tree falling.

So, on Tuesday, Chris and Gary of CHAMPS Handyman Services couldn’t get into the Rattlesnake house to work on it, due to the driveway suddenly being inaccessible (thanks, giant rain storm that dropped .4 inch in 20 minutes). But, that’s OK, because we had that other project, conveniently located across the road, which is “The Cabin,” located on the Wild Hermits ranch that Lee and I co-own with our neighbors, Sara and Ralph. I’m not sure if I mentioned before that it has a main building that’s the oldest one on our property, plus two outbuildings with bedrooms in them, and a beautiful, large deck that has the best sunset views on the ranch.

We’ve been working on it for a few months, painting, cleaning, making it livable, etc. And last weekend, a large group of people got together and cut down two ancient dying trees on the place. (The link is to a video of the cabin, trees, and manly/womanly workers.) We are SO grateful for Sara’s nephews, who came with all their fancy arborist equipment to do the hard stuff, and to her sons, who got very good at the log splitter and axe!

Even after all this work, the cabin is rustic, as you can see from this fun video Chris made. I hope you enjoy our precious chickens and their weird (but functional) little chicken house.

We sure appreciate that Chris is letting us share his comments! It’s fun to see someone else’s perspective, when you’ve been in a place so long you can no longer see it with fresh eyes.

You can see that the bathroom in the cabin was in pretty bad shape. The guy who lives there now and our neighbor have worked and worked on the septic system, so that’s now good. But the shower was ancient, perfect for a hunting lodge, not perfect for a young man and his fiance.

Chris and Gary are putting in a nice new shower unit, in two pieces, and have repaired the sad walls. I know our tenant will be happy to be able to shower in his own place, at last! The bathroom is at least up to the twentieth century in standards!

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Travis 1 Has a New Bathroom!

I don’t think this bathroom has ever looked so clean and fresh!

How exciting that the bathroom remodel on the Travis 1 house is finished! It has gone from being a boring, outdated space with a horribly place window just begging to leak, to being fresh, clean, so cute, and that nasty window is GONE!

It was really feeling like the project was just never even going to get started. The contractor that had won the bid to do the job just disappeared. Have no fear, Mandi knows people. That’s where Ryan comes in. Originally he was only going to replace some light fixtures and by the time it has come to a close, he has done that, numerous other odds and ends that no one saw coming, and he has rebuilt that tired bathroom.

Please check out these pictures of the new bathroom. It’s really very nice and it is ready for the final touches of decorating to be done with it. I am usually not a fan of the black and white floors, but I really like this that Sue Ann picked out. Ryan did a fantastic job putting it in and I really think I may have to rethink what I feel about the black and white floors.

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Bathrooms Sell Houses

Ruben shows off a new toilet. It has the water-saving dual flush feature and a soft-close seat. And it cost less than $90.

“Bathrooms sell houses” is a bit of a truism in our business. But now that I have your attention, I want to talk about something a lot less sexy: Toilets.

I see a lot of renovations where people reuse the existing toilets. Okay. You save a few dollars, but not that much when compared to your overall renovation budget. And think of your buyer’s reaction to walking into a beautifully redone bathroom, lifting the lid, and seeing a toilet ring from a decade of limestone accumulation.

That’s why we always budget to replace every toilet in every one of our projects. When we catch a sale—like we did with the Roadrunner project—we come out ahead. But even when we pay our regular price, new toilets make a good impression on buyers, and we come out ahead.

But toilets aren’t always inexpensive, as we found out on the Ash House. The architect who designed that house used modern wall-mounted toilets. Both bathrooms in that house had beautiful brick floors, which we wanted to keep. Replacing the wall-mount toilets with freestanding ones would have required jackhammering out the brick floors to rerun the drain lines. Worse, it could have required replacing the drain lines throughout the house.

I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of the fancy wall-mounted toilets we used in the Ash House. Luckily, they are still available.

Still, we didn’t have a choice. The toilets in the house when we bought it looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in more than a decade. No way they were coming clean!—no matter how hard we scrubbed. As you can see if you follow the link on the picture of the toilet, the replacements were expensive, but I believe they were well worth the price when you see how beautiful the bathrooms ended up.

So the bottom line is simple. Budget to replace the toilets in all your renovations. They’re not sexy, especially not like a jetted tub is sexy. You’ll never hear a potential buyer exclaim how excited they are about the toilets. But old toilets can kill a deal. Spend a few more dollars to make your buyers happy, even if they don’t know it.

 

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Roadrunner Update: Week 4

Water in the drain pan of the water heater.

The water heater didn’t survive cycling the water pressure. Looks like a new one is in order.

Ruben and crew made good progress on the Roadrunner house since last week. As with almost every project I’ve ever worked on, we’re falling behind schedule. But that’s because we keep spending “invisible money” to make things right. And we found more places to spend it.

More often than not, turning off the water to a house exposes a problem with the water heater. While it is in use, water pressure keeps any rust in the tank pressed tightly against the tank walls. When the pressure is eliminated, the rust can settle to the bottom of the tank, exposing small holes in the tank wall. These holes leak when you turn the water back on.

This problem happens often enough that we budget for it in every renovation. If the tank survives cycling the water pressure, that money goes into the contingency budget and often fixes other problems, and the water heater is usually good for years. When it doesn’t survive, we replace the water heater, and our budget isn’t killed with an unplanned expense.

A man sprays texture.

Grillo sprays texture on the walls. When he’s done, the texture throughout the house will be consistent and beautiful. He always does a good job.

Last week I mentioned we had five different textures on the drywall. When skim coating and floating, we discovered that some of the drywall had not been installed correctly, and that caused undulations to telegraph through the skim coat. We removed that, fixed the underlying problems, and reinstalled new drywall—all so we could re-texture it and continue working.

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