I figure you guys could explain it better than wikipedia. Is it like home renovation? It sounds something like salvaging homes that used to be unlivable. Am I right?
There’s no rigid distinction, but I think most people would understand home renovation to mean updating an old house, condition otherwise unknown, whereas rehabbing suggests the place is in pretty bad shape, but not necessarily unlivable. Gut rehabbing like we did isn’t all that common; I’d say most people live in the house and do a room at a time. As it was we moved in before the work was anywhere near done.
That’s what we did, and are doing. Room by room restoration, construction.
Gut rehabbing and room-by-room rehabbing is very cool and all. But I’d settle for a bit of threshold-by-threshold rehabbing by someone more competent than me at my place. The external wood at my front and rear doors is rotting and needs to be replaced before they get worse.
I’ve got oak floors. Beautiful, yes but problematic because I can’t get replacement thresholds. The fields of the floor are fine, but there is edging which parallels the baseboards throughout the house. At the front and back doors the edging extends through the doorways (beneath the door iself and is exposed to the weather) into a 3/4 inch bullnose, returns to the face of the house and drops another 3 inches.
The best I (and a few neighborhood handimen/contractors) can tell it’s made out of a solid 8"x4" pieces of oak that have been milled into thresholds No one knows where to get one and those that can make 'em (out of multiple smaller pieces of oak) want hundreds of dollars and a week or two to make 'em. Problem is, I’d need to totally disassemble the front or rear doorway soo they could get a cross section of the pieces.
Grrrrr…
This is where the brothers of the right way will tell you to grit your teeth, pay the money, and do it right. You don’t need to totally disassemble the doorway, but you’ll certainly need to take apart the sill. A couple hundred dollars and a week or two sounds pretty reasonable to me - probably the millshop will need to have a knife made, plus there’s a setup fee, then you’ll need a good finish carpenter to install the sill. Finally somebody will have to sand the whole thing flat and stain and varnish it. A lot of work, I know, but an 8x4-inch milled sill … nobody does that now. That’s gotta be a century old.
And you really do want the replacement to be as good as the original so it can last another hundred years.
I about cried when watching one of those flip this house programs when the freaking jackasses took a sawsall to a pristine fitted wooden wall in a pasadena craftsman to install a 50 inch flatscreen tv entertainment center. I could see if the wood was rotted, or damaged, but pristine :eek::(:mad:
I swear, if I were the family filmed as looking at it to buy it in some episode, I am afraid I would rip them a new asshole for totally ruining an original wall like that. :mad:
Funny, I don’t even remember making this thread. I wonder what kind of houses zombies live in.
Rehab . Isn’t that like when you have a drug problem like Amy Whinehouse. Just Joking. All home repairs of an existing house is my best answer. The bummer is when a person has to remodel the new remodel because the first contractor or home owner jacked it all up. That is why the expression "Do it right the first time " exists
WE live in the same kind of houses you do, except my house is a Great House to Me, even if it is small in terms of sq. ft. Zombies don’t need as much room as the ordinary person