Oh yeah, the doors. Replaced over time almost every interior door with an antique one, including hardware. There’s an architectural antique place in downtown Houston called Adkins and it’s been an amazing resource. I’ve also been able to find there various old chests and other pieces I customized or dismantled and rebuilt to furnish my daughter’s room and storage pieces for the garage. Yes, it’s ridiculous but my garage looks like a turn of the century drive through general store.
Our first house was in Vermont, a 150-year old Cape Cod. Spent the next eight years renovating it. Wirred the entire house (when got it, it had just one line to the kitchen), put copper plumbing throughout, build kitchen counters, knotty pine on the walls, new wallpaper (awful job), etc.
The biggest project was building a brick fireplace. I got 2,000 interesting old used bricks. Spent a month with a mason’s hammer knocking all the old mortor off.
Then build a cement block foundation in the cellar, cut a hole in the 1s story floor, poured a cement base for the hearth, then started the brick laying. Used an old hand-hewn beam for the mantle piece, then cut hole in 2nd story floor, moved up the chimney, and before cutting through the roof, build a scaffold and platform on the ridge. Hauled all the flue tile, bricks and morter up there before cutting a hole through the roof to finish the job, praying for no rain. Prayers answered.
All this in my “spare” time while was working 60 hours a week or so. This was many years ago, so can’t recall how long the entire job took, but when done it really looked great, as the old brick was compatible with the design of that wonderful old house.
I submitted it to a contest for home improvements run by Popular Mechanics magazine and won third place.
After doing this sort of thing on three successive houses, I’m now old enough to hire everything done! 
We built our house and barn. Ok, contracting out a bunch.
We means my part in the transaction is saying to my husband " Do you want super sized fries and a Huge Diet coke with the Big Mac?" and I disappear for hours and return and the project is done to mostly done. It is for a much better relationship if I am not standing around with my finger up my nose and getting assigned the peon jobs of sweeping and cleaning windows from the Approved Stickers from Da Man.
My job now, since kidlets, is to Keep Them Away From Him while he nips off into his Man Cave ( the barn) for hours and comes in all covered in grease or sawdust periodically to use the toilet. if we could afford the septic feild for the barn or at least a composting toilet out there, I’d never see him on weekends. One afternoon he ripped down the newly built staircase that was a nth of an inch off at the top (staircases are never perfect…ever.) and rebuilt them to have them only be slightly more off by the time he finished. This vexed his German Anal Retentiveness greatly.
I have, I am proud to say, hung up pictures in our upstairs hallway with roofing nails and using the heel of my cowboy boots to drive it into the drywall all by myself. Where do I pick up my prize?
I’ve only been a homeowner for 6 months now so I’ve got a lot of catching up to do!
All I’ve done so far is:
- Painted the living room and 4 bedrooms (at night in November - thus, in the dark!)
- Hung up an ungodly amount of window treatments
- Cut down and logged 4 trees, and 2 large parts of other trees
- Chipped about 1 ton worth of treebranches/prickers/cuttings
- Removed, at the stump, 4 large evergreen bushes
Still to do this summer:
- Paint the exterior
- Fill in dirt around the foundation
- Make beds around the foundation with all my new mulch
- Fix my lawn so it’s not so fugly
I don’t see myself doing any major building or excavating like you guys have. I think I know my limits too.
Although during the past year I have been helping every weekend at my church - they’re building a huge extension onto the existing building and I’ve learned:
- Making wood wall frames (weilding a hammer, using an air hammer)
- Hanging roof trusses
- Putting up floor joists for the second floor
- Hanging drywall in hard-to-reach places (cutting and measuring drywall)
- Using a power screwdriver
- Laying stone tile and grouting stone tile (mixing mortar and mixing grout)
- Putting in insulation in hard-to-reach places
- Carrying very very heavy things and lifting them up
So if I ever need to build a building, I’m there 
I say this deserves a Honorable Mention For Creativity and General Kickass-ness 
One thing we did that was a huge PITA but ended up giving really pleasing results was to overlay the covered sidewalk between the house and garage with antique brick pavers. Many of these had originally come over as ballast on Dutch merchant ships and had “brick” stamped into them in Dutch, although I’ve no idea why anyone would need “brick” written on a brick to know it’s a brick. The rest were from Chicago, warehouses I’m guessin’ and many showed evidence of a fire. These were thin cut, about 3 or 4 pavers from a single brick, and whenever writing was on them I put that side up, arranging them in a staggered and lined pattern. Hard work kneeling on the sidewalk and mortaring them in but well worth it. They and the full bricks I wrapped around the bottom third of the covered roof’s support beams really added a nice touch to an otherwise plain sidewalk. I carried that look out to the yard too, circling the big oak with a ring of full brick, lined the kid’s playhouse and built a remote patio in the shade with them, perfect for warm afternoons.
Well, thank you ! I was only working out of sheer desperation since all the tools were outside ( very far away) in the driveway…and I was…um…lazy.
Roofing nails, for those of you who aren’t in the know ( like I wasn’t) are too large and long ( ooooh, phallic!) to use for the delicate chore of hanging pictures. According to my Husband, who knows about these things. If he had hung them when I had asked ( 3 nagging years of nagging) this kind of thing would not have happened.
See. It is his fault.
This is a minor expansion of a posting in a old thread
Plumbing is the spawn of Satan.
I’ve got two stories because I have two bathrooms.
Upstairs
“Honey, come look at this.”
“This” is a 4x4 tile that has dropped off the shower wall. I reach to the wall and feel the area where the tile has dropped off. The wallboard is mushy. Water is leaking under the wall somewhere. There’s no way this tile is going to reattach to that soft surface.
I pull at the surrounding tiles and, without any effort, lift a half-dozen more from the wall.
OK - I need to patch the wall and replace the shower stall somehow. I decide that I’m going to replace the tile with a fiberglass surround because I don’t feel like messing with trying to do my own tilework. Plus, I think grout is a pain to maintain.
“Gee, Dear, why don’t we replace the tub while you’re at it, it’s got those nasty chips in the enamel.” It does look bad and this is a perfect opportunity. Rent a truck, get wallboard, the fiberglass surround, & the new tub from the home store.
Remove the toilet to make room. Strip off all the ceramic tiles, haul them out. Pull down the wallboard, haul it out. (All the wallboard has to come out to remove the tub.) Pull out the tub (easier said than done) and haul it out. Now the upstairs bath has visible studs around half its circumference, the tub is missing.
While pulling out the tub I nicked the shower fixture snapping off the stem. The stem is replaceable so I’m off (again) to the Home Despot to buy a replacement. Fully three replacements later, each replacement having not sealed correctly, I’m back again buying an entirely new shower/bath valve. By the way, the shower never did have any shutoff valves so the entire house has had its water turned off for all of this. I buy the copper tubing, valves, blowtorch, etc. to add the valves & fixture during this time, too.
Install the new in-line ball valves for the shower, wrestle the new tub into position. Find that the old drain pipe doesn’t line up with the new drain hole. Spend an afternoon, including another trip to the hardware store, getting the tub level and the drain and overflow lined up.
Take my newly aquired soldering skills for a test drive and install the new shower fixture. Wallboard over the exposed studs (another new skill) & paint.
Since that shower wall connects to our bedroom on one side and our garage attic on the other. I decided that I was going to run a coax cable in that wall before the wallboard was up. This would allow me to bring cable TV to the bedroom. While drilling the hole into the attic, I drilled in the wrong place and made a hole to the outside. This, of course, had to be sealed, too.
Here’s the expansion from the orignal thread.
The flooring was pryed up (two-pieces of sheet vinyl that didn’t actually meet at a straight seam) and replaced with 12-inch ceramic tile with dark-green accent pieces. Lots of cutting and piecing since I bias-set the tile. The accent pieces, of course, required lots of corners to be knocked off to fit them. I actually was one accent tile short, on a tile no longer produced, but was lucky enough to be able to cut one in half to fit at two boundary edges.
New vanity bought & a new granite top & bowl installed. New faucet & lighting fixtures including some swanky halogen cabinet lights mounted under the medicine cabinet to add sexy highlights to the granite top.
Now - the walls were a combination of old and new wallboard. In retrospect, I should’ve torn it all out rather than try to match the old & new. It would’ve been easier by far and probably cheaper, too.
The old wallboard had an orange-peel texture applied, the new stuff, of course, did not. I had two choices, smooth the old stuff or texture the new to match. I decided to go the first route thinking I’d never match the textures well enough. It took a week, applying layers of mud & sanding it flat, trying to feather onto the new wallboard without leaving a bulge. I think there’s four layers of mud concealing the old texture.
Paint to match, and it’s a swanky new bathroom. The only original piece left is the old toilet bowl.
Never did connect that cable to the bedroom…
Downstairs
One day I notice that there’s water leaking around the base of my toilet. If you’ve been a homeowner for a while, you accept this and run down to the hardware store, buy a new wax seal for $1.25 and replace it.
However, massochist that I am, I decided this would be perfect time to replace the nasty tile that’s in that bathroom, after all, the toilet will be up off the floor already. (The previous owners were the Larry, Moe, and Curly of home maintenance so when they installed vinyl floor tile, they didn’t feel it necessary to actually make the edges touch or anything so mundane.)
So down to the home store with the Wife to pick out a floor pattern. We find one she likes only to find they that store doesn’t have enough. So three stores later I find enough to do the project. It’s simply peel-and-stick urethane squares - easy, right?
I scrape the old floor up. It’s no small task and when I’m done the remaing floor smells like tar and is gloppy with glue. Turns out the Larry, Moe, & Curly used the wrong adhesive which actually never cured. I scrape it up and leave remaining bits to harden.
Now when I peeled the floor up, the bottom track of the folding closet door that was in that bath got peeled up to. Some genius had decided that gluing to the floor was the appropriate installation method and it was destroyed on removal. Given that a flimsy metal door (late 70’s construction) needs both a top and bottom track, this renders the door useless and it needs replaced.
While the remaing glue is curing, my visiting mother gets curious and lays a few unpeeled squares out to see how the finished floor will look. She marvels for a moment and walks off. These tiles will have to be scraped off the floor since they get glued down by the curing original glue.
Finally, the floor is ready for the new tile. I plan, cut, peel & stick may way around the room and it looks good. I bring the toilet back in and turn it over to scrape away the old floor seal. While it’s upside down, I see the reason there was water on the floor. There’s a small, triangular piece of porcelain missing which was filled with the original wax seal until it dried too much.
Once again, back to Home Despot for a new toilet and seat. Place the wax seal, seat the toilet, and all finished. My $1.25 wax seal cost somewhere around $300 all told. The new closet door is still waiting to be hung.
When I moved into my condo I:
replaced the carpeting in the whole place
painted the walls and ceiling of every room (kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom)
replaced the kitchen cabinets, sink, dishwasher, range
replaced the kitchen and bathroom tile
replaced the toilet, sink, vanity cabinet, and medicine cabinet in the bathroom
replaced the light fixtures
replaced the door handles/locks
All the work except the carpet installation was done by myself and my parents. It took about a week of working 12-15 hour days to complete, and let me tell you, it isn’t fun not having a toilet.
**Belrix ** could be my twin, for all of the 79¢ fixits that turned into mini-remodels.
And one of my more recent projects started with a wax ring.
“Why does it always smell like pee in here?”
That’s never a good question for your mate to ask. From experience, I surmised the toilet’s wax ring had dried out, shifted or otherwise gone AWOL. That’s probably why the toilet’s been a bit wiggly. I can do this! I’ve done wax rings before! Off to the store for a wax ring! I’ll have this finished before lunch! Yay!
Go to bathroom, wax ring in one hand (yech…) and wrench in the other. Shut off the water, disconnect water line. Drip drip drip drip… Hmph. Try to tighten valve more. DRIP! DRIP! DRIP! DRIP! Oh crud, I forgot to offer a sacrifice to the plumbing gods. Eh, I won’t have the toilet off for long, so I pop a bucket under the end of the water line.
Unbolt toilet and pull it off. What’s all this stuff that looks like coffee grounds? EWWW! No, not that. AHHHH! It’s disintegrated subfloor! How long has this toilet been leaking? I poke at the mess and find it is all the way through and has extended beyond the footprint of the toilet. Remember the part about the wiggly toilet?
Honey! You didn’t really like this floor tile, anyway, didja?
Happily, this is a toilet and tub room, so the toilet was the only thing that had to come out. Pry out the old sodden flooring, then measure to find how big and how thick a piece of whatever I’ll need.
Back to the store. Get a suitably-sized piece of stuff cut to the right size so I can just drop it in. Pick new tile. It’s a guest bath. Vinyl squares will be more than adequate. Clever me! I even remembered to get the threshold strip that covers where tile meets carpet at the door.
Back at home. Cut a hole for the toilet drain, attempt to drop in the flooring. A midge too wide here… nice crescent-shaped scrape on the wall. Trim the stuff, and now it goes in. Nail it down and prime it so the tiles stick better. Not gonna be done by lunchtime. Aim a fan at the floor so the primer dries faster while I have lunch.
Honey? As long as I have to re-paint the scraped wall, do we want to keep that color? No? OK, let’s go pick a new color.
Three hours later, return to the scene of the crime with new paint in hand. Close to two hours to prep and paint goes by. Plan to do second coat after dinner.
Tomorrow
Paint looks good, but now the trim looks crappy. At least that’s just white and we have white trim paint. Might as well do it now, so any drips are on the plywood. Room’s too small to try and lay tile while there’s wet trim paint. Come back after lunch to do the tile.
Tile’s in. So’s the threshold strip. Put in the toilet. Bolt it down and connect the water. Sop up the drips. Turn the water back on. More drips, but from under the handle. Handle has no apparent means of removal and there’s no apparent anything to be tightened to stop the drip. Strange valve! Back to the store to get a replacement valve. Might as well replace the water line that’s between valve and toilet, or it will spite me a week later and burst.
Turn off all water to house, replace valve, hook it all back up and turn water on. Success. No drips.
“Now that you’ve painted the walls and put in the new floor, that light fixure looks really dated…”
How exactly did a wax ring morph into a sheet of underlayment, one gallon paint, one box of tiles, one threshold strip, an angle stop, a new toilet supply line, new light switch, new wall plate, new ceiling light, a new toilet seat and five trips to the store?
At least it no longer smells like pee.
Master bedroom/bathroom remodel. Tore out the wall between the MBR and bath. The bath was typical small full bath. The bedroom was 15 X 18 feet. We made the bathroom 3 feet wider, installed a separate shower and whirlpool marble tub, plus twin vanity towers and lots of cabinets.
So now, I know how to build walls, make straight walls (ever check the squareness of your walls? Sometimes one is surprised at the sloppiness of the original contractors.), put up drywall, tape/mud in/sand drywall, primer, paint, hang wallpaper, put cabinets together, install same, take out old toilet, install new one, install sink, etc.
Priceless experience. There isn;t much I’m afraid to do on the house any more.
We did hire licensed professionals to do the plumbing, electrical work, marble tub and shower, and carpeting & tile. But it was still a massive job.
Well worth it. We have a dynamite bathroom and a still-large master bedroom, but one that is of more “human” proportions.
wow, I feel like small potatoes with mine.
I put in chair molding in the living room so I could run surround sound wires and cat 5 cable to the entertainment center.
You and I combined could take on da world
We hire people for nearly everything. My husband has a tendency to “over-toolbelt” everything, if you know what I mean. He’s great around cars, but carpentry is not his strong suit. Either is just about anything else. We did plumbing in the bathroom together once and nearly drew blood (and weapons). Last time we have a “Happy Couple Under The Sink” moment ever again. I swear.
We built my house, and we built my brothers house. From the dirt up.
Then we remodled my house, then we remodled my brothers house. We work as a family contracting unit. I just got done moving my parents into a house that is ‘completed.’ It is driving my dad nuts! He wants to tear out walls…
Forgot to mention the softer, sinister side of my hardware adventure. The towels don’t match the paint. This was resolved with a roundabout shopping expedition to Target, Linens-n-Things and Bed Bath and Beyond. Target had ugly towels but had “Oh, these shower curtain hooks are just a-DOR-a-ble!” LnT had just the right shower curtain to go with the new hooks and BB&B had the perfect towels, plus a trash can and assorted sink-top doo-dads like soap dishes and toothbrush holders. Somewhere along the line, it was decided that the existing towel bars and hooks were also dated and had to be updated.
<record scratch noise> The part of the bathroom I was working in didn’t have a sink! Thanks to a strange hotel-style layout, the tub and toilet are in a separate room, so there’s no place to put or use a soap dish, and who would want to put their toothbrush on the toilet? Decorating Accessory Creep has set in. I just hope I can stop it dead in its tracks before it finds its way to the kitchen.
A tiny bathroom - all of 3x5 feet of floor space, plus the tub - involved visiting three housewares stores, plus six trips to the local Big Orange Home Center.
Remember, it all started with one wax ring.
I helped my father in law build an entire 2-story “beach cottage” from scratch. And I mean from clearing rocks and digging foundation trenches. He did most of the work himself, but I got to do a little wall framing, a little wiring, a little tiling and plumbing, roofing, panneling…
Damn thing took 15 months, and in the end we all moved away and he was stuck with a white elephant and sold it. Broke his little heart.
Our first remodeling job as a couple started with a couple of broken floor tiles in the kitchen. After deciding to retile the floor, we couldn’t very well have the 70’s era faux wood laminate countertops could we? And who’da thunk that the cabinets underneath the countertops would be rotten? And of course we needed new appliances. And lighting. And a decorative wall or two…new paint, chair rails… It took two years to get my new floor installed1 But I absolutely love it!
I’m really just the cleanup helper - hubby is da man! He can do anything. I tease him as to how many “sh*ts and dammits” this job will take…
I added 750 square feet the the rear of my house. This includes a master suite, laundry room and a third bedroom. I have also remodeled. two original bedrooms, making one of them into an office/library. I’m presently remodeling the living room and then have the kitchen still to do. Remodeling consists of tearing everything out back to the studs, new wiring, insulation, drywall, etc. Resided the original house years ago. I can’t remember how many times I’ve reroofed. I’ve done all the work myself. It helps to have been in construction all of my adult life.
Here are some pics from our master suite and office/library. First pic is from a webcam. Sorry aboput the poor quality.
On the current house I basically leveled the back yard, put in a rumbled retaining wall (about a meter and a half high), built a planter in the back for the wifes bits of plants and such, put in an automatic sprinkler system (plus drip system for the planter) and will probably put in the sod sometime in the next two weeks. Thats the biggest project so far in the new house.
In my house in Maryland I (with my father in laws and significant help from other friends and family) took a two bedroom one story beach house (about 900 sq ft) and turned it into a 4 bedroom home of about 2000 sq ft with an upstairs master bedroom/bathroom/study. To date thats got to be the biggest home improvement I’ve done for my own house. It basically trippled the value of the house/property…and it was well worth it (mostly for sentimental reasons I won’t go into here).
-XT