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30 March 2009

Orange Swan's Laws of Home Renovation You're all familiar with Murphy's Law, of course. Well, here are Orange Swan’s Laws of Home Renovation.

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• If you carefully cover your entire floor with a number of drop cloths and one of them shifts about to expose an inch of floor, that inch will immediately acquire a paint splotch.

• When trying to install a light fixture, there will be a moment when you’re standing on a chair, the fixture is half installed and still needs support, and you drop the screw you need to complete the installation on the floor, six feet below you. There will be no one around to hand you the screw.

• Things always cost far more and take much longer than you ever would have thought possible.

• When especially frustrated, you will find yourself muttering a) much profanity b) phrases suitable for p0rn flicks and c) bizarre word association/stream of consciousness verbal creations (i.e., singing “fuckity fuck fuck, fuckity fuck fuck” to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”.

• You will constantly make declarations about the incompetent maintenance, atrocious housekeeping, and bad taste of the previous occupants.

• You will have “oh for CRYING OUT LOUD” moments when you discover some ridiculous attempted fix or incomprehensible mistake made by the former occupant of your place, such as finding a working electrical outlet under some wallpaper, or an excellent-condition hardware floor under green shag carpeting, or the ruination of an antique detail via a botched attempt at retro fitting it.

• You will be hampered in your attempts to do something reasonable by some heretofore unsuspected and nonsensical city ordinances, and declare your municipality to be a) a Banana Republic or b) a fascist state.

• You will occasionally find out that you have unwittingly been running some health and safety risks, such as those occasioned by mold, lead paint, faulty wiring, a dryer vent that has not been cleaned out in decades, or smoke detectors sans batteries.

• You will find very old coins in unexpected places, such as a ventilation grill or under an appliance, check the date on them, and note that it’s been decades since that specific location was cleaned or maintained.

• You will occasionally make a discovery of something charming, such as finding old mementoes tucked away in a hidey hole or an antique wallpaper behind a wall.

• The occasional disaster will strike. Quite often this disaster can involve a large quantity of water in places other than those in which you would desire it, i.e., not in a hot tub.

• Home renovations workers you hire will occasionally make comments you did not expect, such as compliments about the duvet on your bed.

• You will fondly reminisce about your days as a renter.

Feel free to add your own…

post by: Orange Swan at: 15:02 | 14 comments

I did a lot of remodeling with my father when I was a kid. I was amazed at how much underwear we would find inside walls, under/behind/over cabinets, stuffed down pipes, you name it.

posted by Ardiril 30 March | 15:07

If you have expensive sunglasses in your shirt pocket, they will irretrievably fall into the hole you are trying to peer in. The chances of this happening are inversely proportional to the cost of the sunglasses.

posted by Melismata 30 March | 15:28

singing “fuckity fuck fuck, fuckity fuck fuck” to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”

Thanks a lot, O S. This is now stuck in my head.

posted by Ardiril 30 March | 15:43

You will occasionally find out that you have unwittingly been running some health and safety risks, such as those occasioned by mold, lead paint, faulty wiring, a dryer vent that has not been cleaned out in decades, or smoke detectors sans batteries.

Hah! Occasionally? My house is 2700 square feet of health and safety risks. Lead Paint? Check. Faulty and/or exposed Wiring? Check. Asbestos wrapped pipes? Check. Dangerous staircases? Check. Structurally unsound porch? Check. Roof leak in garage causing great slabs of drywall to fall 15 feet to the floor? Check. Garage door with fifty year old opener without safety that will happily crush your foot? Check.

The good news is that I've really perfected my Tom Hanks laugh.

posted by octothorpe 30 March | 15:55

Love your list! lol... I just wish the following had happened in my case:

an excellent-condition hardware floor under green shag carpeting

We knew that our living room had beautiful dark hardwood underneath the hideous blue swirly textured carpet because the adjacent hallway and foyer had it, but when we got around to removing the carpet we discovered that it had been glued to the floor with linoleum glue! Not just the edges, every square inch of it! People are idiots.

posted by amyms 30 March | 15:56

That part in the basement? Where one section of bricks looks newer than the rest? Don't look in there.

posted by trinity8-director 30 March | 16:20

You will occasionally make a discovery of something charming, such as finding old mementoes tucked away in a hidey hole

I cheer up the future renovator by creating impromptu time capsules. For instance, behind some drywall this January I put our local paper's Obama inauguration front page, lightly curled.

Let's see if I can add some.

* You will, much more often than you believe possible, engage yourself in a minor repair which will become a major repair as you discover the conditions of the item you're working on. For example, I needed to replace a $10 toilet seat cover in a rental, but the screws were rusted shut, so I had to recip saw the bolts in two to get it off. I'm already at about $40 of my own labor. Then the bowl turns out to have a leak at the wax ring, but the bolts holding it to the floor are also badly rusted, so it's saw time again. The water supply to the toilet is metal pipe, not modern vinyl tubing, so I have to undo that as well. When the bowl is all the way off at last, it turns out that the plastic flange on which it's mounted (which is screwed to the subfloor with ... you guessed it ... rusty screws) is cracked.

* Some problems only make themselves clear after the labor of a fix has been attempted. For instance, I had a door that was rubbing on the carpet. It's a hollow core so it took a couple of days to glue all the edges back together. I had to put toothpick filler in the hinge screw holes because the stress of dragging had pulled them loose (then it turned out that it was 1/16" out of alignment, so I had to do this over!). Finally, with the door hung properly again, it transpires that the bottom hinge needs shimming out, or the door will just keep dragging on the carpet.

* You will at times be faced with the prospect of taking apart the rather simple thing, only to find that putting it together again is fiendishly complicated. In my case, the rail for a sliding closet door. I have all the parts, I just can't seem to get them in the right place to allow the doors to be supported at the right height and slide easily back and forth.

posted by stilicho 30 March | 16:39

I love all the above!

*When you attempt a task that you've not done before, you will engage in a learning process. By the time the task is 70% complete, you will figure out how it should have been done. If you're crazy/simple-minded enough to do said task again, you will figure out how not to do it after 30% of the job is done.

*Any task will be finished it to where it's perpetually 95% complete.

posted by mightshould 30 March | 17:01

1. You will find out that the person who sold you the house bought a "10 year" water heater, that lasted about 12. You will be amazed how little he paid for it, and how poorly he installed it.

2. You will also be amazed that someone could install ceramic tile in a BATHROOM over particle (chip) board, with the kind of mastic one uses for vinyl, rather than thinset cement. With the inevitable expansion of the before-mentioned particle board, you will have lotsa fun and go through a lot of products before finally finding the right caustic chemical to remove the mastic from the tiles, which were leftovers and not made anymore.

posted by danf 30 March | 17:01

In Turkey they use mastic as an ice cream topping.

posted by mudpuppie 30 March | 17:34

The other Laws of Home Renovations people are posting go VERY well with the ones I wrote.;-)

posted by Orange Swan 30 March | 18:40

We knew that our living room had beautiful dark hardwood underneath the hideous blue swirly textured carpet because the adjacent hallway and foyer had it, but when we got around to removing the carpet we discovered that it had been glued to the floor with linoleum glue! Not just the edges, every square inch of it!

I'm familiar with that particular piece of idiocy...

posted by dersins 30 March | 19:11

In my house we call it "attack of the ex husband" in which everything done wrong is blamed on my landlord's ex husband.

Sheet of drywall used to wall up a still-there window, with no insulation? Attack of the ex husband!
Three breakers for a 1500 square foot apartment? Attack of the ex husband! Those breakers just existing as a failsafe to keep you from blowing a still-active 1930s vintage fuse? Guess who?!

yeah, it's exciting. On the plus side, my rent works out to be less than thirty five cents a square foot, so I can't complain too much.

posted by kellydamnit 30 March | 23:22

We're considering renovating our kitchen this summer. I'm terrified.

We've found garbage in the walls. U-pipes that crumble away when you tap on them. Faulty seal at the base of the toilet? Scratch that, it's a MISSING seal at the base of the toilet! Le sigh.

posted by heatherann 31 March | 12:54

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