2016 was a busy year for improvement projects. We replaced the furnace and air-conditioner, the roof, the driveway, the garage doors, the front door handles and the toilet in our bathroom. The caulking was stripped out and replaced with impeccable silicone, and most of the outside was painted – the painters “forgot” two windows.
I did the deck railings, the toilet and the door locks and some re-sodding and the rest was contracted out with varying degrees of success, which evaluation described the home grown efforts as well. After the air-conditioner was replaced, we found the trellis panel around it had been removed and replaced very roughly, and I had to remove it, re-construct it and replace it, and also baby the clematis plant which had formerly been growing up it until it was torn out. The double front doors needed matching handles (one reversed inside) and the parts we received didn’t match what we expected, so only one handle is up. However, the replacement “comfort height” toilet (aka the magic throne), which is easier to dismount for those with bad knees, went in with hardly a murmur (except for getting 100lbs of ceramic up the stairs, that is.) I was flushed with success. (The deck railing project was not so nice – it turned out there was lots of wood rot to be dealt with, so I think it took over a week, filling, waiting for epoxy to set, sanding, filling again…)
We carefully considered the order of the front projects, so that trade A was not messing up the work done by trade B, and for the most part, got it right. We didn’t know we were getting new door handles, and naturally, they were a different size and shape, so I had to quickly touch up the paint on the front door. However, the weatherstripping around the garage doors was a different matter. The painters wouldn’t remove the old, so I did, before they arrived, so they had a nice flat surface to sand and paint in case the new weatherstripping didn’t cover the part where the old one had stopped (where there was a ridge of old paint). Unfortunately, the painters in their wisdom decided the new weather stripping would cover the ridge so didn’t sand it down, just painted over it. Naturally, when the garage door went in the next day, the new stripping didn’t cover the ridge. As it had taken me a couple of hours to dig out all the screws to remove the old for the painters (which otherwise the door installers would have done) I was rather upset.
One nice result from the garage door project was that our neighbour had the exact same doors, and as our bottom section was in better shape than hers, she got that, and Mary-Jo’s cousin took the complete door from the other side to replace her broken door.
So here are some photos, and a video showing some of the work and machinery that has been bothering the neighbourhood this year.
