I'm having a really frustrated night. You know those days when everything seems really bleak and problems seem insurmountable? Yeah, it's that kind of night. It's another one of those awesome when-it-rains-it-pours type things, where there're a lot of things that need fixing and I don't even know where to begin to fix them all. The house we live in needs work, more work than I thought, and I'm frustrated at the prospect of having to spend the time/money to do the work.
The annoying thing is that I was having a perfectly fine day. Then, I had a surge of energy and decided to shampoo the carpet in my living room. Having two dogs living inside the house, the carpet needed it. Turns out my carpet shampooer is broken/leaking and when I put water in it, the water all leaks out onto the carpet. Yes, this made a huge damn mess. I dealt with it for about half the floor before I decided it was too much a problem to go on. I'm just going to throw the stupid thing away, it only cost $100 or so.
Instead, I really want to replace the floor in the living room. It's cheap carpet and has been in the house for the last 8 years. It's time. So, I want to put in vinyl plank flooring because it's waterproof and the laminate floating plank flooring isn't. The issue here, of course, isn't the flooring. The flooring is really inexpensive, it'll only cost us about $200 to do our living room, the issue is that the subfloor near the windows is wet underneath the carpet. It's bulging and moldy, so it really needs to be replaced. This happened because the windows leak. So, now I'm worried that the joists under the subfloor (which is just plyboard) are also needing to be replaced because they might also be wet/molding/rotten.
Yeah, one big ol' problem after another. Fortunately, it's only a small section of subfloor and joists that need replacing so I'm thinking that after Christmas, at the beginning of the year, I'll get an estimate from someone who actually knows what the hell they're doing to replace it. I can't imagine it'll be
that expensive. It's not the whole living room (I hope--I'd have to take up all the carpet to see, but I don't think so).
Oh, and this all compounds the fact that our heater still doesn't work and the fact that our manager wants us to replace part of the skirting on the house because it's broken and there're places we can see under the house. I have idea how much it'll cost to replace the heater, hopefully it'll be reasonable. The skirting is another issue, it wouldn't need replacing if the maintenance people hadn't chipped the crap out of it with the weed eater. The skirting has all these little holes along the bottom because they got too close, too often, with the weed eater. Matt thinks he can fix the skirting (which should be interesting), so we're going to do that soon because it's only $10 or so a panel.
Finally, we need new steps. I was hoping to get a deck built in the front of the house, but with all the other repairs, we're going to have to pass on that. So, I'm looking into getting fiberglass steps. The ones we have now are wood and they're falling apart. Sadly, the fiberglass steps are going to be expensive. They're about $400 + $75 for the railing and $110 for shipping. Bleh. Almost $600 for steps. That sucks. So, I might just see about building wooden steps instead, hopefully it won't be nearly as pricy.
So yeah, I'm ticked off and frustrated, but I also know that some of the issues
absolutely must be fixed to prevent bigger problems. And I guess I have to fix the stupid leaking windows. And the irony? If I had fixed the leaking windows years ago, I wouldn't be having the problem with the sub flooring at all, which is going to be the biggest part of the job. It just sucks. But, it'll be a new project to start a new year and when it's done I'll be able to install the new floors, which were the whole reason I started looking at the subflooring to begin with.
Whew! There's a lot to do, and it's going to be expensive to do it, but ranting about all of it is actually making me feel better. Awesome.
