Home Improvement - The Planning Stage

1909.  That's the year my house was built so this year it celebrates (or has celebrated) its 112th birthday.  Lot's of maintenance, lots to improve.  Keeps me busy as I am in no rush to get it all done.  I figure some day I will die and anything undone will be passed on to the next owner.  Meanwhile I try to do the best I can for projects I can do myself and hire good people for those I can't.

    Was going to insert a picture here of the house but my Seagate Goflex Drive, where years of pictures are stored, has apparently given up the ghost.  The power button no longer works although if I hold it down I can hear the drive spooling up.  So yet another expenditure, this time to buy a new backup drive.  I do have the cables to hook up the old drive so just need somewhere to dump everything.

Bathroom: My upstairs bathroom has some sort of weird tub leak.  Can't figure out where it's coming from, including using a scope to look through a hole in the wall at the underside of the cast iron, built in tub.  Well, I hate the bathroom anyway and have long wanted to redo it, so maybe it's time.  Oh yeah, it also has a galvanized sink drain which drains slowly and which I've been told not to snake as the snake might punch right through the galvanized pipe.  Oh yeah, it also has a big crack in the cast iron toilet drain pipe which a plumber friend and I sealed using 100% silicone, but only after cutting a hole in the kitchen ceiling in order to access it.  So yes, it needs a reno.

Kitchen: The kitchen is sort of crummy.  Other than the big hole in the ceiling (currently covered with a pinned up old bedsheet to prevent dust and debris from falling into my cooking) it has a soft floor with lots of broken tile, old ugly cabinets, an old ugly countertop, and a stove vent fan that was originally held together with lots of duct tape and now isn't attached at all since I was a bit concerned about the "taped together dryer ducting" that had been used and didn't particularly want to replace that.  In other words, I would like a new kitchen, even though the current one is serviceable.  Don't need new appliances as I have a nice stove and dishwasher, as well as a cool new fridge which I may have blogged about.

Laundry Room and Powder Room:.  So there is this little extension off the back of the house.  About four feet deep.  Runs the width of the house with the exception of five feet on each side, so about fourteen feet wide.  Half of it opens of the dining room and contains the powder room (bathroom with toilet and sink for those of you unfamiliar with the term).  The other half opens off the kitchen and contains (barely) the laundry machines.  It is fine, for what it is.  Hard to get at the laundry machines but I've adjusted.  Annoying that people go to the bathroom during dinner in a room right off the dining room but I rarely have people over.  And I can always send them upstairs.  Plan, if I am going crazy with renovations anyway, is to push out the back of the extension by an extra eight feet.  Gives me an extra 112 square feet of space.  The space would be used for adding a shower to the bathroom after moving the entrance to the bathroom into the new space and sealing up the dining room wall access; and creating a mudroom off the back of the house that would have laundry plus storage.  

I'll provide pictures as I go but I figure the first step is to invest in someone who can visualize projects and improvements.