The Home Projects Are Picking Us This Year

I had plans for this year and already the universe points and laughs.   We still have carpet on the stairs that looks horrible so we were going to retread them and replace the horrible dated balusters which look relatively easy to do.  (I know.... famous last words!)  Then some smaller decorative projects to finish up the master bedroom.  We didn't want anything remotely as disrupting as what we went through last year and those seemed like reasonable projects to shoot for.  

I did not plan on 2 1/2 months since being "done" with the biggest parts of the master bedroom being choked out with noxious fumes on the daily.  There's no better way to start your day than with dry eyes, congestion, a burning throat and hacking up a lung trying to get the 'low voc' water based stain out of every pore of your body.  Then not knowing if it was the found-out-too-late info of potentially cancer causing outgassing fumes from the vinyl mural was the culprit or the wood I spent so much time distressing, staining and waxing.  I sealed the mural with two coats of clear furniture wax, let it cure for 2 weeks (and let my shoulder recover from the privilege) before applying 2 more coats and knowing I'll have to reseal it with two coats every or every other year.  I told you guys before that I used a sample of no voc varnish to find on an extra board that it did block the stain smell so I found a matte version of a similar varnish so it wouldn't look like a 70's nightmare.  While I was not jacked about having to seal the wood wall/shelf on a project I was relieved to be done with, it had to be done or the wood was going to get ripped out.  Can you effing imagine after all we'd been through having to rip it out??  (Though I will say, if you are in attached living- don't do it.  I swear that wood is now just an amplifier for the witch's drawers closing on her nightstand and down in her kitchen reverbing up through the studs.  We did not have the ability to put thicker drywall on so yeah, I have to live with that one.)

Speaking of a-hole neighbors, we have no choice but to re-drywall our entire party walls.  The quality of life here has swirled and it's even worse now that these dicks are working from home right along with us.  I know we're not quiet as mice but I've lived in attached living my whole life except for two years (which was heavenly) so I was trained to be courteous to neighbors.  No one else has gotten that memo.  The guy next door who has two renters now since his wife left him (also a slammer) after he held her hostage and threatened 6 police officers with a gun slams morning, noon and night.  And I mean as late as 1am and as early as 4am.  If you think we're talking to a man who isn't afraid to point a gun at 6 cops and got away with it is high on our priority list, you would be mistaken.  He slams the microwave, every cupboard door, the washer and dryer and mounted a TV to the wall.  This all is attached to every space of our living area.  I have nightly anxiety attacks starting at 7pm knowing I've got an hour if I'm lucky until he starts blasting his talk shows or now, his new addition of music.  Sometimes, we get the honor of him slamming the sliding closet door like he's ending an argument or sounds like he just randomly throws a bowling ball at the wall and makes me jump out of my skin.  Yep, we've looked at moving and you've seen the markets out there.  We haven't had a mortgage in 8 years.  Would you be anxious to get one that was 3-4x the amount you paid when you had one for a house that will need reno's and meant you would basically never have another vacation again?   (We haven't found a single one we liked in 15 years and I look weekly.)  So we know we can't really afford to go anywhere with this BS of the housing market even with $150K down.  We found a dealer who can get the Sound Break drywall and we'll get a quote for installation of both one and two layers.  I know we can't control the stomping around because of the joists but if we could get even a 50% improvement on the amount of noise coming through our walls, it would dial down my 24/7 anxiety.  Even going upstairs doesn't help because we hear him slamming in his kitchen which is directly connected to the stairs.  It is hell on Earth but I read about people who live in free standing houses next to people with non stop barking dogs, loud music, her-dee-der hee hawin', mowing the lawn at 7am on a weekend just as much.  This does not bode well for someone incredibly sensitive to sound.  It has to be installed going both upstairs and down and we know that isn't something we could DIY for his side.  We'll have to see how that goes and if it works well, then we'll have to work on her side and her untrained barking dog.  It literally sounds like they're in our house now.  My temporary solution is a loud white noise maker and I think I'm training her that when the dog is out of control, that comes on and she doesn't like it so she'll actually "parent" at times to keep things quieter some days.

But guess what we have to do BEFORE we can get to that?  Upgrade our electrical panel.  Yep.  We've never felt super confident in the wiring here when it was brand new in early 1996.  If you ran the vacuum, you'd get that little flicker of the lights throughout the whole house when you turned it on.  It's only gotten worse as time passes.  It got noticeably bad when we had the kitchen reno done.  They moved the hole for the chandelier which had been done before but we also had them install LED recessed lights in the cave of a living room.  (We were too poor at 21 and 23 to pay $45 for the rough in and it's the biggest mistake we ever made not begging for $1 from each family member and friend and that we'd pay them back with wedding money.  That $45 cost us over $1000 24 years later!)  All of the lights on the first floor will flicker every now and then especially in the kitchen.  We couldn't even do the Edison lights I originally had because it would flicker so much it was like a damn disco in there!  It never happened right away, so I just thought they were crappy bulbs.  But then when I noticed the following year that the recessed lights would do it when they were set on the middle of the dimmer intermittently, I started looking crap up.  The final nail in the coffin was the electric fireplace in the bedroom.  When you turn that on, if the air purifier was on in there, the purifier output would drop to about 50%.  It's insanity.  Welp, that has to be done first because if they need to poke around in the drywall, it isn't going to be after we've just paid thousands to add a layer or two onto the existing.

This isn't even addressing the hot water tank that desperately needs replaced and sounds like someone playing marbles with metal ball bearings when it's heating up or if the dishwasher or washer is running.  😑  That one is going to have to get pushed out as far as we can go with it.  We're hoping it's just more of a nuisance thing right now because it's not more than 10 years old.  

So who knows if the stairs will even get touched this year or next since we'll be in the market for a new car and all of the rules have been thrown out the window on a 30 year process we're used to.  We can't do the stairs until the drywall is done because I'm not having them get ruined after putting all of the time and expense into it.   I haven't slept for a solid hour due to the slamming and anxiety of anticipating the slamming in four days now.  I was supposed to do taxes but I honestly don't trust my brain to carry out that task.  I have tried all of the things and nothing works.  I am exhausted and barfy just thinking about all of that.  Until it can all be tackled, we're basically hostages in our own home.

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Any home projects picking you this year?

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