New House - New Year

Well,

This year it is shaping up to be plenty of projects for me to complete.  We recently purchased a house in NW Calgary.  It was built in 1980.  There were a few renovations done to it, but several were not fully completed.  I am not saying that it is not livable, but little things like there was no trim put over the tiles, so there is a bare edge kind of stuff.

In October we had bought a 2001 Nissan Pathfinder at the auction.  It has been a great vehicle and the only thing I have done to it thus far is change the oil and replace the battery.  We have had an unusual cold winter here in Calgary, so I am not surprised that the battery failed.

A leader at Church wants me to put together a radio go box for him.  This is exciting, because I get to buy all these radios and put them together, and it won't cost me anything to play with them.  I will discuss that project in detail in a future post.

So for the house thus far we have done a little bit of work on it thus far.  We purchased a home foreclosure from the bank, so there are some risks that are Realtor's explained to us.  They were rather nervous about it, probably because they haven't processed very many foreclosures in recent memory.  There must be some systemic issues here in Calgary that are not well publicized because approximately a quarter of the houses that we viewed were foreclosures.  One of the things that our Realtor said was that it must have been some young couple that got in over their head.  Well, that didn't make us young first time home buyers feel better, but we knew our financial position so we charged ahead.

On the day of possession we arrived and the heat was off.  It was a very cold February day, so it took a long time for the house to warm up.  As it did, we noticed some dripping from the cold water line by the clothes washer pipes.  There was still some water left in that pipe and it split it.  So off to RONA to get a pipe cutter and some pipe solder.  I already had the torch to solder the pipes.  Now our cold water tap is approximately 2 inches above the hot water tap.  Now we were able to charge the rest of the house water lines.

During this time we noticed that there was still water (i.e. a block of ice) in all of the toilet bowls.  This was going to take some time to thaw, but once we charged the tanks, there was one tank that was full of ice too.  It turns out as the ice melted there became a lake around this toilet.  It had broke the bottom of the toilet out.  Lucky for us we were already planning on changing the toilets with high efficiency dual flush toilets, which we had got on sale at RONA.  There is a RONA about 3 minutes from our house, so it is likely to be the unofficial supplier for most of our home renovation needs.

The third frozen item in our house was a trap of the main floor half bathroom.  It is the only metal trap in the whole house and when the water froze in it, it split the metal.  Lucky for us RONA, was also the unofficial supplier for the previous occupants renovation efforts.

So I spent the weekend getting plumbing issues sorted out.  A blog on toilet installation to follow.  During this weekend we had several of our good friends come over and assist us in painting the house.  There were a couple that were very experienced which helped the finished product look superb.  As we were removing face plates for the electrical outlets we commented on the fact that the outlets were the original cream colored round plugs, but in an attempt to modernize the look of the house the previous occupants had used white cover plates.  This looked rather poor to us, so we decided to replace the oulets and plugs to the decora model.  A quick conversation with one of my electrical engineering consultants at worked agreed with the decision to change plugs as they typically have a useful service life of approximately 25 years.  They tend to get loose and don't make a very good contact after a while.

So for upcoming projects:
-fur out the basement wall and run electrical wire for plugs, and install a new sub-panel
-install a hitch onto the vehicle
-change the regulator on the trailer
-build and install some raised flower beds for some produce this summer
-install a vhf and hf antenna

This should be a good start for the year.  A lot of new experiences to learn from.