"It's like the grown-ups know what they're talking about" - Wax

[cimorene]

As I was looking over my post from yesterday about the costly and exhaustingly time-consuming mistakes we've made so far in renovating our house, I noticed the pattern that in every case, we could have avoided the trouble by doing:

1. On the too-high kitchen floor that doesn't fit at the edges/cabinets: We should've done the first thing Wax's mom and our contractor suggested because it is basic, sturdy, period-appropriate* (well, to the period when the original owners last updated their kitchen: 60s), and affordable: installed sheet vinyl. Would've been a thousand percent better off! Why didn't we completely strip the old floor, then ask the contractor to evaluate our idea before we tried to order any new flooring? Still could've avoided it that way (even though before the old vinyl came off it wasn't apparent that the floor was unsuitable for a floating tile floor).



2. On the cabinet, counter, and toekick problems: Should've done the first thing Wax's mom and our contractor suggested: ordered the cabinets and counter and sink all at once from the kitchen store and had them assembled and installed. This is the most annoying because we thought we could save several hundred bucks by doing what looked Not That Hard ourselves with the Ikea ones, and it ended up costing us more than that because of all that stuff we Didn't Know We Didn't Know.



3. On the hall floor that we for some reason thought we could install: Should've done the first thing the contractor and carpenter assumed: had them install it. (Also we already wouldn't've ordered it in the first place if we'd gone with vinyl per #1 but also they assumed we wanted them to install the linoleum tiles and that was the only sane thing to have wanted.)



4. On the accidentally unusable flooring and the planks we failed to find under the cardboard: Should've done what the book about our sort of house would recommend: peeled back all the layers of the floor, because you're probably gonna find plank floor in a 50s-60s Finnish wooden house. If we'd thoroughly read and followed the expert advice in Hannu Rinne's invaluable book on our house type (houses made after WW2 with our house plan), Perinnemestarin Rintamamiestalo: Kunnostus ja Ylläpito, we would have known. It's incredibly detailed and covers all the common issues and recommendations from decades of fixing and restoring them. We would have known both about the cardboard being a thing and about the extreme probability of the plank floor existing.



5. On the livingroom paint rigamarole: Should've done the first thing the Rintamamiestalo book recommends: re-wallpapered in paper wallpaper domestically made by Pihlgren & Ritola. In the end, this would've been the best thing we could have done.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

It's so hard to look back and realize all that you didn't know that you didn't know.

HUGS.

[cimorene]

And it's especially annoying when it's because you thought you knew better than advice from older and wiser heads!!! Wax says the Finnish expression for "learned the hard way" is literally "through the heels", which I guess means by walking, and I definitely feel that one viscerally...

[torachan]

At least you know now for the future! >_<

[cimorene]

We can only hope for the opportunity to use this knowledge to do better or help others!

Unfortunately my parents and sister (in possession of a house that needs some minor renovations, although fortunately nothing on the scale that ours did) are both particularly prone to ignoring advice they don't want to hear, lol.