Paul & Jenn's Adventures

Winter is upon us and some nights are dipping below freezing. One task on my mind is to improve the insulation of our house for better energy efficiency and comfort. Currently, I am focused on the garage. Although the garage is usually considered an unheated space and not insulated, this is not completely true in our case. We have a raised ranch house with the bottom floor being the 2 car garage, laundry room, and family room. The 3 bedrooms we have are above the garage, and the rest of the upper floor is the living room, bathroom, and kitchen. The floor of our master bedroom is often cold, and I suspect that the insulation between the floor and the garage below is not very good. Heat also leaks from the family room and laundry room into the garage through a thin wall. To make matter worse, the north side of the garage exterior wall is currently not insulated. It is just 2x4 wood studs with exterior sheathing and wood siding, on top of 9" concrete block foundation. The insulation ...

Ever since we moved into our first house, we've been doing home maintenance work and improvements one after another.  One of the first things that we needed was a ladder, because we wanted to replace our bathroom fan and need access into the attic.  I did some research online to see what options are out there for ladders and how much they cost.  At first I was interested in the telescoping ladder such as the Xtend & Climb types because I saw our home inspector use it to get access to the attic door, and it is very compact when folded down and easily fits into a car trunk.  I read some reviews and saw that some users find it not very durable and not long lasting, and it can only be used against a wall or some kind of support; it cannot stand by itself, making its use somewhat limited.  Right off the bat, I didn't want to get a regular ladder because it would be almost impossible to move it around inside the house and get to the room with a small...

Since we bought our house, we have been working on the yard little by little. At the moment we are focused on reducing the population of unwanted plants. There are weeds in the lawn, overgrown bushes in the back yard, and aggrasive species climbing on top of trees and power lines. While we pull the weeds out, we are also interested in learning what they are and what makes them grow. Here is a few things that we have identified so far. Wisteria sinensis (Chinese Wisteria) blooms with purple flowers in April and is fragrant. They have wrinkly leaves with pointed tips. They like to climb onto things and choke trees to death. If there's nothing to climb, they send off shoots on the ground in all directions until they find another thing to climb onto. When we first moved in, we find that it has climbed onto every tree in the back yard and over the power lines which also runs along the property edge. Also to note is that this plant is toxic and can cause nausea, vomiting, stomach p...

The oak hardwood floor in our house was old and looked dirty, with many scratches that showed the traffic pattern of the people before us. There were places where the protective coating had worn out and the wood turned gray and black, which didn't look nice. We wanted to resurface the floor before we move in to make it look new again. Since sanding the floor will create tons of dust, we wanted to do it before we move things in. We began on Veteran's Day, Nov. 11 and rented a floor sander from The Home Depot. These sanders are very heavy and uses a very large sheet of sand paper. The base moves in a small circular motion to sand the floor and we started with 24 grit to remove the old finish, followed by 60 grit and 100 grit. I pushed the sander around for 10 hours that day and returned the sander the next morning. It didn't come out perfect because there are some deep swirl marks that we couldn't get rid of. For the most part, the floor is a lot better than when we start...

We bought our first house and closed the deal on Nov. 2, 2009. The search process seemed long because we were going out to open houses almost every Sunday and we saw many houses in the area we wanted to live. The general requirement was that it should be within 20 minutes driving to work. Then there are other requirements such as 3 bedrooms or more, 2 bathrooms or more, 2 attached garages, among other things. We looked for houses in the $200k to $300k range, as well as some that are in the 400k range. Each time we see a house, we would rank it from 1 to 10, where 10 being the ideal house. Each time Jenn and I will be pretty close; 5, 6, or 7 are common, and a few that gets the 8 rating. We began to realize that price does not necessarily correlate to quality, and the 430k house is not ranked higher than some that are $280k. By September, we were not seeing many new listings, so we felt we should make a decision at that point. What we did was making a trade-off matrix in Excel, with e...

Jenn and I are thinking of buying a house these days. In fact, it constantly occupies my mind. Jenn had been looking at houses ever since she moved to the Capital Region, and we have been looking together since summer of 2008. Jenn was looking to buy a house because of the notion that renting is like throwing money into the toilet. I don't completely agree with that concept, but in the long run, paying a mortgage and end up owning a house is better than paying rent and still don't own anything in the end. Jenn didn't buy because of many reasons, such as having to take care of maintenance by herself, under-utilization, snow removal, yard work, etc. Last year we were looking because Jenn was deciding whether to renew the apartment lease or buy a house. She ended up moving to a different apartment. Now that we are married, there's even more reason to buy a house. Our population has doubled, our stuff is doubled, we want to do things that living in an apartment cannot offer...