Home Changes, Life Changes

Many of our customers of replica handbags have older homes, in which large, complex or expensive projects have been delayed. Sometimes, the needed renovations are really overdue, but we are glad our customers waited until they found us to work on their homes.

Renovating a home is stressful. It costs money — sometimes a lot of it. Just to remind ourselves of these facts, we renovate our own homes from time to time.

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Chestnut Hill Kitchen/Powder Room Reno

Today, we are beginning the construction portion of a small kitchen and powder room renovation in Chestnut Hill. This cute, Tudor-style twin is home to two adults, two kids, and a senior-age dog.

The kitchen was no longer functioning well for this family. Here is their wish list:

  • Better flow/space function/circulation
  • Better/more prep area
  • New location for the fridge, which is currently in the unheated shed area out back
  • Better storage
  • Better work surfaces
  • Better kitchen efficiency
  • Open plan kitchen/dining room to engage the whole family
  • Better venting of cooking area
  • Better lighting
  • A more discreet powder room
  • Better pantry use
  • Staging area for lunch boxes, keys and things that need charging
  • Better organization of the many doors in the room that access powder room, pantry and basement
  • Stay tuned for updates on how this project is coming along!

    Unforeseen Conditions

    Many a customer will ask us what “unforeseen conditions” means. They ask because “unforeseen conditions” are explained in our contracts as something that can cause a “change order extra” to take place — and no one wants to spend money on something they don’t understand.

    On this project, our plumbers encountered a cracked bend in the soil line. Here are some snaps of the problem:

    You can see the old rusted pipes are in the basement ready to go to the scrapper. The new pipe is on site waiting for the change order extra to be approved. One snap shows the cracked bend where the toilet sits. The bend is in the bathroom floor under your toilet. You can see the large ugly hole in the living room wall the plumbers had to make to get at the pipe. The last image is from the bathroom looking down into the living room. This kind of destruction can be very upsetting to a homeowner, so it’s best to get the problem fixed and closed up soon as possible.

    The bend is what is under your toilet and it’s connected to the soil line, which carries the waste from your toilet all the way to the street. If the soil line is cracked inside the house, what is in the pipe gets into your house. That’s sewage: solid and liquid waste, plus sewer gasses. It’s not a nice thing. If you smell something funny, this kind of leak is something to check for.

    These cast iron pipes last a long time, and they are much quieter than PVC. When they fail, they corrode from the inside. Sheets of iron can flake off inside the house causing a clogged soil line, which forces sewage to back up into your house.

    If the pipes in the house have not been used for a long time, they dry out and can crack when use begins again. Tree roots can also get into them. Ever wonder how those huge trees can grow on tiny front lawns? Yum! Soil line!

    A cracked soil line is just one example of “unforeseen conditions.”

    Photo Tour: A Trip To The Stone Yard

    Many folks who have renovated their kitchen or bathroom are familiar with stone showrooms. That’s where they go to select the stone product to be used in their project.

    Because of what I do for a living, I get to peek behind the fancy showroom into the work areas of the fabricator. It’s a very dangerous place. You’ll notice the heavy stone slabs are strapped tightly to their frames so they don’t fall over.

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    Signs of an Organized Worksite

    Chris, one of our lead carpenters, is temporarily off this job site, where we are renovating a few bathrooms. We have to wait a few days for glass and stone to be delivered, and I was on site today to meet the templaters from these two suppliers while Chris was on a small window replacement project in town. I wanted to share with you what an organized job site looks like:

    The job site is left clean.

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    Something Old, Something New… Something Blue

    We are completing a renovation project consisting of three older bathrooms in this 1920’s Mount Airy Stone Twin.

    We installed this Forbo Marmoleum sheet goods floor in the powder room and the third-floor bathrooms. The color is #3182 Lapponia.

    Marmoleum linoleum is a green product that’s been around a long, long time! It has a jute backing, and the sheeting is made from linseed oil, cork and sawdust plus coloring. The color goes all the way through, so it will wear a long time. The linseed oil oxidizes, which means this flooring repels germs! I used to do oil painting restoration, and oxidized linseed oil was one of the hardest substances we ran into.

    You can see that we salvaged the original nickel and glass towel bars, too! The bars are made of 1-inch round glass rods.

    Our Customers Are Always Interesting!

    We love our customers. So many of them are really interesting people.

    We are renovating three 80 year old bathrooms in this large Mount Airy stone home. Inside the house has many interesting treasures, some of which we had to move so they would not be damaged during construction. I’ll show you just a few slides of some of their wonderful collection of objects.

    Design to Build = The Better Way to Go

    At Myers Constructs, Inc., we use the phrase “Design to Build”™. It is our trademarked remodeling system.

    You’ve all heard about terrible remodeling projects where the project goes over budget and takes forever to complete, while no one knows what’s happening, and the homeowners are suffering while waiting for the next shoe to drop.

    That’s not us! Our system takes the chaos and stress out of your home renovations. This system is great for commercial projects, too.

    Design to Build™ means we only design what you want and can afford. We don’t design with the aim of piling up billable hours like some people. That’s because our business model is based on what we build, not on design time we bill for.

    We won’t design highfalutin flying buttresses (or other misfit architectural details) on your addition just because they’re really cool. We understand your home’s style and we Design to Build™ using that style as a taking-off point. The result is a long-lasting project, built on time and on budget, with few or no surprises.

    This means that you can relax knowing that you’ll be pleased with the results of this system. Why not go ahead and schedule that vacation while we complete your project for you? Many of our customers do.

    Construction Pros Who Study/Think

    At our company, we are curious. We are always on the lookout for new and better ways of doing things.

    In the modern world, many of the old ways of building no longer work. The building materials of old are no longer available. People live in their homes now very differently than they did 20 to 50 years ago. These changes are even more apparent when we work on an 80 – 100-year-old home. Kitchens are no longer in the shed out back to prevent fires from consuming the whole home. Bathrooms have moved from the back yard or back porch into the sleeping quarters and near new kitchen locations inside, thanks to indoor plumbing technology — which is amazing if you think about it.

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    Alarming Electrical Hazards Hidden in DIY Home Renos

    We are working on a “new” home built in the 1960’s. Its a 2 story ranch in decent shape for its age.

    The homeowners who just bought the house, asked us to come in for a lot of projects all over. In particular, we are focusing on a great paint job, refreshing hardwood floors, tweak an existing kitchen, rework a laundry powder room, and a gut remodel of the master bedroom suite.

    While working in the kitchen it was discovered that the electrical wiring in the kitchen was really dangerous. It was a surprise that no fires had been started. Many hidden splices were found and illegal junction boxes. You should know that junction boxes must be accessable, and covered to be legal. There were not enough lines to the various outlets either. Our electricians corrected all these problems. But encountering them set a tone for us. We were going to remain on the look out for further dangerous conditions!

    Sure enough when we opened up the existing master bathroom, last renovated at about the same time as the kitchen, the same types of electrical issues were found! Our electricians had some new splice connectors worth showing you. These allow us to make legal splices without junction boxes.

    If you look at the last photo you can see the HUGE hornet’s nest that was found in the corner of a small office closet floor space. What a noise that next must have made in summer!