Evil Monkey's Home Renovation

Beautiful job Robert!

First pictures, I thought "The only thing wrong with this place is the wallpaper and the cabinets"... but wow... that is one hell of a transformation.

 

Thanks. My wife has the vision of how it should looks. Fortunately, she helps with the grunt work.

 

Man you guys are doing a beautiful job on your renovation, all that modernizing should really increase your home value. Must be hard on the wallet to get bit my the taco mod bug AND the home mod bug !!

 

That's a big help.

I've got a ton of projects that I'd love to do on the condo, but with my wife's disability, not only is she not a help, but she's an impediment.
With her sleep issues, we'll sometimes sleep until noon on the weekends, an d of course during the summer, it's then too hot to do anything.
I don't want to get up and in the middle of a project and then have her calling that breakfast is ready, so I just stay up until 12 or 1 and sleep in with her.

Sucks sometimes though... did my water pump yesterday. She didn't feel like making breakfast, so we went to Denny's, then she decided we needed to go shopping.
By the time we got home, it had cooled off and I did not have direct sun on the truck.
That part was nice.
The part that wasn't nice was I finished torquing the bolts, changed the hoses, installed the serp belt, and reattached the fan while cradling a flashlight between my shoulder and cheek. I didn't want to leave the system dry over night and have coagulated coolant block the radiator.

 

wow, what a difference!!! can't wait to see it all trimmed out and finished...

 

Got most of the floors done this weekend. I still have some pieces to cut for the hallway and the stair landing. I also have to do the insides of the closets. I saved the closets for last in case I didn't have enough material. Looks like I've got plenty. We didn't have a lot of waste. After that we put some of the baseboards back on.

Dining Room:


While I was at work on Friday, my wife did about half the entry way and half the dining room. She used the jig saw, the chop saw and the table saw. She made some pretty clean cuts around some register holes. It just needed some minor trimming to fit. I finished the dining room and entry way on Saturday while she was working.



On Sunday, my wife finished the little room next to the living room while I worked on the hallway. I'll be building an open bench seat in the area that's not covered with flooring.
Living Room:


Hall:


My wife made some pillows for the couch. It's hard to see in the picture but the yellowish-gold pillows have a trim with hanging glass beads. She wants to reupholster a chair (same style as the couch) with the yellowish gold material. I bought her an air-powered Bostich stapler.

 

you and your wife make a great team!

 

The flooring looks finished and elegant and the handmade pillows, compliment the floor. The complete renovation is appreciable.

 

Love the setup of the house and especially the changes/upgrades y'all have done. Very cool!

 

We received our turn-on authorization from SDG&E this week. My wife flipped the switch at 3:00 pm on Friday.

 

Holy smokes that was a lot of wall paper haha. Nice looking home now though. Looks like all that hard work paid off.

 

I still have three more wallpapered rooms plus the main hallway.

 

Here's a electricity use graph from Monday. The bottom is a usage chart for the week. We generated 23kWh more than we used. I've been generating an average of about 45kWh per day since we turned it on.

 

Sub'd

Just bought our first house and will be doing some projects ourselves. Seeing your transformation and work makes me feel a little better tackling all this. Looks great by the way! I love that bar idea. Very unique and clever.

 

This weekend we put up some shade sails in the back. It got really hot back there as it's all brick or cement (the putting green area is a cement pad with outdoor carpet), making it useless as a place to relax when it's hot out. Since the area is encased by the house, the garage and the bank of the hill, not much airflow gets around back there. I found these on Amazon for $34 each.


They're 16 feet on each edge. I bought 50 feet of steel cable, some cable clamps, eye hooks and turnbuckles.

They make quite a difference back there.

 

This is a beautiful thing. Way to go! How much do you charge the electric co for the extra you are producing? I have enough unused open space in my backyard to run the whole block if I could just turn it into a solar farm....and less to mow too.

 

wow, awesome work sir!

 

It's usually not worth it to generate more than you need. I think they only pay back 4 1/2 cents per kilowatt hour. That's why most installers will design the system around your energy bill over the last year so it doesn't exceed your normal use by too much. If you generate too much, you'll fall under a different regulation scheme.

Plus, according to my installer, SDG&E bitches to the regulatory agencies about paying back solar customers. They claim it costs them $25 to write a check. So if they only pay you $1, they claim they paid out $26. Multiply that by a couple of thousand homes and it gives them ammunition to the regulators to change the way they charge net-metered connections. He advocating keeping track of your usage and trying my best to have a zeroed out bill or pay slightly at the end of the year (you're only billed once per year with SDG&E).

The biggest advantage is being able to run the AC when it gets hot, especially on "Reduce Your Use" days. They charge a big premium during that time. When my parents were staying at my house in the summer, they racked up a $650 electric bill, mostly because of the heat pump AC unit in my house.

 

Good info......Yeah, I pay about 10.x cents a kilowatt and they only pay out 4.5 and yet they cry. Silly. Everything's gotta be a racket. Just hate that the consumer is always hosed on playing the game the same way. Would be so much fun to actually bill your electric provider instead of them billing you. Still, cool setup you got there to at least try and break even on.