An Unplesant Surprise – roof update

I haven’t wanted to write this post. It’s hard to admit when things go wrong, but it’s time to update you on the house renovations and that means coming clean… The roof was finished in the last days of September. It was a Monday. By Friday the scaffolding had come down, and on Sunday we found this on our balcony.

It looks pretty innocuous, that is until you realise that it’s part of our new roof. It was getting dark and so we waited till the morning to up on the roof. It was a mess. Part of it had blown off:

 That wasn’t the only problem either. The more we looked into, the more we found. So we called an architect friend and had a proper report done. Not surprisingly, he found a whole host of problems that we never would have seen. Long story short we’re going to have to redo it. (Though I must say we’re still really happy with both the driveway and the bay window roof.)

As you know, the other big renovation news is the asbestos. Before we can start the work on that, we need to be granted a special environmental permit. But in order to do that we need an asbestos inventory – a full catalogue of all the possible asbestos sources in the house. A week ago Monday, we had the inventory. Now we’re waiting on the results. Once we have them, the asbestos removal company will start the process to get the permit. Hopefully we’ll get it by Christmas and then we can start the work in January.

Since there’s asbestos in the whole house and we have to empty the space before we can do the abatement work, we’ve decided to do it in two halves. The first half will be the upstairs (the top floor – a granny flat, which we plan to convert into a bedroom floor; and the stairwell). Once that’s done we’ll have to put in new floors to replace the removed asbestos ones. We’ll take advantage of that time to do some other renovations that have been on the list for awhile and we’ll do what we need to do to fix the roof.

Then comes asbestos part 2 – the downstairs (our current bedroom floor and the basement). If nothing else, that’ll be a great opportunity to clean out the basement, put in some shelves and really get my organisation muscles working. So, there you have it: our unpleasant surprise and what’ll keep me more than busy in at least the first half of 2013.

Life lesson to retain from all this:

• Renovations always come with surprises. Though you might not know what they are, you can prepare for them by building in a buffer of both time and money into your planning. 
• And when in doubt, this too shall pass =p

Now I need your help…

I need ideas:

• Have you put in floors that you absolutely love?
• Found a shower, sink, or storage solution that made a small bathroom feel a bit more roomy?
• Ever designed a walk-in closet?
• Have some super must-know painting tips?

Let me hear them!! I’d also love to hear your stories of renovation surprises. Come on, vent! You know you want to =)