Spring 2020
I know, the title says 2021 but this story started earlier.
Here we are again! Today is March 29, 2020. We have been down here since mid February spending time and resources in a continuance of regular maintenance, needed repairs, and improvements to our cottage to share with you all. Currently, the whole island is lockdown. No visitors or guests allowed in Dare County, and as of lately, no non-resident landowners either. That is really putting the hurt on a lot of folks who are usually here and getting their properties ready for the rental season. For those of us still here, we’re trying to conduct affairs as normally as possible but it is difficult scheduling services with the various contractors. Some are not working at all unless the house is empty. So far, we have not been able to contract with a carpet cleaner at all. We are currently wrapping up the remodeling of the queen master on the ground floor.
It’s always interesting taking on a new renovation project. The project we’re involved with now, the basic premise is to make the room ‘new’ again, as it was very hard for us to have a lot of pride in the room the condition it was in. So, it’s out with the old. The old mattress and box springs are gone, the furniture is gone, the old carpet is gone, the fixtures in the bathroom are gone, sand down and patch all the walls, and put some new paint on the surfaces. We were moving right along and we’re now ready for new primer on the ceiling. Starting in the bathroom, it gets a first coat. And we’re almost done, backrolling a bit when all of the sudden the whole popcorn ceiling coating originally applied starts sagging and falling off! It turns out the drywall was not primed at all before applying the ceiling. That sets us back a few days while we scrape the old popcorn coating from the ceiling, prep the whole room again and properly prime it. So now we are ready to put on the finish paint. Can somebody say “The end is near!” ? So here we are with a couple of pics of the before and after of the room.
Fall 2020
The summer of 2020 came and went. No hurricanes this year! We spent a lot of money and time last spring renovating the AC system. The condenser coil unit outside was repaired with a new coil and we had a company come in and seal the interior of the ductwork to eliminate leakage in the system. Apparently, it produced a lot of cold air. Unfortunately, during the hot spell of August, somehow all the registers in the top floor area got closed off. This caused the main hvac trunk to build up with a cold, cold block of air that was not flowing out any registers. Because of the heat and humidity, condensation formed on the hvac trunk under the insulation, eventually soaking the insulation and the drywall over a period of THREE WEEKS until the drywall started collapsing off the soffits. Why our management company failed to check if the registers were open when guests complained of the heat and why we weren’t notified of water leaking in the kitchen until things reached a disaster level is beyond me. Anyway, we closed the house for two weeks for the mold remediation, hvac, and drywall companies to restore it to a livable status. Take a look below at what happens when air is not moving through the trunk.
After arriving in the fall, we inspected the repair job. It was barely adequate. We had to remove the kitchen cabinets on the wall anyway to repair a water-damaged unit so we ripped out the drywall, repaired the soffit which caused the poor drywall job, refinished the walls and repaired the cabinet over the winter. It’s back to good condition. We also had the HVAC company back out and had them increase the size of the cold air return. That increased the airflow through the system by 900cfm! That should certainly blow the cold air out of the ductwork. Also, the top floor registers have been modified to eliminate the shutoff vents to prevent this from happening again.
Our back “lawn” is being taken over by vines and brush, it’s been bad since we bought the place in 2017. One of the projects this fall is to clean it up a bit. There’s a LOT of brush! We rented a ‘Billy Goat’ from Home Depot, put our gloves and went to work. The pile of brush is just the brush the Billy Goat didn’t grind up.
Spring 2021
We have finished painting the kitchen soffits, installed the repaired cabinet and touched up paint here and there. The doors on the rooms downstairs were in pretty rough shape, so we installed 3 new solid wood doors.
