After nearly a year of renovation work, our apartment finally looks like a home. We completed everything we wanted to complete as “Phase One” of our renovations. An additional project of getting storage units installed in the basement of our building allowed us to have a place to store the work materials we wanted to hold on to (ladders, Shopvac. paint brushes, etc.) and personal belongings we didn’t have room to house in our apartment (moving from an apartment with seven closets to one with three was a challenge.)

No longer a construction site, I am happy to share the before, during and after images of the fruits of our labor. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

If you’ve been a regular reader of The Eastern Parkway Project, you know that we had a terrible time getting the countertop and tile floor and backsplash installed in our kitchen. We hired Lifestyle Marble and Granite to handle all three tasks. However, after botching the countertop fabrication, Dave, the owner, decided to give us back our money rather than complete the job (See Counterop Catastrophe).

While it was great to get our money back, we were left without a floor or countertop and just the beginnings of a backsplash.

Fortunately we were able to find other companies to complete the countertop and tile floor installations. (Shout out to Ecounters.com and Lowe’s respectively.) But companies we sought out for the backsplash either didn’t handle backsplash installations or they wanted to charge us the cost of doing a backsplash installation from scratch.

I was left with no other choice but to attempt to complete the backsplash installation myself. Since I’d never done this before, I consulted several Web sites and home repair books to figure out exactly what I needed to do.

Armed with a wealth of information, I headed to my local Home Depot to rent a wet saw. However, once I got there I discovered that the saw was much too heavy for me to take home by myself. It was around Christmas and my husband had left early to spend time with his family. I was going to be joining him the next week and wanted to be able to surprise him with a finished backsplash when we both returned home.

So I asked the salesperson in the tile department if a regular manual tile cutter could handle diagonal cuts, as the design of our backsplash called for many of these. He assured me that it could, so I purchased the tile cutter and headed home to tackle this daunting task.

I quickly learned that, yes, the manual tile cutter can make diagonal cuts; however, for each triangle I needed, it took three or four tries to get the exact size tile for the space that needed to be filled. After about five hours I had completed the wall the tile abandoner had started, minus a few pieces behind the stove that need to be notched, a task my little manual tile cutter was not capable of.

As I prepared to begin the adjacent wall, I discovered that the wall was not even (thanks to Best Wall Plastering. See If These Walls Could Talk). While I had become quite handy with Durabond over the course of our renovation work, leveling the wall was beyond my capabilities. With our renovation funds running low, this wasn’t a task we wanted to hire a professional to handle, especially given our multiple bad experiences with previous contractors. Luckily, my father is quite handy in this area. The only catch was we would need to wait until spring for my father’s next visit. (Winters in western New York are not good for driving). So we spent five months with the backsplash looking like this:

As my father will tell you, I’m a very impatient woman. However, I waited out the winter without complaint. But I was all too happy when the first signs of spring arrived so my father could make his journey to Brooklyn by car. But then needed repairs at his own home required us to wait until May for him to visit.

Once my father arrived, he smoothed out the defective wall and we were able to go to Home Depot to rent a wet saw. While the wet saw made cutting notches out of tiles easier, it still took a couple of tries to get the tiles exactly as I needed them. After working for six hours two days in a row, I was able to complete laying the tiles.

As an avid viewer of HGTV, I’d seen horror stories of homeowners attempting to grout tiles. This caused me to wait a whole month before taking on the task. Just like laying the tiles, grouting was an arduous task. It took about four hours from start to finish, but all the effort was worth it because in the end we had this….

So before we moved in we decided to have the floors in our living room, dining room and hallway refinished. I called two floor refinishing companies. Both took time to come out to see the floors; however, one never followed up to provide an estimate and the other refused to provide references because he thought they were useless (I wonder what he was trying to hide.)

After searching extensively online, I found a company that offered the exact service we were looking for so I called to get more information. The woman I spoke with was very friendly and even provided references when I asked for them. My husband called the references and received glowing reviews. Based on that and receiving an estimate that matched our budget and a delivery time frame that fit our tight schedule, we set up an appointment for Monday, September 24.

The week prior to our appointment, my husband, my father and I worked nearly around the clock to get as much painting done as possible—tackling the living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway. (See A Dash of Color for the painting story.)

On Sunday evening, we crammed everything that had been in the living and dining room into the kitchen and sealed off the doorways to block out the dust that would be created during the job. Sunday evening while reviewing the flooring company paperwork again I noticed that their sanding machines required a 220v electrical outlet. While we had had the electrical system in our apartment upgraded, the job did not include the installation of a 220v outlet–we didn’t have the need for one.

Concerned this detail would prevent the workers from completing the job, I called the flooring company Monday morning. The representative assured me they could get around this issue by tapping into our apartment’s circuit breaker box for power.

Relieved that the job could go on, my husband met the workers from the flooring company Monday morning. They created sample patches on the floor of the three stains we would be choosing from. Strangely, on the floor, the colors all looked the same. We picked Minwax Early American—a darker tone than the existing stain that would complement our rich wall colors.

My husband watched the workers set up the floor sander and get started. Confident everything was ok, he left the apartment. You may be thinking, “Why would you leave workers alone in your home?” Well, there are only six rooms in our tiny apartment. Three of them were stuffed with furniture, two were being worked on, and all six were off of the hallway, which would also be refinished, so there was nowhere for dear hubby to go to escape the massive sawdust clouds.

About two hours after he left, my husband received a call from a neighbor informing him that there was a serious problem. Apparently the workers determined they were not getting enough power from the circuit breaker box in our apartment, so without our knowledge or approval they found the building’s super and asked for access to the building’s circuit breaker box for more power—and our always accommodating super obliged. But by tapping into the circuit breaker box, the flooring workers blew a fuse that knocked out power in an entire line of apartments in our building. (The better solution would have been for the workers to return to their office to get a sander that was compatible with a 120v outlet, which the company had but never mentioned, but apparently that never occurred to them.)

Fortunately, power was not lost in our apartment and the flooring workers were able to complete the sanding and come in the next day to apply the polyurethane to finish the job. Boy, did our floors look great!!!

But that’s not the end of the story.

An electrician had to be called to replace the blown fuse. In addition, our next door neighbor who works from home lost the work she had been doing on her computer when the power went out.

Days later we received an email from the co-op board informing us that the cost of the fuse replacement would be taken out of the $1,000 security deposit we provided when we started our renovation work. In addition, our security deposit would also be used to cover the cost of replacing our neighbor’s fried computer modem and $500 worth of work she estimated was lost because of the power outage.

We, of course, thought this was unfair, because it was our contractor, not us, who caused the damage. After several months of going back and forth with the co-op board, the flooring company and our attorney, I was able to get the flooring company to pay for the cost of the fuse replacement and the board not to garnish our security deposit to pay for our neighbor’s lost work.

As the incident happened just a week before we moved in, our first couple of months living in the building were a little awkward. Luckily, any bad feelings have dissipated and we are now all living in co-op harmony…and we still think our floors look fabulous.

See for yourself:

Before