Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Repairs
Ah the joys of repair work. I decided to install new mail boxes in my building, the current ones were from the early 1900's. The new mail boxes cost $100 and it was supposed to cost approx. $100 more to install them. Almost $1000 later my mail boxes were in, my front entry and all the doors had been repainted and all but one of the door buzzers is working.
That is often the way it goes when you start a repair job, especially in an older building. You cant anticipate all the hidden repairs or problems you are going to find. In my case, old mail boxes were one problem and an old door buzzer system was another. Also the new mail boxes were much larger then the old mail boxes. The necessary remodeling is what got the painting started.
Don't loose heart. These things will happen. All you can do is hope that they don't happen to often and that when they do that the fix is not to much more then the original cost. When you are looking at starting a repair or improvement job try and budget some extra money and time to get the work done. Not only did the job cost more then I expect but it took over two months to finish everything.
The good news is that my entry way does look nice and I shouldn't need to change mail boxes again for about 100 years.
That is often the way it goes when you start a repair job, especially in an older building. You cant anticipate all the hidden repairs or problems you are going to find. In my case, old mail boxes were one problem and an old door buzzer system was another. Also the new mail boxes were much larger then the old mail boxes. The necessary remodeling is what got the painting started.
Don't loose heart. These things will happen. All you can do is hope that they don't happen to often and that when they do that the fix is not to much more then the original cost. When you are looking at starting a repair or improvement job try and budget some extra money and time to get the work done. Not only did the job cost more then I expect but it took over two months to finish everything.
The good news is that my entry way does look nice and I shouldn't need to change mail boxes again for about 100 years.
