If I Could Do This House Over #1

Time for another recurring post.

And I knew this would happen too. While rehabbing my house last year, I got kind of anal about certain things cause, knowing me, I knew that certain things, if done wrong, would forever stick out and urk me like a...perpetual hangnail. Anyways, thanks to my efforts (and the semi-patience of others as I pointed things out), I'd say I got it about...90 percent right. Still, its that 10 percent that I get reminded of almost everyday.

I have a running tally in my head of the things in my house that if I were to do it again (and have a larger overall budget, not to mention), I'd implement. Please note, most of these were realized only after moving into the house (i.e. these wouldn't have occurred to me during the initial process), some are more cosmetic than others, some would be considered more functional. Anyways, I promised myself I wouldn't be doing those novel-long blogs of my Frankfurt heyday so I'm only going to write four at a time and try to keep these short and sweet...coming back to write more installments over the long haul.

• Heated Floors in the Kitchen Tile...and maybe in the bathroom ;-). While the bathroom would be more of a cosmetic (i.e. sexy) thing to put in (coming out the shower on heated tiles is the hotness, no pun intended), the downstairs actually has a more functional purpose. With the onslaught of Winter '10 in full effect (read: cold as hell), you really develop the appreciation of a certain law of physics--heat rises. Now, aside from the fact that my HVAC return duct is inadequate to service the house (right now its literally below 50 degrees on the first floor and I'll probably have to spend more than a couple grand to get that redone...but that's another story), its ALWAYS cold on the first floor, even with a working system. This is exacerbated by the fact the floor of the 1st floor is the lowest (read: coldest) point of the house and the ceramic tile in the kitchen IS AN ICE BLOCK in the winter! Even with socks on. Its to the point that if I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty as hell, I'm just like "F*** it, I can't get to the refrigerator". Long story short, having heated kitchen tiles would not only reinvigorate the idea of cooking in my house during the winter, but would also probably lower my overall gas bill cause the radiant heat from the floor would actually serve as an alternate (albeit small) heating source for the lower level.
• Light Above the Kitchen Sink. I have a corner sink. I also eat out more than I eat at home so it makes more sense for me to wash the limited dishes I use by hand than to load up the dishwasher. Unfortunately, the placement of the lights in my kitchen (a centered rectangle of 4 recessed lights), creates a shadow over the sink when I'm washing. Not that I can't see what I'm doing, but it would make tons of sense to have another light there right above. This would also be functional for any future corner shelving I put up there over the sink.
• Install a Recirculation Pipe. Ok, now this one may be a bit difficult to explain, but I'll try. I installed a tankless water heater in my house. Your traditional water heater stores like 30 or so gallons of hot water that the house draws on as needed. As the water is used the tank fills itself back up with regular water from the street and heats it up til the entire tank is back to the temperature you set it to hold the water at (hence, when a whole bunch of showers have been taken in the house, you only get lukewarm or cold water cause the tank is dealing with a sizable portion of fresh water from the street that hasn't been heated yet). Conversely, a tankless water heater doesn't store any water. Rather, it heats the water right as it comes into the house (with a gas or electric heater that is more powerful than the heater used on a water tank). The good thing, aside from being energy efficient in the amount of gas or electricity used to heat the water, is that you never run out of hot water. But there is a downside, and its on the front end...it sometimes takes a number of minutes for the water to get hot (sometimes up to like 2 to 3 minutes...literally). The reason for this is that once you turn of the water and don't use it for a while (ex. over the night), the water in the hot water pipes gets cold. Then, when you turn on the water in the morning, all of the cold water in the hot water pipe needs to get flushed from the pipes before the newly heated water, provided by the tankless water heater, reaches the spout. There is a way around this though...a recirculator pipe. What this is is a 3rd pipe (in addition to the hot and cold water pipes) that allows for you to set the water heater to a specific time that you'd like for the water to be hot (say, 6am). Then, at that time, what the system will do is drain the leftover cold water from the hot water pipe into the recirculator pipe, thereby allowing for newly heated hot water to fill the hot water pipe and be used as needed (with no wait for the water to get hot). The cold water in the recirculator pipe is then recirculated back into the system to be reheated and reused. Make sense?
• Placement of the Bathroom HVAC Vent. Now, this one I knew about before I moved in, but by the time it was done, redoing it would have costed more money than it was worth. Basically, drywall is hung over wood studs that are about 3 inches wide. This space behind the drywall allows for many of the mechanical, electrical and plumbing elements of the house to be hidden from view (sort of like the guts of the house). In the bathroom's case, they placed duct work for the HVAC vent behind the wall of the bathroom mirror. So what does this mean? It means that I can't have a mirror that has a recessed medicine cabinet behind it cause the area behind the drywall where the recessed medicine cabinet would go is now occupied by damn duct work. How does this affect the bathroom? That means I had to pay like $500 more than I should have for a stand-alone cabinet that I hung over the wall above the toilet as opposed to paying less for an all-in-one mirrored cabinet. Had they put the duct work behind the adjacent wall (like they were supposed to...meaning, I told them to do it), I would have not only saved money but had extra room on the wall where the current cabinet is to, I don't know...hang a picture or something. I guess that's why I didn't stress it too much--the aftermath was primarily cosmetic, even though the issue had structural origins. But, this was just one of the many issues I had with the HVAC subcontractors my GC on the project used. But that's a $2,000-$3,000 story for another blog.

On the next installment, I'll talk about how 3 inches affected the layouts of the whole 2nd floor.

Cheers.

P.S. Guess I just can't get away from novel-long blogs.