Kitchen Remodel (part one)

I was trying to remember the date when we started working on the kitchen in our house so that I could lay out a time frame to give perspective on how long we've been dealing with this end of our renovation. The more I thought about it the further the date went into the past. It felt wrong to discount everything that we have done in months past in preparation for what we have accomplished in this month simply because those particular hurdles were not nearly as climactic. So, the story of our kitchen renovation goes back so far that I'm going to have to break up the blog a bit and spread it out over the course of a few posts. I could probably give you the nutshell version of everything and like good little impatient fast-food only Americans you will be satisfied. However, if you know me at all, you know that I am never handing out nutshell versions of anything. If I tell you I'm hungry it's usually in enough words that could fill the pages of some of the smaller paperback novels.

The kitchen renovation began shortly after we bought the house in February of '07 and has been part of our lives ever since. I don't think that there has been a single moment in all of that time where we have not had at least one tool taking up residence in this room. The reality is that there has been a constant flow of building materials, tools, paints, broken tile, and household items (that have no business in a kitchen) that has been circulating through use and unuse and finding temporary placement in a room that is commonly the most used room in a house. It would be a gross understatement to say that it has been inconvenient and well more accurately stated as a test of our sanity, patience, and claims that we actually enjoy this sort of thing.


From the first photo you can see how dated everything was. This photo was taken on Dec. 4, 2006 while we were looking at the house with our realtor. Note: Jodi (eight months pregnant) is dark in this photo only from the shadow formed by the flash hitting the wide-angle lens. Just in case you cared to know. Let me give you the official tour. Let's start with the ceiling that had large sections of (most certainly) lead paint peeling off and ominously threatening to land in some innocent person's food when they turned their back. Then there was the bottle collection left behind by a previous tenant who clearly assumed that the next home owner would share his/her appreciation for such a random selection of cheap liquor containers. Next comes the walls sporting their beautiful wall paper that someone proudly installed at some point in history. I apologize now to this person for we couldn't wait to remove your handiwork. The cabinets weren't too awful except that they had no backs to them, they were always filling up with pieces of plaster and drywall dust when we were working on something nearby, they seemed to have been built by someone who kept in mind that mice need to eat too, and half the doors were extremely hard to open due to the misplacement of the latches.
So, yeah, I guess that they were pretty awful. The floor was 12" x 12" laminate tiles that I can only hope someone got for free, because what a waste of money otherwise. There was hardwood under those hideous tiles, but it would've cost a small fortune to refinish it since the installers of the laminate tile thought that it would be a good idea to use that hardwood as their base to stick the tar paper to. The tar paper can be seen in the next photo (taken 3/3/07) as well as the bare plaster walls.

The last photo was taken while tiling the floor in June '07. We managed to successfully continue to use all the appliances by staging out the process and moving them around. This wasn't fun, but it was exciting to get rid of nasty tar paper floor. The floor quickly came together and in a few days it was complete.

To be continued... Part Two.

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Bad for Business

It's not every day that standing in the water aisle at the grocery store makes me laugh, so I knew as I was laughing out loud and receiving puzzled sideways looks from other shoppers that this would inevitably become a blog. It's only proper anyway since so much time has passed since my last entry. You all must think that things have been very boring around my house for me to not find anything worth writing about. But, that's simply not the case. It's rarely boring around my house.

So, I'm looking for some distilled water to purchase at the local PriceCutter right up the road and I find the water seen in this photo. If you haven't already laughed then let me either remind you or just come out and tell you depending on whether or not you've seen the movie Erin Brockovich. Ms. Brockovich is a single mom of three who finds herself working as a file clerk at a small law firm in the early nineties. She stumbles across a pro bono case (a legal case done at no cost to the client, not to be confused with a small box that campaigns for the lead singer of U2) that is dealing with several families that have been ill due to drinking their well water. All these people lived around a PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) plant that had been polluting the groundwater with rust inhibitor that contained Chromium 6. The town that these folks lived in was Hinkley, California.

Erin Brockovich won several awards and was nominated for many others. This was no small movie so I was curious as to why a company would make such a mistake in choosing a name without researching where else it might already have been used. That's when a closer look taught me that the company has been around since 1888. So, then I'm thinking, "What must have these guys felt when they saw the movie?" Then I'm thinking, "WAIT! 1888?! Come on! Who was buying bottled water in the nineteenth century? But that's what their website says. Go see for yourself if you don't believe me. It's at HinckleySprings.com.

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Recipe for Disaster

A little over a week ago I decided to get inventive in the kitchen. I've had experiences in this manner where creativity turned out to be a discovery of a good thing and a couple times the turn out even became a new favorite dish. However, this go 'round wasn't so prosperous as with previous adventures.

My line of thinking was that many people put lemon juice on fish to give it a slight zesty flavor. Commonly this is on fried fish but I wasn't in the mood to break out the Fry Daddy so I decided to see what would happen to skillet grilled fish. I took this thinking even further away from the safety of the norm when I spotted our bag of grapefruits. I thought, "Hey, I like grapefruit." So, I substituted the ruby red citrus goodness for the little bottle of lemon juice and thought that I was on to something big. This may have turned out pretty good if maybe I had squirted a little grapefruit juice on the fish while it was in the pan. But, I was on a creative roll. How could I possibly do what was expected of me. No, I would impress everyone with my culinary skills and do something abstract!

I sliced the grapefruit and placed it atop the fish while it was cooking, thinking that, like chicken, most of the flavor of the grapefruit wouldn't permeate the surface of the meat. Here's your chance to show off, readers. Raise your hand if you know that fish is more porous of a meat than chicken. Well, I wasn't so aware of it.

The wife came home and dinner was served. I was excited to find out what kind of life I had managed to inject into such a boring dinner otherwise but all my hopes of starting my own pay-per-view cooking show were crushed when the first bite hit my tongue. The back corners of my mouth twisted with a speed reminiscent to my first ever dual squirt of liquid Warheads. And, that is saying something because I like grapefruit a lot.

The wife tried to salvage the moment and quickly compliment my cooking, but the boy couldn't lie and neither could his twisted face. His reaction to the fish's taste was only outperformed by the horror of the realization that he was going to be forced to choke it all down in order to gain the ability to leave the table. We, instead, gave him the option to have a couple corn dogs, an offer he just couldn't refuse.

So, let my misfortune be a lesson to all those that read this: Grapefruit was not meant to be a marinade. This has been "Cooking With Levi". Until next time ... (in unison with the live audience) HAPPY COOKING!!

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'Ceiling' is a Funny Word

One of the more recent improvements to our home was giving the kitchen a new ceiling. As you can see from the attached photos we had some very prominent problems with our kitchen ceiling and some not so noticeable. Among the obvious problems were the two patched holes in the ceiling.

The first hole, closer to the center of the room, was created by my foot. Rewind close to two years and you would find a bathroom that had been completely gutted down to open framing and floor joists. The original bathroom was gross and had busted pipes in the floor from the home being unattended during the ice storm of '07, so we had no choice but to do a full renovation of the room before we would move into the house. I managed to get the entire room properly demolished, cleaned out, re-plumbed, and re-wired all while balancing on floor joists. Ironically, it was when I was installing the last section of floor that I accidentally missed a joist and stepped down on the lathe and plaster that made up the ceiling of the kitchen below me. It broke and buckled underneath me but didn't give completely thankfully as I would've ended up creating an unnecessary elevator shaft in a hurry while testing it out without the elevator.

The other hole along the wall came from stupidity and not from an unavoidable accident like its predecessor. This hole was cut by me and on purpose. One day, not long after getting the bathroom completed (or completed enough to move in) my plumbing sprung a leak. Jodi yelled at me from the kitchen when it began to rain in there without a single warning from any one of our many local meteorologists. I quickly ran down to the basement and shut the main water valve off so that it would stop no matter where it was coming from. I thought for sure that it was a pipe that I put in the bathroom and now it was covered up with a 3/4" plywood sub-floor, a 1/2" Hardibacker cement board underlay, roughly 1/16" hardened thin-set mortar, a 1/4" of ceramic tile, and finally 36" of bathroom cabinets. There was no way that I could get back in there to fix it from the top. I would have to come in from underneath. So, away I went with a hammer, crowbar, and jigsaw. I opened up a pretty long section so that I could see almost all of the plumbing that I did along the wall where the leak seemed to be coming from. But, I didn't see anything obvious causing the leak. Upon turning the water back on to spot the exact source of the problem, I realized that the water was not coming from inside the floor but from above in the bathroom itself. I went upstairs and almost immediately saw the problem upon opening up the cabinet to the left sink. One of my thin plastic water lines that feed the sink had popped off the connection point due to not having the nut tight enough. Oops. I tightened it up and the problem was solved. Except for the second big hole in the kitchen ceiling.

Well, my dad helped me lay drywall over the top of the plaster some weeks ago which gave us a flat ceiling again. I finally got the mudding, sanding, and primering done. And then Daniel Sybouts came by and he showed me how to wallpaper a ceiling. It looks really great and I can't wait to see the finished product after it's all painted. We're going to give it a faux-finish to make it appear to be a tin ceiling. It's hard to tell from the photos, but the wallpaper is textured with a classy design similar to what tin ceilings would have. And pay no attention to the color of the photo. The paper as well as the globes of the light are white but there was no way to get them to look white and still show the definition of the pattern at the same time.

The light came to us for free. It was donated to our church for the "Pass It On" program that gives Christmas gifts away to area residents who might otherwise not have anything to give to their loved ones. All the pieces to the light fixture were there in a box, but the thing was so mangled from having been loose that the church didn't even set it out among the gifts to choose from. Rather, they were going to donate it to Habitat for Humanity or somewhere that might repair it. Jodi volunteered for the "Pass It On" event and when she asked about it they gave it to her. With some tightening up and leveling out and bending back the inner rod to a straight position it looks beautiful.

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Inexcused Absence

Where do I begin? Sorry for the extended absence over the last month or so. Things are definitely different around my house. It's been awesome! I have really loved getting up and taking Jacob to school as usual and then getting to work on my business rather than someone else's business. It's been an amazing experience so far and I look forward to what we have coming up. We've been able to accomplish many things that we've just not had the time for previously. I've also really enjoyed the family time. I haven't been able to spend this much time with Jacob and Lyric ever.

Speaking of Jacob and Lyric. Lyric turned two years old yesterday! He really had fun with the whole birthday thing. And, Jacob will turn nine years old the day after tomorrow! Nine! His last year of single digit age. I'm proud of them both.

Over the next couple of weeks, I intend to get you guys caught up on my home projects. I don't want to just generalize what I've been doing, so instead of listing it all out for you here on this blog, I'll spread it out a little so that I can properly show the before and after photos. So stay tuned.

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"Something Different" - God

This blog is more for the books than it is for notifying anyone of my current situation, but I also realize that there will be some who read this news and it will be the first they've heard of it. So, bearing that in mind, I'll write this as if addressing those people even though my main purpose for this entry is to have a written record of what was going on during this time and the process that has led me to my recent decisions.

After today, Friday, December 19th, I will go on "Layoff" status at SRC. A couple weeks ago, SRC Corporate concluded that with the current economic downturns and the resulting effects that it has had on our sales numbers that we as a Corporation are over-staffed by roughly 100 people. SRC is an amazing company, though. After seeing big layoffs and plant closings making the headlines of our local newspapers at an alarming increase in frequency, it's just plain amazing to watch a company that could easily choose to take a similar route but instead stick with the high road rarely taken.

SRC blazed the trail of this high road and has since paved it with hard work, dedication, and humility in the corporate world. Being built 25 years ago by a group of people who just lost their jobs, they've sworn to make comprehensive plans that allow the company to avoid unexpected layoffs at virtually all costs. And, it's very costly for a corporation to hold job security in such high regard. But, the end result of such efforts have built a company full of men and women with a true owner-mentality.

I'm extremely proud of SRC. They have stood up and done exactly what they've always said they would do if times got tough. And times are tough. So, SRC, in avoiding a pick and choose layoff, has offered a Volunteer Layoff Incentive Program. For those who volunteer for a layoff under certain terms will receive an incentive package that should keep most of the people who take it financially secure for months on end. During a three month period, the company can call these people back to work and it will be as if they were just on vacation. If not called back, then they are officially terminated at the end of the period. They are free to find another job at any time during this period and don't have to inform SRC of any job they may take.

Ultimately, it's a way to financially stabilize the company while financially stabilizing the volunteers for a long enough period of time that they should be able to find another job. Even if it takes longer than three months for SRC to bounce back, when they do, they will start calling the volunteers to offer job openings before ever looking at a new applicants information.

I volunteered for the layoff, and after some deliberation on whether or not to allow me to do it, the ball was basically thrown back into my court and they let me make the final decision. I still decided to take it. They respected my decision.

Upon initially hearing the news that they were offering such a package, I must admit that I was somewhat intrigued by the offer but gave it no real consideration. When telling my wife about it, she seemed to think that I should consider it for she immediately saw most of the benefits if I were to be accepted for it. We briefly discussed these benefits and how they could stand to be in line with our long term goals. She then left me to consider the issue telling me that it was a decision that only I should make. So, I prayed about it. I was racked with the feeling of fear that comes with the thoughts of leaving or losing a job. But, immediately as I began to pray about it, I was hit with reassurances of my own wide array of abilities. I prayed more at several different times and was always immediately hit with comforting words, reminders, as well as new thoughts of new benefits that I had not even yet realized. The answer was clear and I knew that I must apply for the program. SRC had written a clause in the program, though, to protect itself which allowed them to choose who would and would not be approved for the program. They needed this clause so that they would not be forced to allow someone to leave whose vacancy would have a significant negative impact on the company. I figured that whatever SRC chose, for whatever reason, God was wanting me to throw my name in the hat. Later, when I asked what I would be doing in the months to come, I heard "something different". But, it had a positive spin, an excited tone, if you will.

Now, to explain what I will be doing in the meantime, for the next several months, I intend to transform my home making it appear to be a spread in Better Homes and Gardens. That will be my job. Without the interference of a full-time job, I can get major renovations done around the house and have it ready for re-appraisal and then re-financing. With the equity that we've built, we intend to purchase another home here in town and renovate it. With the housing market so low, it's the people that have money who stand to make money. Investors can buy homes now and see a significant rise in market value by doing nothing but sitting on it until the market comes back. We intend, though, to do a renovation and turn the house for a profit. Yes, that's right, flip it.

I have many friends who flip houses or who have in the past and I have learned a lot from their advice, shared secrets, and shared mistakes. Also, I have spent much time reading about the profitability of house-flipping and the factors that can help and hurt the possible financial gain. And, SRC invested hundreds of hours in me over the years sending me to classes turning me into a business person who lets the numbers speak for themselves.

Some of the simpler secrets to making money by flipping houses that most people don't want to do are as follows. First, buy with as much cash as possible and with as little credit as possible. Credit puts you on a time line as well as raises your personal financial risk. Credit will make your profitability decrease with every month you pay interest pressuring you to sell sooner possibly at a lower cost. When you buy using credit, you must make payments that you didn't have before which takes up more of your personal budget. If something should suddenly come up that puts you in a bind financially, you stand to lose much more if you find that you cannot make payments. Second, keep a regular job to fund your personal budget. This is a big one. Your bills should be paid for by a regular job not from your profits from your house flipping business. Some people will make money doing this, but it can be hard, very risky and this tends to be the largest reason why people are unsuccessful in going into house flipping. For this also puts you on a time line. If you are living off savings while waiting for a house to sell or get finished in order to sell, you are motivated to take significantly less for it to sell it quicker as your own savings begin to dwindle.

These two secrets are the biggest ones because not following them contributes to negative motivation. If you can buy a home with cash and fix it up with cash, then it doesn't matter how long you sit on it. The only thing you pay in the meantime is taxes and insurance. You aren't motivated to sell too quickly and you can wait for market changes, a motivated buyer, or even decide to rent the property out if the market proves to need significant time to improve. If you might recall, that's how Donald Trump made his fortune. He bought up parts of lower Manhattan during the economic recession in the early eighties, properties that made millions upon millions when the market turned around only a couple of years later.

The third secret is not so secret, but I'll include it anyway. Do most of the work yourself. Contractors will work in a profit to do a job. So for every job that you hire out, you in essence share your profit with them. Contract every job out and you'll quickly find that you might just break even or possibly even lose money. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that both of the first two secrets will motivate the owner to contract out services to get the job completed faster. But, as I just said, contractors take a cut of your profit. This is another reason that they lead to negative motivation.

To recap, buy a house preferably with cash and preferably while the housing market is down, fix it up preferably with cash, keep a job doing something else to pay for your personal bills, and do as much of the work as you can by yourself. No, this isn't easy to do. But making big profits in a short amount of time isn't easy to do and that's why so few people will do it. You may also ask, "But I don't have cash to buy a house, who does?!" Some people do. I don't, but I have been investing in my own property so much and for so long that I have built enough equity up to use a portion of it to do just this.

So, to explain why I, personally, stand to benefit from this volunteer layoff, I can use this time of financial stability and joblessness to get my house to a point in which I can effectively obtain a high appraisal and a refinanced home loan in which I can take a portion of the equity out. With the interest rates down and the housing market down, I can both get a better home loan at a lower interest rate and take the equity out only slightly raising my monthly payment. I can then go back to work for SRC if they call or I can get another job somewhere else while working on our project house that we own free and clear. I'm not going to count on SRC calling me up to bring me back on at a convenient time for me. I realize that this scenario is not likely to come about.

Sure, there is a measured risk involved, but I am confident that I'm being led down this road. After many answered prayers, I cannot deny that we are being looked after during this economic down-turn. God has blessed us immensely and we've been responsible with what He has entrusted unto us. And, I have faith that He will continue to bless us and provide a path for our every step.

P.S. Just before I was about to post this blog, Jodi called me to tell me about the house across the street. About 4 months ago the house was purchased by a woman who house flips. Her and her boyfriend spent the last few months sprucing it up inside and out. Some of the work was structural like moving a couple doorways, but most of it was simple cosmetic improvements. The woman bought the house at auction and no doubt got it pretty cheap. They said that they were going to list it at $89,900 and it went on the market about two weeks ago. It apparently sold already because people are moving in right now. Pretty encouraging, I'd say.

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Strike 3, but NOT out

Everyone knows that times are tough. The economy seems to be rocketing towards disaster at a pace never seen before. And it is for people my age. I don't know first-hand how bad it was back in 1982 when the economy was attempting to recover from another steep recession like this, but I was there. At three years old, I didn't even notice the crisis, but throughout my employment at SRC I've been reminded of it over and over.

SRC was founded in 1983 and we celebrated our 25 years in business in a big way earlier this year with lots of food, Three Dog Night, and The Doobie Brothers at the Shrine Mosque. SRC only became a company because International was desperately closing down plants to stay alive. The International corporation survived, but not before abruptly closing it's Springfield plant. I'll skip the history lesson since most of you have heard me tell it before and because that's not what I intended to write about anyway.

The last three days of headlines for manufacturing in Southwest Missouri have been a serious blow to worker's confidence. It started with Aaron's Automotive announcing their intentions last Tuesday to close their Springfield plant starting in February and finally closing the doors for the last time in June effectively putting 184 people out of work. Then, Wednesday came and went and informed us that Fasco will be closing their plant in Eldon, Missouri utilizing the same time frame as Aaron's which will add another 390 names to the list of people looking for a job. Then, strike three if you will, yesterday's News-Leader boasted the headline, "Rail-car shop closing, leaving 228 jobless." TrinityRail announced to its Springfield employees that they, too, would be closing their shop effective February 2.

A quick search on the Internet brought me to another article that was reporting the numbers of jobless claims on a federal level. Apparently the numbers spiked for this week well over what Wall Street was expecting. The number of people filing claims for unemployment has now surpassed the amount of people who were filing for the same in 1982. A saturated job market is going to be the result as more and more companies are beginning to throw in the towel and settle in for a long, hard recovery with minimal staff and few hopes of expansion.

I remember the recession that followed 9-11 and remember wondering what would become of us, as a country, then. I'm not worrying this time, though.

In retrospect, every part of my life seems to have been gearing me for survival in tough times. I was raised by a mother who worked hard and provided for us in every way. Of all the things that she taught us over the years, spend-happy flightiness was not one of them. We learned how to make the most of everything we had. We "garage-sailed", and frequented flea markets, and thrift stores. Don't get me wrong, we weren't poor. I had more growing up then a lot of kids had and I had opportunities to go virtually any route with life I wanted to. I simply chose where I am today and I enjoy it. I take more pride in what I can make or fix than the objects I buy new. Everybody likes saving money, but for me its a game. A game that I really enjoy winning.

I was reminded once again of this game last night when I repaired my laptop. Their was a problem with it where it would shut down abruptly from even the slightest movement while running. I bought it dirt cheap for this reason. The previous owner couldn't figure it out. I figured that it was a loose connection somewhere and formatted the hard drive and reinstalled a fresh operating system. I checked all the connections to the main components and found nothing irregular. I put it all back together and the problem was solved somehow. I just assumed that maybe someone had messed with the system BIOS settings and that by reinstalling all the drivers for the hardware I fixed it by having the BIOS return to the default settings. I was wrong, though. The problem started occurring again.

Last night I was determined to pinpoint the precise cause for the instability of the machine and after many pokes and prods and the resulting shut-downs I determined that one side of a small cover on the bottom was to blame. I removed the cover, turned the computer on, and sure enough, I couldn't get it to shut down again. Upon close inspection I found that it was a design flaw in the case and cover. The cover had two guide tabs on the sides and when securely fastened to the case, one of the guide tabs was pressing against the mother board. Mother boards don't like pressure on them while they are running. I broke off the tabs. Problem solved.

My point is that I do this with everything. I'm not always successful, but Jodi and I both are two resourceful, resilient, and creative people. No matter what the future may hold, we'll be sure to find a way.

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