A few months ago my daughter and her fiancée bought a house in Mountlake Terrace, a suburb north of Seattle. It is only 9, minutes from our own house, so we are very excited. Houses in Seattle are very expensive, so what they bought was a small, one-story house built in 1962 that needs a lot of work. At least the kitchen is in pretty good condition. Our out-of-town family were shocked to learn what it cost.

As a dad, this is a dream come true. I enjoy my relationship with my kids (and their partners), but I always love the rare occasions where I can actually help them out. As I love home improvement projects, I’m once again enjoying a brief period of relevancy. I had just come out of retirement to work for Aurora, but had I stayed retired, I could spend all of my time fixing up their house.

Their two most immediate needs were the electrical and their hardwood floors, so they had those done before they moved in.

Electrical

The three biggest electrical issues were:

The service panel in their home was both very under powered and highly illegal (it had been recalled many years ago). If their home burned down due to their service panel, insurance wouldn’t cover it.

None of the wiring in their home was grounded.
Apart from a few lights in the kitchen and the bathroom, it had no built in lighting.

While I am comfortable working on simple electrical projects, I left this one to the professionals. We had Dadz Electric re-wire the entire house. My primary contribution was to patch the drywall after they finished their repairs (there was surprisingly few holes to patch).

Flooring

They have hardwood floors throughout the house, but there were several large pet stains that required the wood to be replaced. The kitchen floor had tiling, but it was poorly installed (they added it at the last minute when they listed their house), the tiles were cracking, and the floor felt kind of squishy.

They decided to extend the hardwood floor throughout the kitchen, but we agreed to remove the old tile and underlayment to save money. Removing the underlayment was a lot of work (done almost entirely in the dark due to the electricity being turned off). We used my track saw to cut through the underlayment and to remove it in sections. When doing so, we learned that the sub-floor is only ½” thick, which is why the floor felt so squishy.

After removing the underlayment, we had to cut it flush to the cabinets, which was tricky, but we found that a vibrating cutting tool worked pretty well.