Nice Guy Handyman (1)

We're almost done w/ the home repairs, we've gotten the major fixes done, at least. My next few posts will be about the various repairs that were done to our place by Jeff, the Nice Guy Handyman.

This post will be about our laundry area (o sige na, ... closet).

Problem 1: Existing ductwork is made of plastic, this is no longer up to current building codes and is a fire hazard. Clothes dryers need to be vented, the vent goes into the wall, up the ceiling and should go all the way out of the building/house.

The outer ductwork is aluminum coated (up to code) but the ductwork inside the wall is made of plastic (outdated & could be a fire hazard because lint & dirt collects inside).

Problem 2: As luck would have it, it turns out that somewhere along the way, one of this condo's previous owners decided to cut off the ductwork in the ceiling and attached this vent to one of the roof struts.

Yes, our clothes dryer has been venting heat, moisture and lint into our ceiling all these years. We didn't know until Jeff went into the ceiling to check it out. The insulation around this vent was wet.

Problem 3: See the water hookup ? That hose is made of rubber. Rubber hoses (non-metal clad ones) should be replaced every 5 years and I recently heard from a friend that some condo associations are requiring owners to use metal-clad hoses in their units already.

Problem 4: See that faucet w/ no hose ? For some reason, our washer wasn't hooked up to the hot water, it's no biggie but I decided to just let Jeff check if the hot water source is live and if it is, to hook the washer up to the hot water.

Work done:

Day 1: Jeff replaced the plastic vent with aluminum coated venting material and connected it back to the ductwork (already exists) that leads out of the bldg. He installed metal clad hoses for the washing machine water hookups, patched up the holes that he made in the closet (for installing the new vents).

That night, hubby decided to cover the ugly walls up of the closet with some paint.

I wasn't really feeling up to it and I felt it was a waste of time since this was a utility closet anyway but I suddenly remembered that we still have that unused gallon of white paint left over from when we were doing some DIY work in 2009 (we stopped when we found out I was pregnant with Swe-cha).

An hour later, we had finished painting the upper portion of the closet. We only painted up to the part where the shelves were going to be installed, we figured we can continue the rest later.

I'm glad that hubby sort of insisted that we do this because the new coat of paint makes everything look so much cleaner and nicer. This is how it looks after Jeff put the shelves back up on day 2.

Now, I'm much much happier, after having done a couple of loads of laundry using HOT / WARM water :)

I'm hoping that we can finish the rest of the painting soon so this doesn't look half-done (and I know us... the longer we put things off, the lesser the chances of it ever getting done at all).

For the vent work, Jeff charged us 1/2 of what the other company quoted us. He also only charged us a little bit extra for the water hose replacement. I'm glad that we had this fixed because the existing vents were almost choking w/ lint (we really have to get the vents cleaned more often) and all that moisture being vented into our ceiling ?... can't be good.