Flooring, planned obsolence and rental units June 10th, 2008
I'm putting the finishing touches on house #3 down at our rental properties. Second major renovation this Spring, following a 6 week stint in house #2 - both houses needed interior walls removed so that insulation could be added, some walls with mold on the plywood had to be removed or remedied as possible. After that a complete repainting and then brand new floors. Almost all of my coding in the past month has occurred after 6 PM in the evening - although this AM I woke up with some tweaks to monthly profit calculations for Big$hot so I am doing a little morning coding before getting to it.
House #2 got pine floors, screwed down, stained and polyurethaned. Very pleased with the results but the process was quite time consuming, including a 2 week period where the wood needs to sit in the house to humidity match - not to mention that the kiln dried wood still carried a bit of moisture given what the dehumidifier was able to suck out of the air. So, house #3 needed to be done in a tighter time frame - 1×4's were less viable as well because the cost of a half lift of the material had more than doubled in 6 weeks - next time it's cheap I'm going to buy a lift and store it. House #3 received inexpensive laminate floors in the back bedrooms - looks kind of like wood and, for the price, is a great way to do a floor in a hurry. But it doesn't stand up well to water so it's a poor choice for the living room and kitchen as both of those rooms have doors from the outside. Which gets me to the topic of this rant. You can spend a lot of money on pretty nice flooring materials these days and, as I kind of like fixing houses and having good tenants, I'm inclined to consider this kind of thing. But, and here's a big one, all of the interesting stuff like hard tiles and rubberized wood strip like flooring have a limited shelf run - at least in this small market where we are doing our buying - before the manufacturers will replace the stuff with newer models. The upshot? If you put some in and need a few more pieces in 18 months... you are hooped. The retailers clever answer is buy a whole new set and replace the lot. Cha-ching. I know you can't legislate that companies continue to carry and support products but this practice is evil and companies who do it ought to be ashamed.
While I'm at it - if anybody ever makes a car that will take the same parts for 30 years then sign me up. I'm getting old and curmudgeonly and all of this redundant make work and sales marketing crap is getting on my last nerve. It's time we held folks who are filling our landfills and burning precious resources on fin additions, bumper reworking and pattern tweaks - you know what I am talking about - without offering truly new functionality, to task. Want to get my hard earned sheckels? Make good things and then support them going forward so that the people who buy stuff from you aren't left high and dry when they need to get those things fixed.
All done ranting for now - I feel a bit better, thanks for listening,
L.
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