Welcome to this week’s edition of my weekly recap.  It’s been another busy week for me with ongoing renovations.  But I still had time to write a review on a Fin Tech company called Borrowell.  If you’re looking to get a free credit score and report then check them out.

Weed is Now Legal in Canada!

That’s right.  It is now legal to buy and consume Marijuana in Canada and already there are supply shortages across the country.  I guess people really underestimated the demand for the product.  We’ll see if this continues.  I have a small position in a small cap weed stock.  It was up early in the week, then came back down at the end.

Stocks Fail to Recover

Stocks haven’t been doing well lately.  After the big drop they failed to recover this week, which suggests to me that the “trend” is lower.  On a brighter note, one of the utility companies I own increased its dividend payout.  My plan is still to stay invested and ride out the inevitable storm by focusing on my growing dividend income.  It’s tough to see how more rate increases are likely given that global growth is falling across the board and that debt levels are crazy high.

Renovations Update

This year has been crazy busy for me.  It all started when in January when my wife and I decided to start renovating our home.  It’s been difficult to get anything done the past few years because we have small children and have focused a lot on them.  Now that the kids are a little older and in kindergarten and pre-school, we have a bit more time to tackle the laundry list of things we want to do to our forever home.

It started with a simple task: furnish our living room.  From there it spiraled into painting 2 bedrooms and renovating our family room (which turned out fabulous I have to say).  By the end of April the family room was finished and no sooner was it finished then a huge wind storm blew down our fence!  Soon after, we found a moldy spot on our basement carpet near a window.  Luckily our insurance helped cover some of the cost of these things.

In June our new fence was installed and then we turned our attention to the basement.  Having a finished basement is a must if you have kids.  It’s their space to play hang out.  So it’s been super difficult these past few months without a kid friendly place for them to play.

The basement water issue forced us to look more closely at some of our future home repair projects and to tackle them this year.  After all, what’s the point of getting new carpet, paint etc, if there is a chance the same thing could happen again.  Already I had to fix a small water leak by our electrical conduit.  The problem with these “small” leaks is that they tend to go unnoticed until you see a mold spot on the carpet.

Each one of these nuisances require cutting into the wall to see where the leak is coming from.  There’s usually a little mold on the insulation, baseboard and drywall, so all those need to be replaced.  When I pulled up my basement carpet, I found settlement cracks that needed to be addressed before putting any new flooring down.

To make a long story short, we decided that we’d had enough with our leaky, moist basement and so we were going to do the Cadillac of repairs to properly address all of our current and future concerns.

We decided to replace our 30 year old, leaky eavetroughs.  This was done in July.  Next, we sealed our basement cracks with self-levelling polyurethane caulking and used a deep penetrating concrete sealer on the rest of the floor.

But that wasn’t enough.  To be certain that we would never have to deal with any future water issues, we decided to do a full exterior waterproofing, replace our old cloggy weeping tiles and install a sump pump.  This upgrade will protect our foundation and our basement investment for decades.  And it only cost about $30k which is not so great for the finances!  But our peace of mind going forward…is priceless!

So I’ve spent the past month painting the ceiling and priming the walls for the painters and painting our trim.  I ran some new electrical and have to install a subfloor before the carpet goes down, but I’m pretty sure these will be done in no time.

Here are some before and after pictures:

The area by the window is where water came in.  We ran new electrical to put a big screen on the wall and at the eleventh hour I also ran an Ethernet cable to make sure that I don’t have any issues with Kodi or Netflix.

Here is the after picture.  A nice clean wall!

My basement had an office area with plate glass windows.  I never liked them and thought they would eventually get broken by the kids.  So I took them out and repaired the wall:

You can also see the ugly green color that we painted over with a light grey.

Finally, I finished the sump pump discharge drain line.  We ran it out the side of our house and about 30 feet to the front and connected to a french drain so that for sure the water won’t come back.  Because it gets freezing cold here in Ontario, it is important to have an air gap so that if the sump drain line freezes, it won’t burn out our pump and cause flooding in our basement.  To achieve this, I bought a product made by Raybend called Freeze Drain.  This provides an air gap and, in the event of a frozen drain line, will eject water on an angle away from our foundation.  The Freeze cost about $30 on Amazon, but is well worth it and easy to install.  Oh and FYI I had to use a special glue to connect the Freeze Drain (which is PVC plastic) to the drain line (which is ABS).  It worked great and already we’ve had some rain and cold temperatures.  The glue held and next week I’ll backfill.

So I’ve been stuck in home reno hell for the past 8 months, but it’s finally looking like the basement reno will be wrapped up by early November.

Thanks for reading my Weekly Recap October 20th Edition.  Oh and if you’re getting bored of reading my posts here, check out my side project Shark Munch.