Apartment renovation crews have dried up, but the Russians have found new ways

The queue for trusted craftsmen and teams – those who have been on the Moscow market for many years and therefore are familiar either to the clients themselves or to their friends – seems to be longer than ever in the foreseeable past.

“It was necessary to freshen up the bathroom and the kitchen, I called the master who did the repairs seven years ago, he is busy until the New Year,” says Yulia, a resident of Troitsk. “Another brigade, which was advised by friends, returned to its homeland, to Uzbekistan, the third master from other friends left for Armenia.”

Similar searches are described by other Muscovites interviewed by MK. There was a shortage of quality brigades before, but now it seems to have worsened. In this case, the landlord has a choice of three options: to wait a long time on the “waiting list” for a good team, or to randomly turn to repairmen “from the street” and ad portals …

Or, finally, try to make “cosmetics” on your own. After all, they used to do repairs on their own, and with jokes, jokes and funny hats from the newspaper! And this was in those days when a roll of ordinary wallpaper was problematic to find. And now there are entire supermarkets of these materials, repair them – I don’t want to. And many do.

As easy as possible

When you are your own team, you still have to start from the same place as in the case of hired workers. With the preparation of a repair plan. Literally, you walk around the apartment, survey the field of future activity and say to yourself: so, master, here you have to ditch, and then putty, but the pipes, in principle, will still live …

And here – immediately a powerful advantage of “self-repair”: the customer and the contractor in one person do not have the motivation to “inflate the estimate.” Both the desire to save money and natural laziness (no shame, by the way!) Play, on the contrary, to reduce the amount of work to the minimum possible. Works – do not touch. And nice!

And the second feature: when a contractor works for himself, besides a non-professional, repair technologies are chosen not according to the principle “how beautiful”, but according to manufacturability. That is, how easy it is.

Sometimes this causes a “reanimation” of seemingly forgotten methods of finishing and repair. Such, for example, as “retrowiring” from twisted wire in a fabric braid on insulators. It is much easier to conduct it than to ditch walls for concealed wiring that is common in today’s houses, and it looks much more aesthetically pleasing than ordinary modern cable channels.

“I am renovating an apartment for the wedding, the deadlines are tight,” says 36-year-old Vasily Dorman. – The wiring had to be changed, it is about 70 years old and it is not designed for modern loads. And there was no time to wait for the master with a puncher and then putty the walls. Therefore, we finished the walls, and my friend and I pull the wiring on our own, on insulators. At the same time, my fiancee was delighted with the beautiful porcelain switches and sockets! Another advantage of retrowiring is that it can be easily shifted and supplemented.

However, in this case, some electrical solutions have to be greatly simplified: in the “retro” they look too cumbersome. For example, we are talking about a circuit of switches that allows you to control the light from two points at once. It requires pulling several parallel lines of wiring at once.

Finally, false ceilings and distributed lighting systems almost always disappear from self-repair projects: installing them, especially out of habit, is very laborious. Instead, whitewashing ceilings or even wallpapering them for painting is returning: there was such a technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Wallpaper is more profitable than whitewashing if there is a redecoration in an old apartment: not so marco. If we are talking about a new building, it is enough to whitewash the ceiling before finishing the walls, but after the floor – when ready, the floor is simply covered with a reliable layer of covering material.

Superfluous and necessary

In addition to the tools that every home usually has, a lot of other things are usually needed for repairs. It all depends on the list of work: you may need a puncher, a building hair dryer (for removing old paint and some other work), grinders, spray guns, consumables …

– The trick is not to buy something that will not be used later in everyday life, – advises Alexander Pavlov, a finisher with many years of experience. – Let’s say, you can definitely rent a perforator or borrow it from someone, similarly to a compressor and an airbrush, a sanding machine. But you can buy a screwdriver, it will always come in handy. A welding machine for polypropylene plumbing pipes is rarely needed, but it is inexpensive, so you can buy it rather than borrow it. Adjustable and gas wrenches for plumbing – should be in the house, so if not, you need to buy it.

So, technologically, most apartment renovation operations can either be bypassed, or simply done on your own. But there are several “bottlenecks” where difficulties are still inevitable. The first one is floor repair. Most of the manipulations associated with it are difficult for non-professional finishers.

– It was necessary to completely abandon the large-scale repair of the floor, – says Vasily Dorman. – Maybe next year we will be able to invite a parquet master. And in the bathroom and toilet, the tiles are old, but still like. The hardest thing is with the kitchen, where there was linoleum – maybe you just have to lay a new one.

Although this type of flooring in Moscow has been considered unfashionable for many years, many are returning to it, at least temporarily, said Alexander Pavlov. “This is the only option that you can do without experience on your own,” he confirms. In order to be able to use linoleum without feeling the “inferiority” of the repair, the master advises not to stint on an additional heat and sound insulating substrate between the screed and the coating. And the linoleum itself can be chosen and quite thin – by design.