It’s Only Been a Month?!

Renovating this house is starting to feel a little bit like that movie The Money Pit with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long. I can just imagine our staircase falling apart step by step each time I climb up. Seriously - when we fix one thing, then we discover ten other things that we need to fix. We have a giant list of little projects that are taking a lot of time and effort, and it feels like it’s never ending. I think we may have bitten off more than we can chew. Don’t worry - my daughter says “I told you so,” and reminds us that we chose this. Every day.

We have had the keys to our new home for one month! Wow, that seems like a lifetime ago. I miss those days… to have energy, and no aches or pains. Gosh we were so motivated at the beginning of this! And now, we are starting to get a little worn out. Okay - a lot worn out. But, ever since we got the keys a month ago, we have done quite a lot of work! Still a little behind schedule…. just a little.

Fortunately, we hired some help so we can get a few of these projects done a little quicker. I reached out to the moms club that I’m in and asked if anyone could recommend strong teenagers looking for a part-time summer gig. So, thankfully a few days per week we now have two youngsters (Cooper and Max), to take on some of the work. And they have been a huge help!

Let’s start with the positives…

Our house lost another 3-4 tons with a second full dumpster load. But, the new drywall, underlayment, and concrete board were all delivered last week so our house is going to start putting on a few pounds soon.

We have made huge progress on the ground floor! New ceiling drywall is going up in the living rooms. Our new kitchen is completely framed in with new electrical and plumbing. Since we are moving the refrigerator from its original location to the other side of the room, we needed to cap off the old water source and add the new one in the crawl space. Michael drew the short straw when it came to going down in the crawl space. He suited up and took one for the team!

Upstairs is well on its way! We built the new laundry room, which is also completely plumbed, wired, and vented! We tore up all of the gross urine soaked underlayment flooring in all of the bedrooms (thanks to Cooper and Max). My office lost every single sheet of underlayment. But, believe me when I tell you - it smells sooooo much better in there now! We are about half way done demolishing both upstairs bathrooms. Pretty soon, the second floor rooms will be ready for primer and paint!

We had to make some serious decisions over the last couple of weeks. We picked out flooring and ordered hardwood and carpet. The hardwood we picked is Southern Yellow Pine and will be delivered next week. This species of pine is harder than most other pines, and we love the rustic look of the grain. We’re thinking about staining it a warm dark brown tone, but before we do that we’ll test some stains out first and pick the best one. The carpet we ordered will be installed at the end of the month. We chose a light neutral grey that will compliment some of the subtle paint colors that we picked. This house has HUGE bedrooms too, so we ordered a boat load of carpet!

Side note: Notice the name of the carpet color we chose… it was meant to be ;)

We also have a good idea of the tile we are going with for the master bathroom. We chose a large 12”x24” slate grey natural stone tile, which I think will go great with the white subway tile in the shower. We were toying with the idea of heated floors in the master bathroom. Apparently they aren’t too tough to install ourselves. What do you think?

We also picked out bathroom vanities, paint colors, outdoor sconces, guest bathroom tub and the master bathroom shower basin. Still lots more decisions to make!

Our apples and pears in the tree out back are ready to pick! They are finally ripe and ready to eat. Unfortunately, the majority of the apples ended up on the floor, or eaten by squirrels and birds… but we still got more than we could possibly need. Free apples to anyone in the neighborhood who wants to pick some! And in the midst of a hectic week, we took a break and had an old fashioned picnic in the back yard. Michael’s mom, Judy, was nice enough to share one of her recipes with me of one of Michael’s favorite meals. It’s like a veggie pizza - but more like veggies and ranch dip kind of thing. It’s really good!

Okay, now for the bad news…

The worst thing so far that we discovered was the wall in my office. This is the same wall over the garage that needs new siding on the outside. We knew from the beginning that the window frame is rotted and needs to be replaced. We thought we might hold off on fixing that until next spring… but… we discovered something way worse. There has been so much water damage from years of rain pouring into this wall that the structure of the wall is completely disintegrated. There are no 2x4’s holding any load on this wall anymore, so technically the only structure holding up the roof is the truss. Cooper and Max took out the underlayment and the drywall, and that’s when we saw how wiggly the wall was. Load bearing walls aren’t suppose to wiggle when you push on them! Ugh! This surprise will need an expert framer or contractor to repair and will be an expensive fix. And, this will need to be fixed before the carpet is installed, so we need to get on it quickly!

All of the other little things don’t compare to this problem. It’s a structural issue and that’s major.

But, I had “fun” trying to melt the wallpaper off the walls. That was gross. Do you know what 40 yr-old wallpaper glue smells like when it’s heated up? Trust me, you don’t want to know. I didn’t get very far on the wallpaper because I’m kinda short and I don’t do well on ladders - so I could only take off what I could reach. And it is so messy! But, the steamer works pretty well. We just have to finish this project on a cold day because it gets pretty steamy.

Before we could install the new ceiling drywall in the living room, I needed to remove a million gnarly nails from the joists. I’m not kidding - there were so many of them all bent and crooked. Michael had the pleasure of doing this in the family room and kitchen. It took a long time to get all of them out. We found out that all of the second floor joists are uneven. Surprise, surprise. Like, they were really uneven! So to fix that, we needed to buy a electric hand planer and flatten out all of the joists one by one. Then install perpendicular firing strips so that the drywall can be screwed in. The room isn’t as square as we originally thought, so measuring and cutting the drywall is time consuming. We rented a drywall lift to help us with installing - it’s still a pain to maneuver.

Oh! I almost forgot! Haha - okay so Michael tore down the ceiling in the living room two weeks ago and a huge (I mean mansion sized) mice nest with buckets full of mice poop rained down all over him. Thankfully he was wearing his hazmat suit. OMG, it was awful! And the smell… I think we need to rename this “The Stinky House” instead of “The Someday House!”

Every night we come home to the apartment and we’re so sore and stiff we can barely move. We are a little deflated when we think too much about the things that are going wrong. But, that doesn’t last long because we always change the subject to what the house will look like when it’s done. It will be a beautiful house. And it will feel good to be inside this beautiful house and feeling proud that we touched every single surface and made it our own.

Until next time…