Hi blog. It's, uh....it's been awhile. I don't really know how to apologize other than to say I'm sorry. I didn't forget about you. I just got busy. Really busy.
You see, we bought this house......(cue foreboding music)
Slumming:
gerund or present participle: slumming
1.
spend time at a lower social level than one's own through curiosity or for charitable purposes.
Last year around this time, we started getting the itch to buy a house. We had been really timid about jumping in and buying a house again after we took such a loss on our Kentucky house. But after 2.5 years of renting, we felt ready. We looked at a bunch of houses, made a couple offers, and got outbid each time. During the process of qualifying for a loan, it made us sick to look at the amount of student loan debt we are going to be carrying around for the next 25 years. We started crunching numbers and thought how much more awesome it would be if we could apply the equivalent monthly student loan payment to a house payment. How great would it be to have that loan out of the way! So we decided to make it happen. We switched gears from house buying and started to look at rentals instead. Our kids are still young and even with lots of bedrooms, no one is brave enough to want their own room yet anyway. So we figured, why not?
We found a place with three units that we started to pursue. It had a small three bedroom house and another building with a studio apartment downstairs and a two bedroom apartment upstairs. It was a bank owned property and had been on the market for awhile. Add in the fact that it was December and the bank decided they wanted to get rid of it. We made an offer and they accepted. It took an annoying couple of months to get all the financing, inspections, and approvals in place but we finally closed on it and took the keys home on February 28th.
This is a pretty lame picture of the outside, but the three bedroom house is on the left, behind the van. The studio is on the bottom floor of the building on the right and the two bedroom apartment is on the top. And that's Bennett and Leah riding bikes, pretending like we aren't the slum dwellers that we are.
At the time we were renting a nice house on the south end of town and this new place was on the north end. We came up with all our plans to update the property one unit at a time. We planned to fix up the two bedroom unit first because it was the newest and largest. Then, we would move into that unit and start fixing up the next one. Then we could start renting them, rake in the dough, and pay off our student loans while our renters paid our mortgage and then some. It's a pretty bold plan.
I didn't take as many before/during/after pictures and I should have. But we had a lot of work to do. Popcorn ceilings, brown carpet, old windows, cedar shingle roof, mustard yellow bathroom, dark brown kitchen. The works baby.
I never did get a picture before we started tearing things down. But this is pretty close to the beginning. I spent days scraping the popcorn off the ceilings. We let it fall right onto the carpet then rolled it up and tossed the carpet when we were done.
Here is the stack of shingles that are about to be our new roof.
This was our first major priority. The cedar shingles were old and our insurance company would only let us buy the house if we agreed to replace the roof within the first 30 days. We were lucky to have a couple of warm-ish weekends in a row with no rain or snow.
Don't be fooled by the smile here. It wasn't very fun.
And this huge pile of boards is our hardwood floors. The FedEx driver showed up and said he couldn't take the boards off the truck because he didn't have a forklift. So like a total douche bag, he sat and watched me lift every single bundle of boards--all 2 tons of it--and pile it on the patio BY MYSELF while my kids were running around and Keith was at work. Thanks FedEx driver for making me hate you that day.
So one day, I got a phone call from the city utilities department. They asked if we had been using the water a lot at our new place. Huh?? We didn't even live there and had only flushed the toilet a handful of times since we had the water turned on. She told me our property had used 32 THOUSAND gallons of water in the past 11 days.
We were still living in our house on the south end of town so I immediately jumped in the car and drove to our new place. The ground was a little squishy near the water meter and the city came quickly and turned the water off. And, we started digging. A few feet later, we found the line that was spewing water and replaced the pipe. Keith and I found this emergency project to be annoying (and oddly reminiscent of the same emergency we had in the dead of winter in our house in Philly--another good story/bad memory for another day). The kids thought the dirt pile was fantastic.
Once that was taken care of, we got back to business. Isn't that kitchen awful? At least the popcorn ceiling and the carpets were gone.
That big pile with the tarp over it is the wood floor. They had been shipped from Florida so they needed to dry out for a while before we could install them.
Sweet chandelier, huh? Lots of smacked heads happened right there.
So about this time, we had been at it for a few weeks, commuting back and forth from our other house. And honestly, our other house was so much bigger and nicer that it was hard to leave and drive across town to deal with this crappy project. We decided that we needed to hurry the project along. We needed to make it hurt.
And so, we moved out of our house across town (we were renting and had fulfilled our lease a few months earlier) and decided to live in the construction zone. It would end up giving us several more hours each week that we could work. Instead of commuting or quitting at the kids bedtime, we could work later and longer.
But everything was so torn apart that our only option was to live in the studio apartment. If you've ever followed Dave Ramsey, you've heard him say "You've got to live like no one else so you can live like no one else." Dude. We win that prize.
We moved all our stuff into the house (it smelled like cat pee REALLY bad so it wasn't ready to be lived in) and stuffed all five of us in the studio apartment.
These pictures are terrible quality, but you can see how we crammed ourselves in there. Yes, that really is a boarded up window on the left. Keith hung that bar on the ceiling with a big drop cloth so we could separate ourselves from the kids at bedtime. They would never have fallen asleep otherwise.
You can see our tiny kitchen on the left and behind me there was a closet and a tiny bathroom. Five months, people. We lived this way for FIVE MONTHS.
Our next priority was the bathroom. I really wish I had taken a before picture. It was amazingly bad. The shower and counter top were mustard yellow and the cabinets were the same dark brown as the kitchen. There wasn't a window so the darkness of all the yellow and brown (makes me want to pause and pay homage to my dear old Davis Darts) were beyond horrid.
So we tore it all down. Drywall and all.
Once again, I'm no photojournalist...I didn't get any pictures of installing the cast iron tub (holy cow that thing was heavy) or the new tile floor. In the next picture, the base cabinet of the vanity is in place, the counter top is there and we just put in the back splash/accent tile. The dark green is just a waterproofing material. You can also see a glow coming from the ceiling where we installed a sky light.
Keith is starting the shower tile!
First bath! The studio only had a stand up shower so the kids were so happy to have a bath again!
Meanwhile, this was the progress on the bedrooms. In these pics, the ceilings and walls were already painted. This is the kids bedroom:
And this is the "master" bedroom (if you could really call it such a thing...)
That room on the back leads downstairs to a big storage room, the utility room, and the man cave/garage.
Next up, a little kitchen progress. The cabinets had to go. We had also already built that little closet on the left (props to Dave--the only person who willingly suffered a little with us on this project) which will end up having our washer and dryer stacked in it. We have other plans for the utility room downstairs so we decided to move the laundry there.
We are laying down a new sub floor so it's strong enough to support the tile.
Once the tile was finished (again, no finished picture there) we moved onto the wood floors. We started in the kids room.
Keith is never one to take the easy route. So he decided to re-create the floor pattern we had in our classic old Lansdowne (Philly) house, just for a nod to our past. This turned out to be incredibly time consuming (and even Keith questioned his sanity) but it looks really cool.
The bedrooms are done--moving on to the living room:
And a coat of gloss makes everything look better!
The kitchen is still a long way from finished but the next step was putting in new windows. Of course, I didn't take any pictures of the process. The trim is already done and painted in these pics. While he was at it, Keith installed all the baseboards and doors.
We've come so far!
We moved out of the studio apartment and into the upstairs right around this point. It was actually the weekend before our kids went back to school in August. Our kitchen was still in shambles but Taco Bell can always help out with that. We just couldn't handle one more day/hour/minute/second in the studio.
And once again, back to the kitchen. Now begins the long process of making cabinets. And I need to insert here how incredibly amazing Keith is. At this point, the only thing we had hired anyone for was the granite counter top in the bathroom. Keith is unbelievably patient and analytical. I admire him so much for being able to do every last detail of this project. Plus work his incredibly busy and demanding day job. That doctor business isn't exactly a part-time gig.
This was the stack of finished kitchen drawers, ready to be sanded and sealed.
Our first cabinet door! And again I forgot to take pics of the granite counter tops going in. That was the second time we paid someone to work on our project (although it was the same guy that we paid the first time).
We put in black granite on the outer counters and you can see below the granite that is our island. There were hours and hours of undocumented progress to get the kitchen to this point. Each cabinet door had so many precise measurements and cuts and routered grooves and joinery and several stages of sanding and multiple coats of paint. Then the hinges would go in and we would cross our fingers that everything would fit. Millimeters make a big difference. We only had to throw away a few doors.
This picture was taken over General Conference weekend. We installed the back splash tile while we listened.
In the progress of all the pictures, you might notice that sweatshirts start to appear. That's because we tore out the electric baseboard heat way back in the summer with intentions of updating the system to forced air. But that's an expensive proposition so we waited until it got so cold that we could hardly stand it any longer. The temps inside the house were regularly in the low 50's (and likely even lower in the middle of the night, we just never saw it on the thermostat) before we finally bit the bullet and put in a heater. That was last week. Life is so much warmer now!
So with that done, we can finally say...it is finished.
Before:
And after:
And that, dear blog, is why I've been away for so long. Think anyone will want to rent this place?
