Day 24

A lot (yet so little) has happened in the last couple of weeks.  The stupid dumpster company never showed and has yet to return my multiple calls.  Thanks to the f-i-l we scored a dump truck.  I never thought I would see the day that I would get excited over a dump truck, but alas the day has arrived. :)  During day one of clean up we seemed to focus on the easier to clean up areas and dragging out everything we already had bagged up.  Other than the discomfort of the respirators, it wasn't too bad. Day two, however, was freaking disgusting!  As I was getting ready to shovel out the nastier kitchen, Josh said the exact wrong thing to me.  He said "I really hope that used to be a pillow, otherwise a couple dozen birds died right there."  I have an excellent gag reflex.  It took one scrape of the shovel across the wet, dirty, moldy, dusty floor that might possibly be the scene of a mass bird suicide before I was on the front porch with my eyes watering and dry heaving. Josh was pretty ticked that I left that room for him.  I'm a girl and I'm not the one who bought the house, so he could be ticked all he wanted, I wasn't touching it. Ba-Gack!

House flippers or doomsday preppers?

I am hoping that after Josh shoveled out that nasty kitchen he will be on board with tearing that addition completely off the house.   

 Front room completely cleaned out.  Big change from the first pics with piles of junk three feet high. :)  Crappy old linoleum? I'll take it!

 

Finally every last dead bird and bat is out of the house.  Be gone heebie-jeebies!

Day 10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitchen 1- At some point the house was converted into a duplex with two kitchens in a rear addition.  Poorly converted and poorly roofed, it's falling in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitchen 2 - less of a mess but the ceiling is still on the floor.

More crap.

This window is the only thing in the entire house that made me smile at first sight.  It will be repaired and will remain somewhere in the house.

Can't wait to get my hands on the trim.  Says the girl who isn't yet 100 hours into repairing trim.

You know "Pants on the Ground"?  This is more "Ceiling on the floor!"

State of the art home security.

Isn't it exhausting just looking at that mess.  We bought a shovel.

I have no idea what someone was thinking with this bathroom.

Bird skeleton-yummy!

The original Tribune from the filming of Brubaker.

Thought this was interesting. I flipped through it and was able to pick out the shows I would have watched that week.  Neat thing to have.

Day 9

Let me start by saying that spreading a 30'x50' tarp over the top of a two story house is not as easy as it sounds and it's still not perfect.  Worst part?  The qualified man who installed the new roof on our store lives behind our house.  His truck full of handy roofing tools sat there taunting us all day.  His son was outside for a long time watching (and most likely laughing at) us.  Our poor friends T&D stopped by say hello and literally got roped into helping.  Several hours later, it's as covered as it's going to get for today.

Zhoie got the house numbers painted on the porch so WHEN the dumpster guy shows up he will be able to find the house.  I installed the new exterior door knob all by myself.  It's a small victory, but hopefully one of many things I'll learn to do in the upcoming months.
I managed to get one room cleaned up, here are the before and after shots of one of the bedrooms.

This is Fivel's room. Isn't it pathetic that we have to clean it before we can demolish it?

This fireplace is one of my favorite features.  Too bad it's gotta go!

Even Fivel is afraid to touch the floor!

That vanity you see is one of the few things we will be able to reuse.

That bare floor came with a huge sense  of relief.  The only room in the house that you don't have to watch where you step.

Day 8

On one hand I prefer local small businesses.  On the other hand, they don't return your phone calls or deliver your dumpster and it's frustrating to have to chase a person down to pay them money.  Our last 70 degree weekend and we can't get any cleaning done. :(

In the last few days we have discovered Craigslist and the ReStores.  Wow - this might completely change the way we do things.  There is a whole non-retail world of building supplies out there and the difference in price makes our budget look not quite as scarey. 

Zhoie and I got our very own hammers today as we prepare for demolition.  Demo is definitely our favorite part, it feels AWESOME to destroy things!  We are going to decorate our new hammers mostly so we can tell which one is ours, but also so they are pretty. :)  Lord knows there needs to be at least one pretty thing in that house.

Tomorrow - tarp the roof, install new knob so we can finally lock it up, maybe a teeny bit of demo so we can try out our new shovel too.

Day 6

I swear the two of us are making ourselves crazy going over all of this in our heads.  We've got a blueprint drawn up and now we have to decide what to do with everything.  Can anyone explain why there was no bathroom in this house?  I guess because it was built in the outhouse days?  They poorly converted an upstairs bedroom into a giant bathroom that was nothing but wasted space.  So here I sit going over the blue prints trying to find a place for a bathroom.  How big does a bathroom need to be anyway? If it only needs to be 5'X5' I've got the perfect spot for it. (lol)  In the end, I found myself measuring my own bathroom and bathtub and decided that 5'x5' isn't going to work out so well.  Are we sure we can't just build another outhouse?

Day 5

It's election day!  Why are all my facebook friends being so hateful and harshing my new project buzz? Man am I glad the day is almost over!

In all honesty, this house came along at the perfect time. Our kids are older and don't like to hang out with us much.  (Except our daughter who swears to never leave home, she'll make a handy little slave). We haven't really had a project of any type for several years and this is literally going to change 2013 for us. For better or worse, that house is getting rehabbed. We will love it and make it pretty even if it kills us!

We managed to get plexiglass put over the first story broken windows and spent the few daylight hours we had cleaning the front room some more. The door now opens and the junk is "mostly" packed up.  There are a few little piles I refuse to pick up because underneath them are bird carcasses. The hubs can get those himself. Only eight more rooms to go!!!!!

p.s. we also have a litter of kittens living in the basement and the neighbors are kind enough to put food out for them. ;)

Day 4

This is the first day hubby has off since he bought that poor house that needs someone to love it.  Luckily he's married to me.  You know - because I am so adventuresome and on this ambitious project - I am all in!  For today at least.  The enormity of it all sometimes hits me and turns me into a ball of nerves.  I know, I know, they make a pill for that. :)

We have no idea yet what we are going to do to the house.  The only things we know for certain are:

#1-we need a Sam's Club helping of trash bags (or a match)

#2-we need to secure the house because we don't have any keys and a majority of the windows are broken

#3-that bad boy needs dried-in yesterday (ie-new roof)

#4-we absolutely have to have respirators

#5-we just might be a little bit crazy

Just to be doing something, we use a few dozen trash bags to start packing trash and Goodwill donations.  (I hope there are some old ladies shopping Goodwill for polyester pants in every color of the rainbow).  We ran out of trash bags before we even make a dent in the first room. Encouraging!

We couldn't get the front door open any further.  Where's my shovel?

Heaven help us.

Day 2

We've had a day to think and to talk and the shock is leaning more towards excitement.  You should know that we aren't new to remodeling.  We've remodeled most of our own home and we (mostly the hubby) have helped virtually everyone we know do something. He does it all! We have always wanted to rehab and flip a house.  Of course we can do a better job than those people on television! The only problem is that we've never tried to rehab a big-nasty-disgusting....lets be honest, it's a shit-hole, on our own budget with zero sub-contractors.(insert Jaws music)

It is hubbies Saturday to work.  Our daughter really wanted to see the house and I wanted to get some initial measurements so we could start the planning process.  The two of us aren't what I would call "prissy" but every girl has her limits. First of all, you can't even open the front door.  The room behind the door is piled 3 feet high with crap. Clothes, more mail than anyone should ever receive in a lifetime, sweepers, crap, crochet supplies, crap, fans and oh crap - a million dead pigeon skeletons! Every room of the house is covered with junk, we need a dumpster to clean out the junk before we need a dumpster for demolition debris.  We got about half the house measured before the dead bird heebie-jeebies became too much for us and we had to flea the premises.

Day 1

It was a Friday afternoon that was a little bit exciting because I was leaving work early to run some errands for our daughter's school function.  Yes, as a boring adult the highlight of my week was leaving work a few hours early. Sad but true.

Because my husband works a twelve hour night shift I was pleasantly surprised to find him awake when I walked through the door.  The surprise changed to shock when the first words out of his mouth were "I bought a house and two properties today!"  He doesn't surprise me often, but when he does, he does it right! 

As the story progresses it is revealed that he bought three properties, one with a house on it,  sight-unseen because it really was a deal you couldn't turn down.  Well then - I guess it's time to get in the car and go see what we now own!  We had a hard time even finding the empty properties, so we moved on to the house.  Could we have possibly gotten a really nice house that we could move into tomorrow? Could it be an old house with where the hubs could go in search of hidden treasure?  Could we sell it immediately for a little profit? The anticipation was killing me.  As we drew nearer the street I was beginning to really stress.  I knew of one house on the street that belonged to "THAT" family in town. You know, if your town doesn't have "that" family that means you are "that" family.  I prayed we didn't now own "that" family's house, oh the embarrassment!  We drove up the street slowly checking house numbers.  Whew-it's not "that" house!!!  We keep driving, hoping at every nice house that the numbers would match the numbers on our paperwork. Finally, at the last house on the street, we had a winner....if you could call it that.  Never.

This is the first picture we took of our new house.

We inspect our new homestead and return to the car, staring at the house in shock.  From the quiet the hubs says "Well, at least it wasn't "that" house."  Too bad "this" house makes "that" house look good!


And so it begins, The Rehab Project.