This Damn House

This is depressing and overwhelming, but necessary. (Once I figure out how to whip MT blog into submission, I'll create a permanent link here for my own despair convenience.)

I feel motivated to keep a list of the stuff we've given away! I don't know why....
(updated 3/24/08)

At least managed to get a trip to the dump transfer station recycling center in...

Apparently I'm not the only one with too much stuff...

I did actually manage to catch a handyman on the phone this morning and he said he'd call me back next week to schedule a visit. Still no luck finding a glass installer in our area. *sigh*

you stop working on the house for a few days.

This was a real vacation.

So the only progress I have to report is that the broken window is no longer broken!

That is a task that has been weighing down my mind for at least three years. You'd think, hey, broken window, get that fixed, y'know? We did, in fact, call a few glaziers. One even showed up to look at it when he said he would. Once. Then disappeared. (What is it with the disappearing workmen, eh?) Then we were caught up in the idea that we were going to do a full remodel on the house, which would mostly have involved scraping large portions of it, including the room containing that window. No use spending $500 on a project that would be irrelevant Some Day Real Soon Now.

Finally found a guy to do it. I called damn near every glass repair and glass installation place in the state, and in all cases it was either too small a job or they didn't come out our way. Finally I got desperate enough to snivel a little at one place, and the next day the phone woman said that, while they couldn't do it themselves, they could hook me up with a side job guy they use. (Is it just me or does "side job" sound pretty dirty?) Side Job Man told us he could do it for $500 and I almost proposed to him.

Now it's done, and I will rest tonight and prepare myself for...The Tub.

Mr. TDH took the sundry offspring to visit some friends for the weekend while I was to be working. And work I did! I haven't gotten a work-out like this in ages!

It is totally depressing that about 1/3 of the work turns out to be irrelevant. (Well, not totally...truth is the grout was leaking and making a mess in the basement. Nice to put a stop to that, making the re-glaze project less urgent.) So here I cheer myself with a list of useful accomplishments for the weekend:

• Cleaned the kids' room top to bottom, and made some headway in organizing it. Also threw away tons of stuff I'm hoping they won't miss. Shhhh, don't tell.
• Three loads of dishes and four loads of laundry, washed, dried and put away.
• Freecycled several items, including giving about a ton of old bricks to a guy who is building a re-used brick walk to save energy. Rock on.
• Stripped off the ugliest pink wallpaper you ever did see in preparation for the continuation of Project Re-do The bathroom:

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Who the heck wallpapers a bathroom?!? What were they thinking? "You know hon, we should do our bit against the global mold shortage by dedicating our bathroom as a mold nursery and preserve"? Or maybe "The 'distressed' look is so in style in clothing and furniture, don't you think it would be totally hip to have a room done in peeling pink paper?"

We'll see if we can chew it.

One of the sorest points of This Damn House is the lawn yard. I won't bore you with the long and sordid history of this particular piece of earth (except to mention that Jimmy Hoffa is involved), I'll simply tell you that out of the halfish acre of property we own, about 20 square feet is covered with lush rich lawn. For the rest....well, it turns out if you mow weeds, it looks pretty good from a distance.

The one landscaper who would return our calls quoted us about $10,000 (that's "ten thousand dollars", in case you miscounted the zeros) to replace our sorry excuse for a lawn with something more...grasslike.

That's some mighty rich grass, we thinks to ourselves. How hard can this really be? It isn't like you have to have a Master's degree to install a lawn.

So last weekend we rented a Vermeer shredder-chipper from Home Depot, and turned our pile of dead brush (occupying about 72% of our back yard) into a pile of mulch (soon to be occupying 100% of a neatly laid mulch bed around the western edge of the yard).

Next weekend the plan is to hope our soil samples come back quick, rent a tiller, buy some top-soil and "amendments" and turn the yucky "lawn" into vast expanses of brown fecund earth. The following weekend? SOD!

But now I'm reading up on lawn installation (isn't "installation" a weird word to use in gardening? I keep looking around for a blue progress bar) and I'm tortured with self-doubt. We have to grade the lawn? Remove every stick and stone? What if the first frost hits before the sod roots? What if one strip of sod dies and we are left with a brown streak down the middle like a six inch valley through the middle of my soul? What if there's a bump in the lawn, and the new next door neighbors who just teleported in from Privet Drive sue us for lowering their property values?

Who are we to think we can take on a $10,000 ("ten thousand dollars") task in three weekends, anyway?

Sounds like a movie, eh?

I admit I was a bit trepidatious about what the real estate agent would say. "Huh. Well, I suppose we could sell it as a fixer-upper." or even "Huh. I wonder how much the land would be worth if we razed the house."

She didn't say that, though. She seemed to think it was actually a pretty nice house. (She might be biased since she was our agent when we bought it, too.) She agreed with our priorities on aspects to fix (paint, finish floors, etc.) and which to leave, and encouraged us to invest in good landscaping.

What she did say was that to catch the peak of the market, we should have the house ready to show by mid-March.

MARCH? Like...this March? March of '08?

AAAAUUUUGGGGHHHHHHH.

There's so much to do!!!!!!!!!!!!

(That's ignoring, for the moment, the uncomfortable prospect of moving my family into some temporary housing from the time we sell until Mosaic is ready for move-in; which in theory should be next summer but...I dunno, has there been a project since Noah finished his ark that completed on time???)

I took a bit of a hiatus (3 months!) from blogging. Er...did anyone notice?

My excuses are a variety of personal and medical issues which slowed down progress on The Project, and a broken camera which interfered with project documentation. Plus about a month ago I noticed that I needed to have our house on the market, like, yesterday, and a general state of complete and utter panic overtook me.

The panic has helped motivated me to do a ton of little but much needed tasks...painting hallways, packing up excess furniture, etc.

But what I needed to kick my butt back into blogging gear was a major project to post about.

So, for your reading pleasure, I spent the better part of the last three days re-tiling our main bathroom. This involved detaching and removing the toilet and vanity, tearing out the existing tile, ripping up the water-damaged sub-floor, laying new cement back-board sub-floor, and the tiling itself.

I have a whole host of new "how not to"s to post soon. In the meantime, here is the bathroom we've been living with for the past 3 months. Note in particular the lovely duct-taped plastic sheeting:

Now we are living with this. Note in particular the lovely tile on top of which there's no toilet or sink. Form over function, baby, form over function:

Our house! Our new house! It is no longer just a dream...as of last week, it is a hole in the ground lined with concrete!

Even covered with snow, it gives me warm fuzzies.

I get even warmer and fuzzier fuzzies looking at this artist's rendition of what it will look like next spring:

(That's actually a rendering of Camelot Cohousing neighborhood, rather than my future neighborhood Mosaic Commons, but both neighborhoods are part of Sawyer Hill EcoVillage, so close enough.)

I'm just unbearably excited. It's been a long long long road to get this far. (Mosaic just celebrated it's 8th Anniversary this weekend!) After all the work and struggle and disappointments and despair, now it's going up before our very eyes. In fact, it looks like we'll be moving in early next fall. (The Quicker Fixer Upper project better get Really Quick!)

If you like construction photos, you can see all the details here.

Oh, hey, won't you be my neighbor? We still have homes to sell in both neighborhoods! drop us a line.

If ripping up 3 layers of flooring wasn't crazy enough, we've also decided to pull out a large custom built cabinet that has been in the house since (as a tag behind it said) 1988. The cabinet was kind of nice but it was in less than great condition. More importantly, it cut out a huge amount of the floor space in the dining room that we (and hopefully prospective buyers) want back.

Of course, it's This Damn House, so no project is as easy as you'd think. But...now I fear we may have bitten off more than we have time to chew.

Beind the cabinet there's 1/2 of a sort of false wall.  The cord you see goes to a light switch installed in the side (outside) of the cabinet which controls the dining room light.  It looks like the easiest way to fix this up is to frame and hang the rest of
the wall.  Maybe.

Below the cabinet is the supporting 2x4s nailed to the floor.  The hard part here is that the lateral 2x4s extend the full length of the cabinets, including under ones we are keeping.  So somehow we have to cut them in place and pull them up.  how the heck we gonna do that?!

And of course there's misc. aesthetic issues, like needing base trim around the new wall and existing cabinets.

It's not a pretty situation for sure.  :-\

It didn't take me long this morning to run into my first snag.

The problem:

Dagnabit. I knew I should have gotten that 19 inch tile cutter. "You should really get the 19 inch tile cutter" I said to myself. "But my tiles are only 13 inches wide," I answer, "and the 19 inch tile cutter is nearly twice as much." "Well...okay, I guess," I grudgingly concede.

Failing, of course, to realize that after the bathroom project, I would eventually end up doing the kitchen, with its non-right angles.

...The solution:

Cut the tiles in half. Now I have 6.5 inch tiles instead of 13. Works like a charm.

And now, time for a lunch break.

Once upon a time, this house had a dining room. It also had just two bedrooms and one bathroom.

This much we've deduced through close examination of our very odd floor plan.

Some prior owner decided to make it a three bedroom, and attached the third bedroom onto the end of house, requiring a strange and twisty hallway be built through/between the existing bedrooms to get to it.

Another prior owner, or perhaps the same one, decided the house needed a second bathroom as well. The only spot they could find to put it was smack dab in the middle of the large dining room. Leaving behind a much smaller dining room. Sort of.

"Dining room" was generous even before they added the Looming Cabinet.

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The end result was a room too small and cramped to be a usable dining room, and too far from the front door to be a foyer. For lack of a better term, we not so affectionately referred to it as "the entry hall": apprximately 50 square feet of space whose only purpose was the acquire cruft.

Now at last, having finally erased all traces of The Looming Cabinet (and The Secret Door behind it), I present to you:

The inaugural meal in the New-to-us Dining Room:

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(That's Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, if you are curious)

Wow. This is really happening.

We have set a "go live" date: April 10. (The Mr. and I had a long only slightly heated discussion about whether to go for April 3 or April 10, and eventually settled on April 3...only to find that our realtor couldn't do it then, and the whole thing was moot. Ah well.)

That date is the "realtor open house". Three days later will be the public open house.

So now we have 17 days left to finish whatever we will finish, and spit shine the whole dang thing.

Eeek!!!

Signed with our realtor today. MLS listing goes live next Wednesday. Realtor open house on Thursday. General public open house the following Sunday.

EEEEEK!

Last week, we saw a For Sale sign go up on the house two doors down from ours. Naturally, we looked it up; the stats were very similar to our house in terms of number of rooms, square footage, lot size, features, etc. They were asking about $10K less than we were hoping to ask. AND they have a view of the pond. (Our house is only about 200 feet from the pond but our property doesn't actually front the pond and there's a rise blocking to view.) ACK!

Then today we saw that there's a SALE PENDING notice on the For Sale sign. Sale pending?!? In less than 7 days?!? If that sale goes through, that's good news for us in many way!

Our 4 page To Do list is down to less than a page! And tomorrow is the grand unveiling of our new STOOP! I can't wait to see what it looks like.

Our realtor said we could take our own listing photos. This is cool because it means I can stage one room at a time and take the pics, rather than have to get the house in show condition 4 days early just for photos. It's also fun.

So here are some possible listing photos:
. . .

Get set...
GO!