Today started with a mad dash to get baseboards in the living room and hallway pulled up before the pest control guy got to the house. We have found several cockroaches – the nice, big ones – that are indicative of an obvious problem: we have cockroaches. The floor guy is going to have to tear up the baseboards anyway, so I don’t obviously want to haul them off 20 minutes after they’ve been sprayed with the bug Agent Orange. So…

Get to the house at 8:30. Bug guy scheduled to come between 9:00 and 11:00. You do the math.

It turned out, as is quickly becoming a theme with this house, to be a slightly more involved job than I had planned. Apparently, because of the long nails used to install them, the baseboards wouldn’t come out unless the tack strips for the carpet were pulled up first. That easily doubled my workload. I kinda made things harder on myself, too, when I couldn’t stand to just pull up the tack strips (before I pulled out all the baseboards) – I had to pull the carpet out, too.

If you could see me rollin', you would be hatin'. I know I was; that carpet was craptacular.

And, for your viewing pleasure, I present to you a close-up view of the wonderfully tasteful vinyl flooring underneath the living room/hall carpet. I’m not sure which was worse, the carpet or the vinyl. And what…. what is that brown spot? Never mind.

It's like a bad car accident: it's so horrible to watch, but you can't look away

As soon as that wonderful unveiling took place, the delivery of our new hardwood arrived. There was only one guy, so I decided to help. It was half out of courtesy, half because I knew it would go twice as fast, and half because I didn’t want to get hives from that carpet (yet)(shut up; that’s why I have computers do math for me). That, and I was in a lift-heavy-things-to-impress-your-wife kind of mood.

"In Soviet Russia, hardwood unloads youuu!"

Fortunately, it only took about fifteen minutes, and I was right back at it.

You hit a metal chisel with a metal hammer, and see how long you still care about not looking like an idiot. That stuff is LOUD.

The bug guy showed up when I was only half way through all the baseboards that needed to come up; actually, I think I was still finishing up tack strips. We had him start outside, but I was pretty sure I still wouldn’t be able to finish all of them in time. I was surprised, but I was able to get them all pulled up right as he made his way to the interior. Suhweet-ahhh.

Big piles of junk are fun, so expect to see lots of them

The next big task of the day was to get the water turned off and unscrew that leaky shutoff valve in the hall bathroom, and a quick YouTube search was all I needed to show me what to do. Since I don’t have a water key to turn off the meter, a screwdriver through the end of a crescent wrench was all I needed to get the main valve shut off. Once I had that taken care of I headed into the bathroom.

It didn’t take me long to figure out the valve was in pretty bad shape. How’s that, you ask?

Well, the obscenely oxidized metal was a big hint.

That, and the fact that it straight-up broke off after not even a quarter turn with a set of pliers. Needless to say, something had to be done about this pipe. The obvious solution was to go to Lowes and see what they could tell me. Before I headed off, I took some more photos for reference.

It's like Where's Waldo, but for pipe threads.

I'd like to think this is all part of some plan to fight iron deficiency in your diet. Something tells me that's not the case.

Water is quickly moving towards the "necessary evils" category of things in my life.

So I headed to Lowes, where I had to get a whole slew of stuff. Just finding where everything was ended up being half the battle, and the whole run ended up taking me like an hour and a half. Blegch. Also, apparently no employees were allowed in the entire right-hand half of the store; it took me forever to find someone to help. I finally found what I needed for the new shutoff valve, which included a hacksaw. Yeah, in case you couldn’t tell, that pipe was pretty much shot, so I had to get a compression fitting to go over the end once I sawed it off.

After I got back to the house, Jess left for an appointment while I finished tearing up the rest of the carpet, padding and tack strips in the three bedrooms. Seeing all those staples in the hardwood is making me nervous, and not because they’re going to leave holes in the floor. I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up pulling every single one out by had, unless there’s some magic staple magnet that I can just run over the top of them or something. I’m thinking that’s not the case Jess picked me up pretty much just as I was finishing up, and we headed home to get some dinner and spend some time with Remmy.

That’s one thing I’m going to have a hard time getting used to. With the house being such a mess, it’s obviously not safe for Remmy, which means he has to stay at home while we’re at the house. I’m used to not seeing him during the day on weekdays, but adding in weekends now is going to be tough. I know this won’t last forever, though, so hard as it may be I know the harder we work the faster it will be done. It’s just another facet of parenting that I’m coming to understand firsthand.

I took a shower when I got home, and pretty much passed out until Remmy was in bed. Jess had a lot more energy than I did, but we had stuff to finish for the day so I reluctantly accompanied her to Home Depot before we headed to the house.

We got some tile samples, along with several other necessities. Of course, the compression fitting I got earlier from Lowes didn’t fit – I’m pretty sure the guy I talked to wasn’t 100% sure what he was talking about. The fact that he used the words “in theory” when describing what I should end up with once it was connected should have tipped me off. Oh well. I found someone at Home Depot who definitely had some experience with plumbing before, and got me what I really needed (and more along the lines of what I was expecting, working with a pipe that the end had been sawed off of).

By the time we were done finding everything we needed, not only were we totally wiped, but it was almost 10:00 at night. Needless to say, we forwent going to the house and headed home. There was no way I was installing new plumbing at that time of night. Jess could tell I was feeling exhausted and somewhat discouraged, so she lovingly took me to Bruster’s for my absolute hands-down favorite ice cream-related item: their chocolate shake.

It was… SO… good.

Seriously, it made my night. As soon as I take that first sip, I smiled automatically. Like, it just happened; I wasn’t even trying to. So that was pretty much the high point of my night. Well, that about takes care of it for Tuesday, September 13th, a.k.a. Day 4. I’m sure I’ll be back to let you know how things pan out with the whole shutoff valve thing.

Man, that bathroom makes me nervous.

Today definitely marked our first official work day. Jess and I were both there pretty much all day long; I took today and tomorrow off from work so we could start getting some serious work done. We got there around 8:30 or so, and pretty much picked up where we left off on Saturday night. We took Sunday off – Jess wasn’t feeling too good and I was pretty tired, so on the seventh day we rested, too.

The first big thing that happened was meeting Jerry, the hardwood guy, for the first time so he could take a look at what we had (since we weren’t sure if there was actually hardwood under the vinyl or not). He looked through the house and said everything was in pretty good shape, and that we in fact did *not* have hardwood under the vinyl. That was both good and bad news; I didn’t really want to pay extra for new hardwood and the installation, but now we’ll be sporting swanky, beautiful, new hardwood throughout the house. Yes, including the kitchen – looks like I got my wish.

While we were talking to Jerry, my sister-in-law, Bekah, arrived with my brother Spencer (who is not the one she is married to). We enlisted Bekah’s help to watch Remmy for today and tomorrow, and Spencer had the day off from work so I asked him if he could help. They helped us clear out the rest of the miscellaneous stuff that was laying around the house, and then we headed to Zaxby’s for lunch with Remmy, and my mom who’s grandma name is “Mamasan”. No, she is not Japanese.

The project of the hour when we got back was cleaning out the garage. I didn’t necessarily plan on starting all that right then, it was more like one of those “I took this broom off this hook, now I have to take the hook out of this shelf, and now the shelf has to come down…” things. The garage was pretty messy and ratty anyway, so it was a welcome improvement. I don’t have a photo, but the previous owner left a bunch of random stuff: a broom, a mop, a rake with 1/3 of the tines broken off, a bunch of hooks and kludgey shelving nailed (not screwed) into the wall, some old “decorative” space heater, some coats… yeah, there were a lot of “leftovers”. The best find by *far* was this little gem:

It's like squeedly versus meedly over here

Yeah, I meant the box, not the tard-muffin whaling away on it. It was so weird, too, because you generally don’t find too many people here in South Cackalackie that actually know about White Castle. As you can guess, “the crave” definitely kicked in. It was kind of offset, though, by the fact that said Crave Case had been sitting on a dusty shelf for most likely over a year. Yeah, no. Anyway, we finished that whole deal maybe an hour and a half later, with quite the spick-n-span result.

For some reason the only fitting decor I can think of for that back wall is a wall-to-wall decal of one of the hangar bays from Star Wars. Like this one.

Once that was done, we moved on to my favorite part of the house: the hall bathroom. I have to constantly remind myself that it’s darkest (or in this case, ugliest) before the dawn, and so far it’s still getting darker. All will be well, though, I know this. I promise. Anyway, we still had to get the toilet out, so we started with that. Which was awesome.

"Do you have any food? I wanna eat off of that." - Spencer, in his infinite wisdom

I am now a mouth breather. Permanently. Anyway, once that was done we started pulling up the tile, which has of course turned out to be not as straight-forward as we thought it was going to be. I’m beginning to notice a pattern here.

Somebody call the vet, cuz these puppies are sick!

For starters, the tile baseboard (or whatever you call it) is like 5 inches high, which is kinda weird, so that should also be interesting to replace. I hope it’s as easy as getting larger-than-normal baseboard, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s not the weirdest part, though. Turns out that under the tile, instead of cement backer board, or even just regular subfloor like we expected, we found nothing but solid concrete that goes down at least an inch. I don’t know if that’s just an old-school way of doing bathrooms, but it was like they just poured it in there and laid the tile over that. This is what we were greeted with:

I have a feeling I have a lot more work ahead of me than I planned.

If you look closely at the far left side where the tile meets the carpet in the hallway, you can see the very bottom layer of the concrete, which looks like this weird chicken wire type stuff. I love not knowing what I’m doing. Especially when, after I took over the chisel for a while, I apparently pulled up part of the actual subfloor with a hunk of the concrete, leaving a nice big 3-to-4-inch hole into our crawl space.

Bugs. All I can think of every time I look at this hole is bugs. I think I need therapy.

Oh, and here’s the giant chunk of tile/concrete I’ve decided to place the sole burden of blame upon.

Jerkface.

If you look very closely where the tub meets the wall, you can identify our wonderful, carefully-engineered stopgap device, specifically designed to keep out – you guessed it – bugs. Yeah, it’s a towel. Shut up.

Yeah, so I think I’ve developed an ulcer. Having never done this before, my mind is reeling with how extensive these problems actually could be, which I won’t know until I get the whole floor pulled up. Obviously, this particular portion of the subfloor is completely rotted through; I just hope the rest of the floor is safe. I keep envisioning myself, sitting bolt upright in bed in a cold sweat after having nightmares of turning the corner and peering into my bathroom, a gaping five-foot by five-foot hole where the black, crumbling subfloor used to be, followed by me in bankruptcy court.

Ok, maybe that’s a little extreme. The first obvious thing to do – hate it as I may – was to go down into the crawlspace and see what the damage looked like from the underside. At least there’s a new vapor barrier down there that just got laid out less than two weeks ago, so I won’t have to worry about ground bugs (just underside-of-the-floor bugs). In case you haven’t noticed, I hate bugs. Anyway, I got down there, and this is what I found:

I'm no carpenter, but I'm pretty sure wood isn't supposed to be black.

Yes that is as a matter of fact a bona fide rotten floor plank. Yay.

Not sure what I’m going to do about it at this point, but I do know I’m going to find out. I’ll keep y’all posted. In the mean time, I’m gonna go find a Zantac.

So sure enough, by noon today the previous owner was all moved out and the house was ripe for the picking. Needless to say, it was (is) in need of some seriously major TLC. The carpet is a complete mess, and most likely what’s contributing to that very singular “stale old house with a hint of mothballs” smell. Ok, so enough talking, let’s see some pictures. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the house proper:

I'm going to have a hard time until we can get that floor taken care of #firstworldproblems

If it wasn't such a trendy word, I'd call this the "nook" (which is most definitely not trendy)

Looking from the opposite direction, from the kitchen into the living room. The color scheme in here is decidedly "Boston Creme Pie".

From the far corner, looking back towards the kitchen. You can almost see the smell.

To paint or not to paint? So far it's like 12 to 1 to leave it. We're thinking leave it. Also, note the "inspection zone" where we tried to determine if there's hardwood under the vinyl. Jury's still out.

In the sunroom, looking back toward door to living room. Stuffy, but definitely has potential.

Mmmmm, classy. Yes, that is what we are dealing with.

There are times when "original" is good and classy. This is not one of those times.

I'm still not really sure if this could be cool, or should just be torn to shreds.

For some reason, the picture doesn't make you want to scrunch your face up ("Eeewwww...") like the actual bathroom does. Well, ok, maybe if you look to the bottom left a little...

I'm pretty sure this is the same tile they use in those creepy old mental hospital bathrooms.

"My, my, my, my, my, my, what a mess." - Sam Gerard, The Fugitive

Master bedroom. I, uh... yeah, I got nothin'.

Sink in the master bathroom. Not sure how this particular interior design style "made it onto the ark" so to speak.

Gross.

IDEA: become a millionaire by figuring out how to replace old tile with newer, more up-to-date tile.

So yeah, needless to say we have our work cut out for us. I’m really looking forward to seeing what this place is going to look like once we’re done with it. Oh, and how it will (not) smell. If I had to live here while it still smelled like mothballs and stale air… have you ever seen a grown man cry?

Jess and I stayed at the house from noon to about 3:30 so we could, um… discover as much as we could, and start getting any preliminary or left-behind items out of the way before we did anything else. Later on that night we came back so we could start demoing the bathroom. Our first order of business was to take out that horrible, gross vanity and sink. We started by taking the door off and drawers out, and we found ourselves a bona fide squatter. Well, ok, it was just a cockroach. Still gross, and definitely still unwelcome.

What do Lindsay Lohan and this cockroach have in common? They're both about to get smashed.

My previous comment still stands

Ok, so at this point it's pretty much no turning back. Although, after seeing that rust I'm pretty sure there's like 0% chance of that happening.

I'm kinda wondering if the rusty splash marks on the tile should have me worried.

Not that I’m surprised by this, but just the initial start of the demo process took longer than we planned, so we decided to call it a night after the vanity and sink was out. I thought I was excited to get new tile and fixtures in the bathroom before… yeugch. That is straight-up nasty.

Before we headed out, Jess stuck her head into the laundry room and noticed that there was water coming from the now-unplugged freezer, onto the floor. We didn’t know how big the spot was, so rather than risk possibly copious amounts of water sitting on our floor, I took the freezer out of the laundry room. I ended up having to pull out the dryer to make enough room for the freezer to come out. This lovely scene is what I was greeted with when I did that:

I'm pretty sure the last time this floor was cleaned was... 10 seconds in the future.

Of course, once the dryer was out, the next logical step was to move the washer, under which we found exactly the same wonderful rug o’ bugs. Sweet. On top of that – yeah, ok, under that – we found a couple nice big holes in the vinyl from the old washing machine, along with a corner of the vinyl covering some really structurally-sound-looking subfloor that had gotten pretty rotten.

It's official. We have water damage, along with holes in the vinyl and some water damage to our subfloor. Duh, winning.

So it’s not like I didn’t expect any of these problems, and I know any serious problems (leaky roof, cracked floor joist, etc.) are not really an issue at this point, but the questions have definitely started popping up. Even after not even one day in the house, it’s clear that we have our work cut out for us. I’m sure we’ll be doing tons of research her in the next couple weeks, and it’s our goal to get everything done before we move in around the end of the month.

There’s old hardwood under all three bedrooms’ carpet, and most likely the living room and hallway (yeah, under the vinyl). That being the case, I’m trying to find someone to barter with to do some refinishing. That – along with painting literally everything, and switching all the switchplate covers and outlets - should be the biggest fix, and the one I’m looking forward to the most. I can’t wait to see how this thing unfolds, and the inevitable headaches that will come as a result.

Great, now that I said that, watch. I’m gonna find a skeleton in my crawlspace or something. I hate crawlspaces.

I am proud to announce that as of today, Friday, September 9th at approximately 10:00 a.m., we are now the proud owners of our very first house!

Photographic proof, in case I doubted my memory later in the day

I'd be just as confused/concerned if my dad had that ridiculous look on his face.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!

It’s really hard to believe that less than two months ago, we weren’t even considering buying a house. Like, it was part of the “Five-Year Plan”. As they say, though, curiosity killed the cat – or, in this case, eventually led to the cat buying a house. It basically started as a result of Jess and I knowing we wanted to buy a house, but not really knowing the details of our financial landscape. I’m not going to say we got suckered into buying a house, but the mortgage broker’s initial assessment of our home-buying potential was a lot more empowering than I thought it would be. Like, a lot.

The whole buying process was actually a lot less stressful than I thought it would be, at least based on what everyone else always says about buying a house. “Something crazy always happens,” or, “just wait till the inspection,” became common conversational occurrences, but it was never enough to cause any genuine concern. We were off to a great start when we made an offer, only to come to an agreement literally an hour later. And this was all with our real estate agent as a middle man, back and forth over the phone. We even got a riding mower out of it!  Aside from a dead battery – which recharged like a boss – it was in great shape. See?

The house is in really great shape, the now-previous owner took really good care of it. Within the last 5 years, she has:

• replaced the roof
• installed gutter guards
• replaced the hot water heater
• replaced the heating and air
• replaced all the windows
• Installed a vapor barrier on the crawlspace floor

Needless to say, she has taken care of a lot of the “guts-related” fixes, which means I won’t have to pay for them later (when something inevitably breaks, thereby doubling what the cost would have been to replace it before any problems). An ounce of prevention…

So that leaves us with nothing but basically bringing the interior current, and wow does it need it. I’ll post pictures of the inside tomorrow, when we can get into the house; the previous owner won’t be totally moved out until then. We have a whole buch of “remedies” planned, the the first of which will definitely be to take care of this:

"You put de light in de co-co-nut and flip it up an' down"

There is definitely hardwood under the carpet in all three bedrooms, and hopefully under the vinyl flooring we discovered under the carpet in the living room and the hallway. So the plan is to have all the carpet torn up, and the hardwood refinished; I was blessed enough to find a refinisher willing to barter his services for mine, and I’ll make sure he gets one heck of a nice looking site. I don’t think I could comfortably move in to a house that smells like a thrift store. And yes, you read that right. There is vinyl flooring – like beige-with-gold-flake-in-it vinyl flooring – under the carpet. Rock on. Disco on?

What am I looking forward to the most? Besides the obvious updated end-result, I cannot wait until it no longer smells like mothballs. Yes, mothballs. Hey, I didn’t say they didn’t have their benefits, but yeah, they stink. I’d like my house to smell somewhat new, and if you ask me, a nice, thick coat of fresh polyurethane is a pretty good start. That, and we’re putting one to several fresh coats of paint on pretty much every wall and piece of trim in the house. The kitchen cabinets are the only thing we may not get to before we move in. Other than paint, the hall bathroom will be completely redone: tile, pedestal sink, faucet, mirror, and lighting. Looking forward to that; the current bathroom is – to borrow a phrase – a full-on “Monet”. It’s ok from far away, but up close it’s a total mess. Heck it’s not even that great from far away. You’ll see what I mean.

So I’m sure we have a lot of work ahead of us, and probably more, but I am so looking forward to being a new homeowner. This house is like a blank canvas, and we’re free to “paint” to our heart’s (well, and our wallet’s) delight. I am so done with being a tenant; I’m ready to embrace my God-given right to care for – and to the best of my ability – what he’s given me. I’m really looking forward to documenting this whole process, too. Seeing something transform before your eyes is so awesome, but being able to go back and see the whole process from start to finish (and being able to share it with all of you awesome people) is priceless.

Well, here goes!