Category Archives: our house

04/7/10

clean-up, part 2 – pictures!

I wrote about how we cleaned up our yard about a month ago here.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have any before pictures, except for this one. This is the front flower bed with the cement in it:
DSC_1123

My dad helped us dig up all the cement, and then we got rid of the pieces that day that we cleaned it all up. Here is the after picture that I took with my cell phone:
Our cement-free front flowerbed!

As you can see, we still need to sift all the stones and tiny pieces of cement. But, it’s getting there!! The day after I took the pictures, it rained and our flower bed becomes a pond when that happens! (As does the rest of our yard.) So… I guess we’ll have to figure out what to do about that before I can plant flowers. There is another flower bed on the other side of the front door that still has cement. Someday I’ll tackle that one. Someday, someday…

I wish I had a before shot of our backyard! But here is the “after” picture:
Our backyard - cleaned up!

The trash was all piled high towards the left. Afterwards, I raked the whole backyard:
Our backyard - raked for the first time in 6 months!

I know, it looks less impressive when you don’t know what it looked like before. :-) Our Bagster bag after we were done:
The Bagster bag with all our junk

We couldn’t pile it higher than the sides of the bag, or we would have put a LOT more stuff inside. :-) It’s good to get rid of everything we did, though! It really made a world of difference in our yard.

02/2/10

our house to-do list

Originally posted at twentysixcats.com

I am putting this up here not because I think y’all will find it interesting, but because I want to be able to look back at this in the future. It will be interesting to see what gets done, and what drops off the list.

People who have talked to me recently will probably have noticed that I’m a bit disenchanted with the whole fixer-upper idea. I’ve decided, buying a house that needs work is great if you have money (or have an income where you can easily save for big expenses). We probably could have done this if we had bought this house a year or two ago; as it is, we’re now 3 people on one income and so it is a lot harder. On the upside, our mortgage is lower than any rent we’ve paid. Our thought had been that we could save the extra money that we would have been putting toward rent, but there is just *so* much. There are things we’re discovering now that we didn’t know before – like the rust in the water. Just in general, older homes have hidden surprises. I like the potential of our house, though, and we do plan on staying here a while. I often daydream of what I would do if money wasn’t a hindrance. And I do like the area and neighborhood a lot. Aside from my neighbor’s dogs, I really have no complaints about that!

Below is the rough list we have so far, somewhat in order of importance. We’re hoping to knock off the first couple from the list with the $8,000 from the gov’t.

  • Foundation (One corner of the main level of our house needs to be jacked up, due to soft ground beneath it. One contractor quoted $5,000, but we still need to get a few more quotes.)
  • Insulation in crawlspace (There currently is no insulation under the main level in the house.)
  • Finish the den (This needs a lot of work, and the biggest expense will be the new carpet since the paint has all been purchased. We need to clean all the walls and floor with anti-mold cleaner, then paint the walls and ceiling, then carpet the floor.)
  • Irrigate our backyard (So it stops flooding whenever it rains, which is what is causing the ground to sink and bit and why we need to get the foundation fixed! We have to get our land surveyed before we do this though, so we know exactly what land is ours.)
  • New side door (For safety and energy reasons; I won’t explain in case there are any would-be thieves lurking around my blog. :-))
  • Get HVAC fixed (An air conditioner was added to the existing heater, and apparently they hooked it up inefficiently, so we need to do this for energy savings and also to preserve the life of our A/C. I’m also hoping it will help make the temperature in the house better regulated.)
  • Fix the rust in the water (Currently we don’t drink the tap water in our house… it’s like I’m back in Peru! Not sure what the problem is exactly, or how much it will be to fix.)
  • Double pane windows & sliding glass door (The windows are incredibly energy inefficient; they are the original single pane and several have cracked/broken glass. All are very noisy – sometimes I think they are open because I can hear the cars outside so well. New windows will hopefully help with sound and energy!)
  • Electrical grounding in the den & upstairs (Currently the only area of the house with 3-prong plugs is the main level; grounding the electricity in the den would allow us to put the tv and/or computer down there.)
  • Kitchen redesign (I am not sure exactly how the kitchen could be improved, but I know I’d like to get cabinets that all match and fit my dishes better, a new countertop, and a built-in dishwasher. I would also like to increase the counterspace and storage space somehow – perhaps add a pantry? – but the location of the HVAC vent makes the only free space in the kitchen unusable.)
  • Bathroom redesign (I’d like to put in a new fiberglass tub/shower unit over the existing, recessed lighting above the tub, and redo all the walls – taking down the awful mirrors! The fixtures could use a little updating, and the bathroom really needs some towel rods and perhaps some storage shelves or two.)
  • Landscaping (There is very little grass in our yard and a lot of weeds. I’d also like to put some bushes along the sidewalk to discourage people from throwing trash in our yard, and to give some sort of privacy to our backyard. The joy of a corner lot!)
  • New hot water heater (Ours is 15 years old so we’ll probably need a new one before too long.)
  • New roof (It’s fine for now, but we’ll need a new one sooner than later.)
11/2/09

the realities of homeownership set in

Originally posted at twentysixcats.com

I can’t believe it’s November already! October flew by… We’ve been in the house for a month now, though it seems longer. My in-laws are coming on Thursday to visit their granddaughter, so I have been trying to get ready for them. As I’m unpacking and putting things away, I’m trying to somewhat child-proof my living room so I can invite one of my friends and her 10 month old over!

I can’t believe how much stuff we have. How did we fit it all into a 900 square foot apartment?? I spent some time putting books in the bookcase today, which has helped get rid of some of the boxes in the den.

We have a living room and a den, but the den is acting as more of a basement right now. The carpet was pretty nasty so we ripped it up and got rid of it. There’s tile underneath, and it needs a good heavy-duty cleaning before we get new carpet installed. We also need to price out new carpet for that room and see how it fits into our budget. I’d love to get it in soon, but I’m afraid that I will have to wait a while before we can afford it. In the meantime, we can paint the dark wall paneling to lighten the room. But all that has to wait until we finish unpacking the boxes that are down there.

In the future I would love to see the den as our TV and computer room (leaving the upstairs living room as a visiting room). However, the plugs down there aren’t grounded yet. That’s another expense; getting an electrician to come and work on the wiring. Houses are expensive! :-)

Other things are getting done though! The exterminators came today and sprayed our crawlspace for the powder post beetles that were found during the inspection. I am so glad to have that taken care of – it was paid for when we closed on the house, but for various reasons we weren’t able to have them come until now. We have to wait a few weeks before we can put the insulation back up. In the meantime, it is SO cold downstairs!

Sometimes I get tired of all the things that need to be done. I mean, the house is definitely liveable, but there are little things that would be so nice to fix. For example, it would be so nice to have grounding on all the plugs instead of just the plugs in the living/dining room. I have to remember why we bought this house when I write the mortgage check – we’re paying $150 less a month than we did renting. When we go to sell in the future, we’ll hopefully see all our hard work pay off and make a profit. But in the meantime, it’s hard!

At the same time I’m excited to have a place of our own. I think all the little annoyances (like, not having an outlet at all in the bathroom!) keep me humble – reminding me that I’m still only 26; I have a lot of life left to live and I don’t need to have “arrived” yet.

09/8/09

what we’ve been doing

Originally posted at twentysixcats.com

The outside

I finally uploaded all the house pictures to Flickr! So click here to go see them. (They are the same pictures as the Facebook album I uploaded a while ago.) I took all these pictures last July when we were doing the walk-through with the home inspector, so it doesn’t have any of the changes we have made since we got the keys!

We’ve spent the past week and a half hard at work! My parents have been SUCH a great help. Also, last weekend my sister, aunt, and uncle all drove down from North Carolina, and my other aunt drove from South Carolina to help. My two uncles who live here in Atlanta came by on Sunday and everyone was hard at work! I am so grateful because there is very little I can do physically, and we are racing the clock to get the house ready for us to move by September 30th.

The house is 50 years old, and was a rental house the past 3 years. It needs a lot of work, but it’s not as bad as it could be. However, as I am working at cleaning I wonder how people could have lived in such dirt and grime… The bathtub for example was absolutely horrible, and after many many hours of scraping and cleaning it still doesn’t look great.

Here’s what we’ve done so far:
* Cleaned out all the gutters and replaced the ones that were broken or missing
* Replaced the hollow wood front door with a steel front door. Also replaced the ugly storm door with a storm door with a screen so we can get some cross-ventilation without letting the kitties out.
* Took down the weird shutters around the front door
* Replaced the old fuse box (original to the house, which was built in 1960) with circuit breakers and added more switches or whatever you call them
* Pulled up the carpet from the entire house, which made it smell 1,000 times better. Also, beautiful hardwood in the upstairs bedrooms!
* Cleaned the kitchen with a heavy duty degreaser – it was pretty disgusting
* Cleaned the bathroom, also quite gross
* Removed the shower doors and we’re still in the process of scraping all the caulking from all around the edge of the tub
* Replaced the washers from the faucets in the shower to stop the leaking
* Painted all the ceilings upstairs
* Removed the border print and painted the walls in Savannah’s room and our room (one bedroom left to paint)
* Cleaned the window panes with bleach so as to kill the mold/mildew on them; also removed the nails so now the windows can open
* Removed most of the wallpaper in the kitchen, which is NOT coming off easily despite the wallpaper removed that’s supposed to work wonders (we’ve actually decided to only do two walls; we’ll just paint over the wallpaper on the other two walls)
* Removed the border print in the living/dining room
* Weed whacked about half of the backyard (the mosquitoes have been terrible; we hope that the weed whacking helps get rid of those); most of the yard is weeds – there is actually very little grass, but we’ll deal with that in the future

Major things we still need to do:
* Replace the toilet downstairs to bring it up to code – we need to do this before we can get the water service started
* Replace the hollow wood door coming in from the carport with a steel door – the current one isn’t even an exterior door!
* Run wires to the outlets to allow for three-prong plugs
* Buy a new refrigerator and perhaps an oven (or find someone to fix the oven that’s there)
* Finish painting all the ceilings and the walls
* Put carpet in the downstairs den/family room (this probably won’t happen before we move in, as there is some question about the floor down there)

There are a whole bunch of things on our long-term to do list, but they require more money than we have right now and/or more time than we have. We have a lot to do! I am so tired right now; I will be glad when this is settled. I hate that I can’t help – I would NOT recommend trying to do this a week after having a baby! I hope it’s worth it, because a huge part of me wishes that we had walked away from the house when we were getting so close to our due date… I can’t tell you how much this is stressing me out!

09/2/09

a four-month-long house story

Paul and I have been talking about buying a house for a long time. Encouraged by the lower prices in the current buyer’s market, we decided this spring to contact a real estate agent and see what we could find in our price range and desired location. We decided that we would buy if the right house came along and the mortgage was equal or less than what we currently pay in rent. That of course made our budget really low and limited our selection to foreclosures and short sales. But, we tried not to get hung up on the idea that we had to buy now, and told ourselves that we needed to be content to continue renting if we didn’t find anything.

This was easier for Paul to do than me. :-) Faced with having a baby in a one-bedroom apartment, I was feeling cramped and getting tired of renting!

Last March we put an offer on a foreclosed house that had good potential but needed work. That ended up falling through for various reasons, namely that when we sat down and crunched the numbers we didn’t have enough money for a down payment plus the work that was needed. (We estimated $7000 just to make the house livable, plus less important repairs that would be needed in the first year or so.)

After that, we stepped back and reconsidered the area where we were looking. We then found a neighborhood that I had previously refused to consider because of the bad reputation the area had. However, this neighborhood was one of the “good pockets” in the area, and it had everything we were looking for (nice residential neighborhood without an HOA and in a county with easy access to public transportation). We even found out that one of my friends from choir lived in the neighborhood, and she recommended it highly. We looked at all the houses for sale, and found this one that we both liked. It was a short sale, which is basically the step before foreclosure. So it’s not bank-owned yet, but all the offers needed to be approved by the bank. The house needed some work, but it had a lot of potential and met the needs that were important to us.

We put an offer on the house on May 5th. And then we waited. And waited. We at first got really antsy, then as the months went by we somewhat forgot about it. Every so often we’d look to see if there were any other houses out there, but nothing else fit our desires and price range. I had heard that the average short sale takes 2 months, so I tried to be patient at least that long. Meanwhile, we got everything squared away with the mortgage and anything else we could do while we waited.

Then, FINALLY, 2 1/2 months after our original offer, we received word – the bank had officially approved our offer! We were so excited. We ordered the home inspection and started making a to-do list so we wouldn’t miss anything. Then, the home inspection revealed some concerns. One, the house had settled under the dining room and needed some foundational work to prop it up again. Two, the inspector noticed evidence of termites. After thinking about it and consulting wise counsel, we decided to walk away from the house. Mostly we were afraid of the unknown – foundational problems could be very expensive, and I knew termites were a major concern. We told our realtor that we wanted to withdraw our offer, and I cried myself to sleep that night.

The next day we got a phone call. The listing agent didn’t want to see potential buyers slip away. She offered to pay for a pest control company and also a contractor to come out and give estimates, to see if that would change our mind. We decided it couldn’t hurt, so we said okay. The results: the house once had termites, but not anymore and there was no major damage. The house settling hadn’t compromised the structural integrity of the house, and while it does need to be dealt with eventually, it isn’t right away nor is it something that would be very expensive. Yay! We withdrew our offer withdrawal and continued on the path to buy the house.

We ordered the appraisal, and they came back with the news: the house appraised for $5k less than our offer. So, we had to go back to the bank and submit a new offer. Which resulted in – you guessed it – another wait. Meanwhile, we tell our apartment complex that we will not be renewing our lease and pray that the house works out so we’re not homeless!

Fortunately, the bank didn’t take another 2 1/2 months. It only took them 3 weeks! We actually received word that they had approved our offer the day before Savannah was born. We have to close by August 31st, which was only 10 days away. However, because I was in labor when I got the email, I really didn’t deal with it. I had contacted our insurance company about getting homeowner’s insurance, and emailed the agent the inspector’s report, and then promptly forgot about it and focused on, you know, having a baby.

It was funny. I called my mom Friday night and said, “Guess what! We got the house. Oh, and I’m in labor.”

Monday morning (the 24th) both our mortgage guy and our realtor were going full force in getting everything together so we could close by the 31st. Paul and I were… out of it. :-) I turned off my phone and let Paul deal with everything. There were three major things that needed to be done. One, we had to replace all the gutters on the house. Since the house was being sold “as is”, the owner and bank refused to make any changes/improvements. But we couldn’t get the mortgage without fixing the gutters. So, Paul and my dad spent two whole days at the house replacing the gutters. We also had to fix a small water leak that we discovered. The third thing was we had to get homeowner’s insurance. On Tuesday, we decided to call back our insurance company and found out why they had never responded to my email the previous Friday. After trying to get a hold of the guy all day, I finally called the main number and got someone else, and she said she’d have the agent call me back. He did and said he’d review the documents and get back to us in 24 hours. Well, by the end of the next business days we still hadn’t heard from him. Thursday morning our mortgage guy is antsy and we are both stressed. The insurance agent finally called us back and told us the house was full of problems waiting to happen and we were denied coverage. Fine, we weren’t very happy with them either. Paul talked to our mortgage guy who referred us to another insurance agent who recommended we go with state insurance for now until we can get in the house and fix the problems. We said fine, and were happy that the state insurance prices were about the same.

Oh and meanwhile, I am home completely stressed about the fact that I’m in a lot of pain and I can’t seem to figure out breastfeeding, and everyone has advice on what I should do and I just want to cry. And to make things worse, we have used all our cell phone minutes. We must have gone over our minutes by several hours last month… I am dreading that bill. :-(

Then, Friday afternoon (the 28th), somehow it all came together. The appraiser came by to check the gutters and the leak, saw it was good, and gave the go-ahead. The insurance somehow worked out. I do not know how it was done, but we were good to close on Monday.

Monday afternoon we showed up at the lawyer’s office to close on the property. It has almost been 4 months since we put in the original offer. We found out that August 31st was the drop-dead date. Had we not been able to close by then, the bank would have started over and we would have had to submit our offer and done everything again. I hadn’t realized that, and I am thanking God that we made it just in time.

So that puts us to today. We are homeowners! We have a month before we have to be out of our apartment, so we have hit the ground running! I am going to save pictures and description for another post. And I’ll end this post with a lesson: don’t consider buying a house being sold short sale unless you have lots and lots of patience. And I think God wanted us to have this house, because we were ready to walk away several times and each time He brought the house back to us. Here’s to many happy years for our family living there!