Goal Not Achieved

Well today Friday December 30, 2011 we have begun the first of two moving sessions.
Yes two, 2. We unfortunately did not reach our goal of being int he house by January 1, 2012. As you saw from the last post we are still down to the studs in the front of the house and do not have a working bathroom. Sad face.
 Now we still had to be out of our rental by the 1st so we still needed to move.
 So today, Right now, I am stalling so I can update you, we are moving. I am currently stilling on my packed suitcase pulled up to the coffee table writing this. :)

We are moving al of our stuff into the garage for safe keeping then when the house is done we'll move it in. then we wont have to move for years and tears and years and.years

Now we also did not do ANYTHING on the house this week, we packed instead. SO that gives more days we need to tack on to the end of the 30 days to finish the house. No biggie. We'll get it done.
In the meantime we will be staying with my Mom and Ralph in their guestroom while we finish.
 Now since we don't have much to do in the living room to make it "Livable" we will be able to finish the WHOLE house before we move in.

Okay must go and finish packing and clean before D gets home with the truck from the first load.
TTFN!

Happy New Year Everyone, Be safe!

PS Maggie is not very helpful. she keeps unpacking her toys after I pack them.

3 sets of hands are better that 2

D is to busy to blog right now so its up to me. Michelle Yay! Hi peoples!

So another week has come and gone along with another Christmas. Is everyone ready for the New Year? We are for sure, ready to be done with the house and having a place of our own. Wow what a thing to think about.

The first day we had the keys my mom met us at the house and we made a couple toasts with a bottle of champagne that D surprised us with.
The first toast "To never making another Rent Payment"
  Wow, at 30/29 we will have made our very last Rent Payment. It's so exciting!

The other 2 toast were basically about taking on this project and not killing each other. My father in law made me promise that we would not fight. I told him that wasn't going to happen, but I did promise that when we did fight we would resolve whatever issue we were fighting about. At this point there has been  no fighting, but we still have more work to do :)

Okay back to the work.

I HAVE A VIDEO FOR YOU!!!!!

It is a bit on the longer side but if you are just super excited to see what we have done you'll enjoy the detail. I recommend turning down your music so you can here my commentary. grab a beer or wine or whiskey or water or soda or juice

Do I really sound like that? Cause I don't in my head.

This weeks major props goes out to my Brother in Law Tighe! Who has repeatedly said I will be here to help out my little brother and his wife.

 What is really going through his head every time his thoughts drift to our house/situation.

"What in the hell were you two thinking buying this house. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FREAKING MINDS?!!!!!!!!!"

This is Tighe and D talking about something

So we are eternally grateful him taking the time out of precious day to come take pity on us and our house.

Our biggest accomplishment this week was removing the chimney (in said video) that was directly in the center of our house. which came four bricks below ceiling level.

The project chimney removal started at about 7:30 PST while I was taking to my other brother in law (Nicholi). I painted trim and talked while they started the removal. Now I thought they were nailing down boards and prepping for 25 minutes, while I talked on the phone. No they were not. Moments after I hung up they were ready to bring down the first set of removed bricks.

 We set up a little chain. once all the brick were removed from that set they went back up and I unloaded them.

2 hours it took to remove that chimney. Thank Goodness!

I think I am going to use the bricks eventually to make a brick oven in the back yard.

Okay more pictures.

This is the Chimney

The Bathroom

The Bedroom & Maggie

Tighe putting on his protective gear

The basement, remember all the crap that was in here? Gone all gone!

Then we had Beers and Nachos.

Okay Must sign off now.

This weeks shout outs

Colleen! - She came out the first day Tighe did and painted the laundry room

and of course

My Mom! Always helpful.

Progress as of Dec. 11, 2011

Michelle again!
 Well I really dont have many pictures today but I wanted to let you know how the progress was going.

We have officially been working in the house for 13 days. By "We" I mean Dmitri, Myself and Mom.
I have to brag about my Mom for a second. She has been amazing! She has decided to make her mission the Kitchen. To make the kitchen clean and functioning as soon as possible. With the direction for me (colors and fixtures) she has gone to town. She spent 8 hours the first weekend just scrubing the dirt and grime and Birds, Butterflies, Apples and Clouds from every surface, then going through painting everything from floor to ceiling.
 She has been there on the weekends when D and I are there and also during the week when D and I are work. She has made a huge difference and what will be our kitchen until we decide to redo. SHE IS AMAZING! Thanks Mommy!

Okay back to the house.
 One of the main changes in the house was switching the staircase from the current position (the main bedroom) to the Original position just outside of the kitchen.

You can see in the first photo the whole from the stairs from the main bedroom

second photo is the staircase is in the left.

I thought I had better pictures, Sorry.

 What you are not seeing here is the 4'6" space from where the floor starts to one of the steps. Which meant I even had to duck.

It took D the afternoon to decide what to do, to 1. Re-enforce the floor and 2. move the stairs.
 It only took D about an hour to reenforce the floor. While he was doing that I was trying to give him as much light as possible.
 When we went to farm earlier in the week we were able to collect EVERY possible tool we would need to fix EVERYTHING. Including a great strand on work lights, air compressor and nail gun.
 While I was trying to string the lights I did not remove the hammer from the top of the ladder. (can you see where I am going with this).

Well yes, I drop the hammer on my head. OUCH! of course I wasn't using one of those small finishing hammers, Of course not, I was using a Framing Hammer. A BIG HEAVY HAMMER! ON MY HEAD.
 You see I was already pretty frustrated about something, so when you drop a giagantor hammer on your head it's bound to hurt.
 Tears immediately came pouring out of my eyes. Now did that stop me, of course not. For the nest three minutes, I continued to hang my lights while buckets of tears streamed down my dirty face, not saying a word while my husband looked on with concern for his crying wife.
 After 3 minutes I finally let him hug me, the tears were gone and we went back to work.

Well we ended up not reusing the stairs that were there and built new ones.

D at the Bottom of the new stairs

Enjoying a beer on the stairs after all of his hard work, and rightly so.

Here is what the basement looks like

See all that CRAP, Not ours!

At this point of the work we are still pretty optimistic that we will be in the house on Jan. 1, 2012

Shout outs! My Bestest Monica for come over and filling holes and taking out screws.

Jordan (Father of the Dmitri) for coming over everyday to see progress and give us his 2 sense and food. also for Hardware store runs.

 

Not gonna bore you

Heya! Michelle here.
 I am not going to bore you with the details of finding this 104 year old house. Just that we did. Wahoo! My husband and my first House.
Upon walking into our home for the VERY first time this is what we saw, and we still wanted the house

When officially took ownership of the house we did not expect anything to be clean nor did we expect there to be much removed from the house. We had even offered to help the 80 year old man living the house move out.

Realizing this man IS 80 years old and having seen the condition of the house before he moved out we did expect the house to grimy
But Really?

Yes this is my husband! No he did NOT pick up that bone (they were EVERY WHERE), Correct that is a dead mouse under the fire place. yes just laying there DEAD!

There were also dead mice under the carpets in the corners and stuck in the heater vents. Mouse poop every where.

If you can just imagine the smell, 80 year old man + 2 Dogs (who peed every where) + dirt and grime + mice and all they come with = NASTY!

Again we still bought the house.

We were not supposed to close on the house until Dec 5, 2011 but we were able to close on Thursday Dec 1, 2011 and record in the 2nd. Which gave us a extra weekend.

So with the house and the smell we went to work. We are on a bit of a time crunch, you see. We have a whole bathroom to redesign, Floors to finish and Kitchen to paint and walls to tear down and rebuild in 30 day.

So in the first weekend in the house this is what we did...

We removed all the carpets, decals on the kitchen cabinets and walls, dead mice, unnecessary wall fixtures and SCRUBBED the toilet to make it usable.

Now to make all of this better with a laughed and to warn you, if you find a case in a closet on a high shelf DO NOT OPEN it. because this is what we found.

yes you read that correctly

Vacuum Erection Device.

GRRRRROOOOSSSSSS!

TTFN!