Monday, July 30, 2012

Timeline

I made a quick timeline so I can remember what we did when so that I can write more about it when I get a chance. This gives a bit of a sense of how much work we've been doing.  I apologize for the tense changes.

Timeline:
Tuesday 7/10 Move in. Get air conditioner working, build beds, get drenched in rain, find flooded basement, build Ikea furniture (Including couch in middle of night due to broken guest room AC)
Wednesday 7/11 Unload cube, Home Depot run, Strip kitchen wallpaper
Thursday 7/12 Rock Creek Park hike, More stripping wallpaper
Friday 7/13 More stripping wallpaper, prep kitchen walls
Saturday 7/14 National Mall visit, Paint kitchen walls, built dresser
Sunday 7/15 Farmer's Market, small additional fixes: under sink, outlets, basement lights. Slave labor (aka my in-laws) goes home, unpack kitchen
Monday 7/16 Built desk, unpack bedroom
Tuesday 7/17 Paint kitchen trim
Wednesday 7/18 Prep dining and living room walls
Thursday 7/19 Paint daughter's room, Prime dining room
Friday 7/20 Prime living room
Saturday 7/21 Paint dining and living room
Sunday 7/22 Prep entry, Flat tire, shopping
Monday 7/23 Paint entry, Dinner at friends', Cut finger on walk home
Tuesday 7/24 Clean up house, broken garbage disposal
Wednesday 7/25 Mom visits
Thursday 7/26 Visit zoo. Buy paints, decorations for daughter's room. Start putting up wall decorations
Friday 7/27 Stencil daughter's room. Shop for new cabinets
Saturday 7/28 Attempt to find curtains for living & dining room
Sunday 7/29 Husband sands bedroom door to convince it to close. Otherwise we relax
Monday 7/30 Husband starts job, I am part time housewife, part time researcher until my job starts.

Work on the house will now be a weekly activity (mostly on weekend), rather than a daily one. But 20 days in, the house is livable, I've recovered from the work and am glad we got so much done. And I will definitely do some longer posts on a couple of these, because they make for interesting stories and/or I have pictures.



Friday, July 27, 2012

The Kitchen

While I read my daughter her bedtime story Wednesday evening, my husband and mother in law started pulling at the wallpaper in the kitchen. They found parts of it were so old they were essentially falling off the walls, so it came off in big swaths.Wow, this was going to be easy. Not.

Where the wallpaper didn't come off in big swaths, it clung to the wall in stubborn little shreds. And sometimes it took bits of the wall with it. Here's a picture of the corner of the room:

My father in law repaired it to the best of his abilities with some drywall compound, but warned us that we will need to set some money aside to have it replaced sometime soon-ish. It was quite badly damaged, especially in the far corner, where there were signs of water damage.

Several days later (including a couple late nights), the walls were finally de-wallpapered and prepped for painting. Compared with the wallpaper removal, the painting went relatively smoothly. My husband and I manned the paintbrush and roller, respectively. There was a lot of brushwork in the kitchen, relative to a room without cupboards and stoves and such. We wished we had a second brush. But we finished eventually. And my husband painted the trim on his own a couple days later. Now our kitchen has a fresh, clean coat of paint and we are starting to think about how we want to update the cupboards and counters.

Kitchen Before:


Kitchen After:



Saturday, July 21, 2012

Surprise #3: Locked out

We spent the morning on Wednesday getting all of our stuff out of the two ReloCubes that moved it from one side of the country to another, then did a long Home Depot trip in the afternoon. We were tired and decided to head to Silver Spring for an early dinner and to relax and hang out in the downtown area. We forgot my daughter's sippy cups so I ran back for them. When I tried opening the front door, it seemed to be stuck. I tried locking and unlocking the deadbolt, just in case it was catching, but I could feel it when the deadbolt released. The door still wouldn't budge. I tried putting my shoulder to it. Other doors in the house didn't fit quite right in their frames, so were hard to open and close, maybe that was the front door's problem as well. Still nothing, and I didn't want to hurt the door or my shoulder too badly.

My husband got out of the car to see what the problem was. When he had no luck, my father in law followed. The front door had several old locks on it. We figured out that one of those old locks had caught, one that we didn't have a key to. My mother in law admitted she had been messing with that old lock earlier.

Fine, we thought, we'll go open the back door. But our keys for the front door didn't match the lock on the back door. We hadn't thought to check that before. We went back to the front door and tried reaching through the mail slot, but no luck. It was made to keep people from doing that. We were locked out. The darn house had locked us out.


The back door was just a handle lock, not a deadbolt, so with a bit of work, my father in law was able to pick it (Once again, we were very lucky to have him with us), and get us back into the house. An hour after we intended to leave, we headed out to Silver Spring for dinner, making sure the door was unlockable as we left. My father in law removed the strike plate that evening, so that lock will not lock us out of our own house again.


The lock that locked us out, now disabled


Friday, July 20, 2012

Surprise #2: Flood

Us females arrived after the downstairs air conditioner had been sorted out and the guys had started to assemble the IKEA furniture that had arrived that day. It was about dinnertime, so we headed to the Caribbean restaurant down the street. Just after we ordered, the car shipping company called and said the car was ready to be picked up. My husband and mother in law left to take care of that while the rest of us waited for the food. 

When they returned, my husband and mother in law were talking about the light rain starting, but no one thought much of it and we all started eating. After a little while heard the thunder of water on the roof. It was raining buckets. My mother in law started and said "I think I left the window of the car open". I demanded the keys and went running out in the pouring rain. Luckily, the window of the car was closed, so the car was fine. But I was drenched. I looked like I had jumped into a swimming pool with my clothes on. 

I walked back to the restaurant, figuring I couldn't get much wetter. The streets had turned into mini rivers and there were big lakes forming at the corners of intersections. Being from California, I had not seen rain like this many times in my life. Now I've seen it a couple times, having been in DC for a couple weeks and experiencing a couple awesome thunder storms.

I went down to the basement when we got home and discovered the house's surprise #2, we had a lake down there where it ought to have been dry and in fact was dry earlier in the day (my husband and father in law had checked). We discovered that the main culprit for the flooding was a clogged drain by the walkout door to the basement, accompanied by a thrashed basement door that is clearly not water tight. The drain can be cleared and the door replaced, so not too big a worry. But there is some repeated water damage on the wood in the basement that may need some attention. 

Surprise #1: Why'd They Take That Cord?

So the first surprise came before I arrived. My husband and father in law came a day early to start getting things settled before I and my mother in law came with my daughter. They found a very warm house that couldn't be cooled. The downstairs air conditioner cord did not reach the outlet. And it wasn't a standard plug that could use a normal extension cord. In fact, after going to several hardware stores, they found that the required extension cord did not seem to exist. Clearly the previous owners must have used the downstairs air conditioning. Why did they take such a specialized extension cord with them? My awesome father in law was able make an extension cord from some cable and parts from the local hardware store. Thank goodness he came along to help us get settled. I'm not sure what we would have done about this problem if we were alone. Sweated until we could get an electrician in, I guess.


The too short air conditioner cord with the extension cord my father in law rigged up

Introduction

We bought a house. A big old house. A big old house that was simply lived in by the last owners, not maintained particularly well. We've been living in it for a week and a half now, and I have wanted to take a bit of time to write down our experiences, which have sometimes been comical and other times extremely frustrating, since the day we moved in. Now we have finally taken a day of rest and I am writing something. 

We are trying to get this house back into shape, but as the title of my blog indicates, we are not trained for this. An economics background doesn't really come in handy when the walls need painting.

 I am a bit of a serial blogger. I have several started and abandoned blogs, so I don't know how long I will keep this up. And, as I'm currently doing, my posts will probably usually be back dated, since the times I have the most interesting things to write about will inevitably be the times when I have the least amount of time to write. But we'll see.