Hammers and Shovels

This past weekend was a lot of fun. We started stripping the plaster off the walls in order to get things ready for Todd. 

Growing up in Italy I have only seen buildings made of bricks and dealing with wood is a totally new and exciting experience. It is amazing how easily you can take down a wall and how much fun it can be. As many other things demolishing is a better activity if friends join to help. Gene was there all weekend, John joined the hammering on Saturday and Tony came by on Sunday to help taking off some trimming. We also decided do hire Jaime to help us and he was a life saver, especially when we decided to take the plaster off the ceiling. Luckily for me Phyllis provided lunch for everyone on Sunday -Great tuna sandwich and refreshing iced tea.

Taking the plaster down

The bones exposed

The lathe is coming off

Finally the ceiling has to come down

One room done, another one started

By the end of the day the first room was all stripped off and all the debris stored in the yard. Good job everyone!

Clean up time

Recycling

Let the Games Begin

Our first couple week of work slipped by so fast that I didn't have a chance to update the blog. 

Time to make up with lots of pictures!

The house tented...like in a cartoon!

Eric and I took advantage of our vacation in Oregon to get the house tented. I was a little bit disappointed to be missing the whole process, but it worked perfectly in the schedule. Luckily we have many great friends that volunteered to take pictures!

Once we got back from vacation both the tent and the termites were gone and we were ready to start cleaning up. We first vacuumed the basement to make space for some tools and then moved on to the refrigerator and the 1920s stove that came with the house. Since Eric has to work during the week I took care of vacuuming the crawling space. The house had been vacant for over a year and many spiders had made that their home, working really hard to cover any possible surface with webs. Beside that the previous owner seemed to have used that as a dog house and a personal dumpster. You would be surprised of the “treasures” I found while working down there. Goes without saying that after spending almost a week vacuuming and not being done I have plenty of respect for the property inspector that crawled down there before fumigation!

Almost felt bad when I had to take that down...So much work!

I wasn't smiling anymore at the end of the week!

Nice combination of spider webs and lint in our basement

The front yard before the pruning

The weekend came faster than I expected -we brought over the first tools, changed the locks and got ready for some serious work. 

With the help of John and Todd we cleaned up the front yard. We pruned the oleander trees and the boungavilla, producing enough debris to secure three full loads of greens for Recology. Our plants look a little bare now, but we are happy enough to be able to walk through the trellis to reach the front steps. 

Todd didn't really drive all the way up from Slo just to tame our wild front yard though, he came for business. Todd is a contractor and will be here for two full weeks starting at the end of August to help us. Eric proudly showed him his drawings and walked him through the project. Right now the house has 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom, but the bathroom floor is dry rot and the sewer line in leaking. Before moving in we will strip both the bedrooms to update the wiring and make them ready for us to move- that is where we are going to live while working on the rest of the house. We are also going to install a new bathroom in between the bedrooms and remodel the old one later on. Since we need a new sewer line we will also get new plumbing right away. It is a lot of work but Todd is excited and we know how fast he can work.

Making good use of Todd's truck

First full bin. Two more to go

Bidding Wars

Our great front porch. There is even room for a swing

Back in December my husband and I put an offer on a house, but it fell through. That was our first experience with the housing market and, believe me, we have learned a lot since then.

We spent several months visiting open houses in the weekends and watching the listing in order to find the perfect house. It wasn’t an easy task. Both my husband and I wanted to live downtown to be able to walk to work, the movies or the grocery store and keep sharing one car. More difficult than this was finding a house that had not been poorly remodeled in order to fulfill some realtor’s list. We wanted an old house that we could restore to bring back its original character.

We found the right match when our friend John pointed out a ran-down bungalow on his street, right at the edge of downtown. A little bit of research helped us discover that the house was sitting on an R2 lot, had a great backyard and had not been touched since the 1920s.

The backyard! Garage is on the left, house on the right.

The house was also a bank-owned property, which seemed great until we really understood what that meant. It took the bank about 4 months, since the “for sale” sign appeared, to get the house ready for showing. When the realtor finally started taking bids, they got 10 offers including ours and countered all of them without giving any information. It was obviously the best strategy for them in order to get everyone to put the highest amount on the table. It was hard to decide how badly we wanted the house, but we finally turned in an offer way over asking, and won the bidding war. At that point we thought tough times belonged to the past, but we were wrong. Throughout escrow the bank would not sign a single document, making it really hard for us to negotiate. On top of that we had to deal with the bank’s own lack of organization. As suggested by our realtor we applied for our loan with the same bank that owned the property. We had to be pre-approved in order to bid,they gave us a good rate, and everyone said it was going to be smoother that way. Of course everyone was wrong. The two departments of the bank wouldn’t talk and had huge problems understanding requests coming form one another. We were warmly asked to give up our right of picking the title company, so that the bank could use their own. As a result we spent about 3 weeks returning documents full of errors from both the bank and our lender. If that wasn’t enough they damaged the stucco on the house fixing some steps that the lender considered a safety issued and they lost the original lid-lifter of 1920 Wedgewood stove. Of course no one would take responsibility for any of the above. The realtor even had the guts to tell us that since only the stove, not the lid-lifter was included in the contract they weren’t going to do anything about that.We finally closed, about a week later than planned and almost had to pay penalties! Apparently banks have learned very little form their mistakes.

Living room, hallway...and our beloved realtor

Despite the horrible experience (we are never buying a foreclosed property again), we are now home-owners. A lot of people would call our house a tear down, and I cannot blame them.

In the past two weeks we have said countless times “we are gonna have to fix that”, but have great plans and believe we can turn this house in the perfect home.
Curious? Well we’ll be back with more updates soon.