Change of Pace

Having Todd working full time on the house made a huge difference. The pace has completely changed now that we have all the tools and somebody to direct the big jobs. This is fantastic in terms of progress -there is so much going on that we never manage to stop working before 10.30 pm. We are tired, but seeing the progress keeps pushing us to do more work!

Although we worked hard to get the demoing done before Todd’s arrival we didn’t succeed. I had my portion of playtime hammering the plaster off 2/3 of the front bedroom on my own during the week, but we finished taking down the ceiling and the lathe  only on Sunday. 

On the weekend, thanks to the full crew (Todd, Jaime, Gene and John), we were also able to complete the partial demo of the closet and the full demo of the bathroom and laundry areas. As usual the house had plenty of surprises for us. we found a disgusting dead rat in the bathroom wall- I guess that explains all the rat poison we found in the attic space. Once we took down the plaster in the bathroom we finally could understand the extent of our dry rot damage. There is a crack in the plaster, right were the roof beam comes in. The whole water collected by the gutters has basically been coming in from that gap. These pictures give a pretty good idea of the result. We knew that the floor was rotting too, and we had patching already in the budget. However, when Todd poked a hole in it with his foot, while moving the claw-foot tub, we decided to take the whole thing out. At the end of the weekend the whole west side of the house was an open space...all the way to the basement.

The dry rot hiding behind the medicine cabinet

The full extent of the damage once we removed the plaster

One of the old tenants

Goodbye bathroom wall

The naked front bedroom

Finishing touches

Our pile of wood keeps growing and we are starting to wonder if savaging is a good idea

Since the plan was to get a lot done through Labor Day weekend Todd took off Wednesday and part of Thursday. The rest of the week the two of us got rid of the old sewer, water and gas lines. On Thursday night Todd taught Eric and me the nuts and bolts of electrical and we were ready for the long weekend. 

Electricians in training

Labor Day brought us some new and valuable volunteers. Tatiana and Cody joined the crew on saturday and Sunday and James came to help Sunday and Monday. Thanks to such a large number of people we were able to get a lot of framing done and started pulling the new electrical lines. Todd and Cody also convinced us to reframe the closet...another item that we added to the list. Eric and I set the beams for the new flooring and felt really proud after completing the task.

Cody, Tatiana and Todd...an awesome crew!

James, great electrician helper

View of the basement...through the old bathroom floor

A piece of wood from the old bathroom-some termites must have had a very good time there

The west side of the house after demo

Framing crew at work

Learning how to use the chopsaw

Time to get rid of some windows

By Sunday night the closet and half of the bathroom were framed in, the floor beams were in place and the front crawl space, the front bedroom and the bathroom were all wired. On Monday we also purchased more material and got ready to finish the framing, replacing the last dry-rot and termite damage along the external walls, and get place the last outlets and switches. Got a lot done, but still a lot to do!

Cutting the new doorway

Door for the new bathroom in place!

You can almost see the bathroom aready

Got some good laughs out of this 

Exhausted but happy!

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.