Discoveries

My neighbor sparked my interest in learning more about my house's past when she shared a picture with me of her house, circa 1900 I would guess, and just a sliver of our house could be seen on the right side, enough to know that there was once a decorative widow walk
on the roof of our house and that the front of our house, which I had always assumed was an addition because of its awkwardness, was actually original to the house, but as an open porch - actually a beautiful open porch that Eric and I are very sad was changed. We hope one day that we can make the now mud room something that enhances our houses appearance and doesn't detract from it, but we have a long way to go before that happens!

This discovery made me want to know more; like who originally owned/built the house, could we see complete pictures of what our house once looked like, did our house have any interesting history. I knew we would have to go to the town library and the county's registry of deeds to learn most of that stuff, but I decided a google news search of our address might turn up something of interest...and it did, but not exactly what I was looking for.

Sadly, on February 27, 2000 a woman, one of the previous owners of the house, was strangled by her boyfriend who lived with her. She was killed in her/our home. Now the saddest part: she had 4 children ages 11, 10, 4 and 2. After making this discovery I looked for a few more articles about the incident and found that her boyfriend had killed her because he caught her with another man. Of all the things I had hoped to learn about my house this was not one of them.

Now this bit of information is something that we already half knew/suspected. We had two different people make reference to this, but until now had not been able to find any more information about it. When we were looking at our house our Realtor told us that he thought a murder had been committed here, but we couldn't be sure about it and it didn't really change our feelings about the house. Then shortly after Dalila was born a man stopped by our house who claimed to be the victim's brother. Because he wanted to come in and see the house, we had to turn him away( I wasn't comfortable with having a stranger in the house, especially with a newborn), so we weren't able to get any more details than what he provided with his introduction.

I know some people might think that our house is cursed or haunted, but I don't feel this way. It was a horrible thing that happened, but our bringing new positive energy into the house I think helps reverse any negativity from that event that could still be lingering. I also don't think her ghost is haunting our house, or if her spirit is here, I think she protects the house more than she haunts it.

A Few Improvements!

Our new bathroom is taking a long time to complete and there is a lot of waiting in between steps, but that doesn't mean we aren't keeping busy! We recently have been working on giving our house a little more curb appeal because considering the vinyl siding falling off our house, the peeling paint on the window trim and the crumbling brick steps - we have become( if were not already) "that" house on our street. It only took 3 days to complete( well its almost done) but the entrance to our house is finally looking nice! Below are a few befores and afters and some explanations of what we did :)

Before


After with new granite steps

We honestly didn't have to do much to get the steps installed( we paid the granite company to do that), but the prep work was pretty intense. We had to demo the old brick steps, which was the easy part, then with a sledge hammer, remove the concrete beneath it. Then we had to level and compact the ground so it could handle the weight of the granite. We also had to get rid of all the old bricks and concrete. That turned into quite the event when the only place we found that would take the materials was a gravel pit - we paid a guy in an excavator

to scrape the rubble out of the u-haul trailer( hell yes we paid the $8.95 or whatever it is for insurance!) which was super scary - I dont think I could ever accurately describe what this experience was like!! You really don't know the strength of one of those things until you are in a car being pulled back by one of them as it scrapes bricks from your trailer! Maybe we were taking a risk by doing this - but after spending hours loading that thing up, we just didn't have the strength to unload it ourselves and luckily for us, we made a good choice - the guy didn't even dent the u-haul trailer! It was seriously crazy.

Ok so on with the improvements. You can see from the pictures of the new steps that our door is "a contractor special" straight from Lowes or Home Depot. This door isn't all that bad, but it really didn't fit our old house and because the do it yourselfer before us took all the short cuts he could, it leaked and let tons of cold air in during the winter. The water leaks were damaging the floor of our mudroom and we decided we couldn't go another winter with the door like this.

My Dad's friend, Steve, works construction and at a demo job he removed a wonderful old stained glass door that he saved for us. It has been sitting in our mudroom, waiting to be installed for about a year now and we finally got to it this weekend. This wasn't a straight forward install - because the door wasn't prehung we had to hang it ourselves, make sure it was weather tight and of course, make sure it looked professional. We had to cut the opening for the door 6 inches wider and because of this had to remove much of the vinyl siding. We have put up some primed thin plywood for siding( we are still finishing this part) as a temporary fix - we plan to take all the vinyl siding off our house next summer and restore and replace the clapboards underneath, but the mudroom was an addition to our house and it does not have the clapboards like the rest of the house. Unless we removed all the siding, we wouldn't be able to match the new clapboards up to the old ones and this would make the house look very funny once we removed the vinyl siding on the main part of the house. So maybe it doesn't look the best that it could, but we have to take baby steps towards the end result and sometimes that is going to mean temporary fixes. Ok, so on with the pictures...

Here are the pictures after day one of the install:


And here is the picture of the nearly finished project after day 2:

You can still see some of the black ice and water shield behind our makeshift siding and trim, but we will be covering that today. Regardless, it completely changes the look of our house - it really restores that "old house feeling." More pictures to come as we finish the project up!

Completely Off Topic

I just have to laugh at this:

I just downloaded Jay-Z's The Blueprint 3( I am giving it a chance, but I have very low expectations for hip hop these days, so I don't expect much) and I couldn't help but LMAO when I saw that there is a track featuring Kanye West entitled "HATE" and though I haven't listened to the song I know its going to be about haters. Ironic much? Kanye West has to be THE.BIGGEST.HATER.ON.THE.PLANET(I don't think I need to remind/inform anyone of his hating ways)! I think his self absorption has him confused - people aren't hating on him, they are just hating him and that's assuming ANYONE cares that much.

Do you ever?

Sit up late at night thinking about how you really should check your credit card balances but are to afraid that you have spent WAY too much? That's what I'm doing right now. Life feels very expensive these days and this bathroom project isn't helping...

Plus my sleep deprived brain allowed the man at the lumber yard to order us 8 feet of windows instead of 6. 50% fee to cancel order at this point so I guess we will have 8 feet worth of window somewhere in our house, but it won't be in the bathroom!

Ok enough late night rambling.

Laundry Room

In spite of our plumber troubles, we still ended up with a great laundry room. We just finished it yesterday and it couldn't be better! Here are some pictures:

This is What Happens When You Don't Do It Yourself

So its been a very long time since I last posted, but that's because its been along time since we did any work on the house! Right before Christmas we welcomed our first daughter, Dalila, into the world and have been so busy enjoying her and caring for her that we have neglected our projects. But now that she is a little older and we are more adjusted to being parents, we decided we needed to get back into it or we would never finish our fixer upper.

We decided the next project to tackle would be the laundry room, which would allow us to begin working on our new bathroom. My parents, knowing how hard parenthood can be, offered to pick up the tab on hiring plumbers to do this work so all we would have to do was the cosmetic elements to the projects. Eric was reluctant to give up on plumbing, but after weighing the benefits we decided to hire the plumbers we had always called in an emergency to do the project.

Initially we felt the quote for the work was a bit high considering how long the project was projected to take - roughly 2 days, one day for the laundry room and another for the bathroom. We had talked to other plumbers in our area and none were able to get working right away, so we decided the steep price tag was the price we ( well my parents) would have to pay for the project getting underway immediately.

Things did not go as planned, however. The laundry room took 2 days instead of 1 and when it was inspected it failed, so bringing the work up to code required another day's work. The bathroom ended up taking about 3 days to rough in. For us, this was not a problem; we were grateful to have the work done as soon as requested and the mistakes that had been made when the laundry room failed to be fixed right away.

For the owner of the plumbing company, however, this presented a problem. He now felt he was being underpaid for the job based on the price we had agreed on and without warning or discussion, charged us an addition $2500 on the last day of work, stating the job had taken longer than expected and had been "delayed."

The man apparently could not see reason. He felt we should be paying for the time his guys had to take to fix their own faulty work and for the fact that they worked half days two of the days they worked which made the job take longer(obviously). After an hour long discussion about it, Eric had to tell him we would discuss it further after the weekend. We couldn't see how this was possibly happening - we had signed a contract which he had asked us to sign. We signed it, he signed it and right there on the contract it stated that the cost of the job was fixed. No where on the contract was there anything about how long the project would take, it simply listed the tasks that would be completed for the amount listed.

Come Monday we received a call from the plumber's secretary about how we would be paying for the remainder of our balance plus the addition$2500. Eric told her we were still in negotiation about it and would call her back when we had reached a conclusion. Later that day I received a call from my dad telling me that an enormous charge had been made to his credit card, putting a hold on his card. He wanted to know if we had authorized the charge, which of course, we had not. Can you imagine this company, with out any consent, decided to charge the credit card which we had paid the deposit with?!

My dad put a stop payment on the card and I called the state licensing board because it was getting out of control. When speaking to the licensing board representative, not only was it illegal for a plumber to charge for work that didn't pass inspection, that they were not able to charge more for a job if a contract had already been entered into. These were things which common sense told me, but having the licensing board confirm it prepared us all the more for the next conversation we had with our plumber.

For an hour he tried to convince Eric we still owned him money and finally Eric had to tell him that we would not be paying it and if he perused it further we would not only take him to court, but we would report him to the licensing board and better business bureau. He stated he didn't want to go to court and that he would talk with his guys and be back in touch - we haven't heard from him.

Its sad that my parents gift of what should have been minimal time and hassle over this part of the project turned into something that caused us more frustration than it would had we just done it ourselves. We really are do it yourselfers at heart and I think this experience just further solidified that for the rest of the work that needs to be done to our house, we will be doing it ourselves.

Second Closet

We are getting pretty good at closet building! This project took only a few hours over a weeks time to get fully installed and organized.

Before

After

After

After: organized and in use!
After: organized and in use!