Closing Day/ First Weekend

It finally happened, we closed on our home! While the search for our home was relatively short, the process to get us to closing was rather stressful. We had an accepted offer on another home that was much more move-in-ready, and went through the process all the way up to the inspection only to realize that the kitchen and baths may be updated, but the house had some serious issues in the form of moisture in the walls, leaky windows, a cracked (potentially leaking) pool, an uninsurable roof, and an A/C at the end of its life. So when that contract fell through it was back to the drawing board, and that's how we found this house. If you look through the before pictures it doesn't seem bad, but what the photos don't show is the last couple years of neglect, but the home really has great bones and we were sure we could make it shine!

We don't plan to move in until the end of this month, but we knew we'd need at least somewhere we could rest our weary bones while working, so while Scott was at work I loaded our patio furniture up into the truck. Yes, by myself, and no, nothing flew off. I cannot express how proud that makes me!

Off to closing I went, with patio furniture in tow. After closing we headed straight to the house where my parents were already opening the Bahama shutters to let a little light and life into the house. Dad helped with trimming some of the landscaping that was blocking a few of the shutters, but we still have a lot more trimming to do.

Goodbye giant, over-grown bush blocking this window! Hello sunshine!

Once the windows were open I took down all of the blinds and we got right to work ripping out the carpet and tearing up the tack strips (dangerous little buggers!). Carpet is high on the list of items I despise only because it's just so GROSS even under the best of circumstances.

Oh, yes, that's linoleum straight out of the late 1970's, and as you can see, it was far from clean. Luckily, it was only in the living room/hallway, the rest was just concrete slab.

We broke out my new favorite tool, the ShopVac, and swept up all of the dirt and debris that was left under the carpet after removal and then mopped until we couldn't mop any more.

Once the carpet was out, we removed all of the baseboards, even putting the kids to work. Zane carried trash to the garage and helped rip out baseboards with Mom's help while Miah took photos. (although apparently not any photos of my mom. She was there, I swear, and we couldn't have done all of this without her!)

Don't worry, they were very careful and luckily there were no injuries!

While we were ripping out baseboards Scott started the process of removing the popcorn ceiling. He used our (new!) airless paint sprayer to spray water on the ceiling then used a floor scraper to scrape the popcorn off. The scraper probably weighs 10 lbs and he was holding it up over his head, so I was zero help with this part, but he was able to get a good start and show that it is definitely going to be possible to remove (only 1500 square feet left, honey!).

There were two projects that were high on my list that we were also able to tackle: taking down the fluorescent lighting in the kitchen, and removing the upper cabinets above the peninsula.

In the kitchen we have bulkheads (soffits? depends on who you ask) all around, with a ceiling fan in the center. By removing the fluorescent lighting (and really just the plastic covers and frame for now, the lights are still there) we essentially raised the ceiling by a foot in the middle. We'll still remove the soffits/bulkheads in the future, but this helped for now.

The upper cabinets over the peninsula really closed off the kitchen from the living room area so by removing it, we opened that whole space up. These cabinets will likely find a new home in the garage, but for now are just parked against the wall.

Believe it or not, all of the projects above were completed between 1pm on Friday and 4pm on Saturday. Today we decided to "take it easy" and just take care of a few simple projects. We got a new skimmer basket for the pool and skimmer hole cover (if there's a technical term for that I don't know it) as those were missing. We also purchased two ceiling fans for the lanai. We were about 7 minutes into installation when we realized we needed my dad's help. The switch for the fans (originally there were lights there), wasn't working, plus it was old, so Scott attempted to replace it and was baffled by the layout of the wires. My dad hopped in the truck and after some experimentation with a voltage meter, and a trip into the attic, we (they) figured out the issue and shortly thereafter we had two fans on the lanai. PARADISE!

The first two pictures above were taken from the kitchen sink. I can't get over the view!

While Dad and Scott put up the ceiling fans I ran around the house one more time with the ShopVac and cleaned up the huge messes we've made this weekend to get ready for whatever is next. I ended my cleaning by using my second favorite new tool, our pump sprayer, to spray all the concrete slab and the bottoms of the walls with bleach water to kill any cooties/mold spores that might be there.

Yesterday Scott took all of the vent covers down from the ceiling and we soaked them in the bathtub with some Mr. Clean disinfectant overnight so they were ready for a good scrub today. They'll go back up, but not until the walls/ceiling are painted.

We topped off our third day at the house with our first swim in the pool! The pool isn't heated, but after working so hard all weekend the chill was welcome. We swam around for about an hour under the guise of "stirring the water so the skimmer basket can work" really just enjoying the fact that we have a pool. What is this life?!

A weekend of work also meant a weekend of fast food/pizza/toast for dinner so Mom cooked pork tenderloin sandwiches and we went to my parents' for dinner. It was a great ending to an awesome weekend! I'm back to work tomorrow, but Scott is off for Columbus Day, so he'll be working on some landscaping until I can join him tomorrow evening.

I can't say every weekend will be as productive as this one (honestly, we couldn't keep up this pace if we wanted to), but I'm looking forward to the next steps in making this house our home!