Bought the Farm

Yup, we bought the new house! We closed on it earlier this week. After dealing with all of the paperwork we stopped by our new place. My husband and I stood in the center of the living room, somewhat in shock I think....no ceilings in the living room or parts of the basement; wood floor cut away on the main floor, except near cabinets in the kitchen; all baseboards removed; some sheet rock removed from walls in the basement; disgusting carpet without padding in the bedrooms and basement; a yard that hasn't been touched in 3 years; a barn full of pigeon poop. Is this a little bit of heaven or a little bit of hell? It's hard to tell at this point! There may be times in the next few months, as we labor on the house, that we may wish we bought the proverbial farm!

This is the living room. We'll need to replace the ceiling, wood floors and baseboard molding. We are going to contract with a sheet rock guy to do that work. We've done it before and it's a bear, especially with 9' ceilings. The ceilings and walls are also textured so we will have an 'expert' help match the existing tesxture. We'll do the painting. We are going to remove the can lamps (one is visible on left), but leave the wires behind a plate in case we ever want to put in some overhead lighting.

 The basement needs major work. At one point there was sheet rock on the walls toward the right, both the one near the middle of the room and the one further away where you can see insulation. Most of the ceiling was removed as well. This provides the opportunity for us to slightly redesign the floor plan; we'll put in a wet bar and a theater room, as well as frame an office/bedroom and a hallway.

 The laundry room really didn't suffer from the flooding, but they discovered that pipes were leaking so a plumber removed a 'window' to get in to fix the pipe. I'm not sure why the counter top is missing. The doors are from areas where hard wood was removed

 Check out where the hardwood floor was cut. We aren't sure how wet this area may have been. We will tear out the existing cabinets so we can remove the rest of the floor and check for and mitigate any mold damage. Although the cabinets are serviceable we budgeted for replacing them and putting in a granite counter top. Most of these cabinets will be used in the utility area of the basement and in the garage.