Friday, December 10, 2010

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.

6 comments:

  1. goodness thats a lot of work! congrats
    now what about the barn??

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  2. Other than cleaning out pigeon poop and trying to encourage them to stay out of the barn, and possibly putting up a few Preifert panels, it's more or less ready for the guys. It's serviceable. My dream is to put up a small indoor arena with a few stalls at one end.

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  3. WOW ! What an endeavor! Good luck with it all and can't wait to hear all about the Process!

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  4. Excited for you, and tired for you!!! Lots of work, sure you'll love it once it's all done. Maybe hang some of those plastic owls outside the doors to keep the pigeons out??? And get cats LOL

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  5. Oh, Susan, thanks for the suggestion. I have a plastic owl in my tack room (it's wintering there - LOL)!
    We have the cats, too....they're not quite a year old, but you are right, once the get acclimated to their new home I bet they will LOVE chasing the pigeons!

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  6. It's a diamond in the rough, but you will make it into a lovely home.

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