What a Difference a Week Makes!

As of tomorrow, we will be in our new house for one week, and we are already out of money!  This has been an incredible week of change and surprises, so I hardly know where to begin.

I guess the first comment I can make is that miraculously, we are still alive, and we are still married.  Remodeling anything after age 45 puts both of those conditions in jeopardy.  I recounted in the last blog almost a week ago that we were about to close on the house.  The close went smoothly, and the moving in soon started.  The cleaning supplies that I bought came in very handy because filth is too gentle of a word for what we found in the house.  The house was not cleaned at all, and probably had not been cleaned for months.  Thankfully, most of the house was empty with the exception of a few things in the garage, three pictures of Jesus, and one of the Virgin Mary.  Suzanne, the guardian, said at the closing that the religious pictures were probably still on the wall because the daughters so badly ripped off their mother that they were too guilty to face Jesus, even in a picture.

I wanted to thoroughly clean the whole place before we moved in, but it was already late afternoon, so we had to move quickly if we were going to stay that first night in the house.  We did some preliminary sweeping (honestly, the floors changed color when we swept!) and while I clean the refrigerator -- which was moldy because the daughters turned it off and closed the door -- Rick tackled cleaning one bathroom enough to use it.  We were both so exhausted Monday evening that even the blow-up bed felt like an expensive bed in a five-star hotel.

Tuesday was our day to talk to contractors.  We had about half of the trailer unpacked when the first of four contractors came in.  We talked to two contractors about replacing the air conditioning/ heat pump/ insulation (HVAC) and duct work, and two contractors about replacing the broken garage door and door opener.  Neither of the HVAC guys quoted the same size equipment, so we were glad that we had scheduled a third HVAC contractor to give us a bid on Thursday!  We figured whichever contractor he agreed with must be on the right track for this size house. Every bid came in at more than we had planned for, so that was our first indication that the money would not last as long as we had thought it would.

Dining room wall with air conditioner removed.

Among all of the contactors trooping into the house, we somehow managed to unpack all of the trailer so we could return it on Tuesday evening.  The house had tubs of items everywhere.  We found the paper cups and plates so we could eat, but at least one meal per day was at a restaurant somewhere since our lives were in utter chaos.  We somewhat unpacked some of our clothes into the dresser drawers, setting up our first "bedroom" in the Florida room.  We did this because both real bedrooms in the house had creepy, smelly carpeting in them that we had ro remove before we would even think about sleeping in them.    The old woman who owned the house, Jackie, had a small white dog.  I swear that the dog must be totally bald by now since I swept up enough dog hair to cover a Great Dane or a fully-grown sheepdog!  We decided by the end of Tuesday that we needed to rent a dumpster if we were going to survive in this house.

Dining room with "temporary" wall.

Wednesday brought about the first real drain on the budget: the electrician.  We knew when we bought the house that the electrical panel needed to be changed out.  The house had a Federal Pacific panel which the electricians referred to as "Fire Potential" panel.  We had planned on spending about $2000 on getting the panel changed, some wiring done, and some service updates.  By the time the electricians were done, the bill had almost doubled.  However, in the process we had two good things happen:  the electicians helped us remove an old, heavy whole-house fan from the hallway ceiling, and they also helped us lift down a no-longer-necesssary wall air conditioning unit from the dining room.  The unit prevented us from opening the door in the kitchen fully.  The door opened into the laundry room/garage, and with the unit there, the door bumped into it every time.  By Sunday, the dining room looked like the second picture.