Sunday, August 30, 2015

Slow and steady.

It's been a really long couple weeks. I'm sorry that I haven't posted, however in my defense, not a whole lot to report! We ran in to some issues with the water and that took us a long time to get working. Eventually, we called in the reserves, AKA, my dad, to lend us a helping hand.

Thankfully, things are now back in order. The water is currently shut off but that is a good thing because it's because we are installing a "new" sink and counter in the kitchen!


The water situation in the bathroom was really frustrating and broke my heart because it messed up Abigail's paper bag floor THREE different times. That made me sad because I put a lot of effort into the floor. I guess I should have waited to ever fix it instead of fixing it each time - but each time I thought the water thing was situated and then it never was.





We finally ended up replacing basically everything and anything we could having to do with the shower. And when I say me - I mean Damien. Eventually we (Damien) settled on these awesome things called Shark Bites. If you are EVER doing any kind of work to pipes I highly recommend them. It didn't take long at all to install and immediately fixed our problem.
 




The last couple weeks haven't been all bad. Our dog Otis got to see the house for the first time and he seems to be okay with it. 


We also purchased a "new to us" fridge. 


Abigail has started kindergarten so the race is on to get this place livable so we can move in. We are hoping to have that accomplished (believe it or not) in the next few days.  What more do you need other than a place to sleep, shower, and eat, right? 






Saturday, August 15, 2015

Note to self: Stop expecting.

My biggest problem with this whole mobile home remodel is that I expect to accomplish too much in one day. I really need to stop doing that. Since I have realized I do this, I am also now expecting to live in the mobile home longer than I think we will so I'm not let down when all the projects at our house take way longer than we plan on them taking.

I guess when you buy an older home as you start to remodel you uncover things underneath that need work, too. That is how things went for us today. We spent a solid eight hours working and I thought for sure when we got there this morning that by the end of the day the bathtub would be redone with new faucet, shower head and walls and that the window would be completed and last but not least that Abigail's room would be painted. The window is done. Ok, not done but it is installed and sturdy. Everything else I mentioned is a hot mess.

I promised in this blog to show my readers even the worst part of remodels. I am not going to gloss over the worst days. Here is how we ended our day in the bathroom..


Disgusting, right? And to think I thought we were going to leave there today with a sparkling clean like- new bathtub! You see the previous owner - I'm just gonna say it - was an idiot! There was a leak in the cold water pipe and he just took a ton of silicone over the pipe which did not fix anything. The water was also constantly running on the cold side as well. I'm guessing it had something to do with all the silicone. Anyways - it left Damien feeling like he had no choice but to cut out the entire faucet and pipe that runs up to the shower. It's all water damaged anyways so it probably ended up being a good thing he did that.  Now we are heading to Home Depot or Lowe's tomorrow with this bad boy in tow to figure out what the hell we are supposed to do. 



The biggest hold up of our day was that we could not find a shut-off valve anywhere. It was several hours before we finally located the main shut-off valve for the house.  Also, in case you are wondering, there is tons of spiders under the skirting of a mobile home. Gross. 

I don't want to end this post on a negative note - so I'll show some photos of the window that has been put in the back of the house. What is really fun about this window is that we bought it on sale for only $10! It wasn't quite the right size but Damien did a great job making it work. In the next few days he will make it look pretty but for now it's sealed up and sturdy and no more bugs will get in. 






Here's to a better day tomorrow! 










Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Painting & Flooring

The plywood flooring project is FINALLY done. Damien finished up the section in the bedroom tonight that he felt needed to be reinforced. Now all the plywood has been laid down and we are ready for some other type of flooring to go on top.  This is a huge relief as that project was beginning to feel like it would never end. Here is the bedroom - back in one piece and sturdy!





If you look at the first picture - you can see what one of the upcoming projects is. You guessed it! Fixing that ridiculous window. Here are some closer shots to give you an idea of what is going on here. They had a window air conditioner in there. Every day we go there I'm amazed at the way these people lived. 





We don't really have our plan worked out yet but we think the parts of the window were in the closet so there is a very slim chance we can just put the window back together. We have to wait and see what happens when Damien tears off that plywood. 


I also started painting in the kitchen. We picked a really bright color for the cabinets. So far I think I like it. The walls definitely need more paint on them and so do the cabinets - but it is definitely looking cleaner than it was ten days ago. 




We will also be replacing the counter because it's in really bad shape underneath and has a lot of water damage. 

This past weekend we were at a carnival/flea market in Palmyra and I found 10 yards of the fabric pictured below for only $5. It really caught my eye and I'm going to be using some of it in the kitchen. I think it will match our paint choice very nicely. I'm anxious for the kitchen to be pulled together. That will help the overall look of the house drastically. 



There are so many projects to be done to make this little place a home but very slowly I see things coming together. Here's a cute shot of Abigail helping me work on her brown paper floor that we are putting down in her room! More on that another day! 







Monday, August 10, 2015

We have sub-floors! (almost!)

Over the weekend we worked a lot on finishing up the floors. I actually helped quite a bit. I started off by just doing some measuring to try to speed things up for Damien but by the end of the weekend I was using the saw and laying pieces all by myself. I can now say I'm perfectly comfortable around a circular saw. At least the one we have anyways.

The floors are not perfect but they will do. All areas (except for the one we cut out) have flooring underneath already anyways so it's not a big deal that they did not come out perfect. There is still plenty of floor under it to keep us safe and sturdy.  The floors are not all screwed down so that's why it looks like some areas are sticking up. Damien needs to go back through and screw them all down. Abigail has a real hard time listening to the saw even with headphones on so we were just trying to get everything cut this weekend so we can put the saw away because it is LOUD.





This is the area we had to cut up because there was a hole in the floor. Damien bought some brackets at Home Depot for .76 each that held the pieces of 2x4. Originally he thought 4 would be enough but he is probably going to end up adding 3 more in between because it didn't feel quite sturdy enough to him with the replacement boards we got. This part of the remodel only ended up costing us somewhere around $20... which is way less than it looked like it was going to cost when I originally saw the huge hole! Hopefully it will be done tomorrow evening. 










All in all we ended up buying 17 sheets of plywood to cover all the floors. We also bought two smaller pieces that were much thicker to fill in the hole in the bedroom. 

My project for this week will be getting the kitchen half decent looking and the bathroom. I keep forgetting to get photos of the bathroom. Here is how the kitchen looked when we got it. 


That fridge does not work so we had to have that hauled away. And as you can see - there is no stove. We hope to have that changed by the weekend. As of now we have no appliances at all.  We have been checking out Craigslist and yard sale Facebook pages looking for them at a great price. We really don't want to buy brand new appliances for the trailer since we will be buying brand new appliances for the house within the next year or so.  We thought about just buying them now and then moving them to the other house but I have my eye on really nice appliances for the other house... ones we certainly can not afford right now. 









Saturday, August 8, 2015

Believe in yourself a little more.

We have been working at the mobile home for about 10 days now. We go Saturday and Sundays for most of the day and just about every evening at least for a couple hours. Even Abigail is eager to help out where she can.

The mobile home was/is dirty as can be. It absolutely amazes me that a family actually lived in this place right before we bought it. It's gross. Filthy. When we tore up the carpets we found that there were several places where the floor was wet... turns out it was from a pit-bull that lived there unattended for several weeks. Well, trailers get "soft spots" in them if they get wet (something entirely new to me as I've never lived in one before). So as Damien was working on pulling up the flooring, he began basically falling right through the floors. Great! We were going to replace the sub-floors anyways for our own peace of mind (they are basically particle board!) but we anticipated being able to go right over the existing, rather than having to cut them out and start from scratch. This photo shows the spot along the bedroom wall.  Since this happened, Damien has walked around all areas of the trailer and double checked for soft spots. We found a couple more that we were able to fix easier than this one.


This one is not completely done yet.... obviously. Damien is in the process of fixing it this weekend. Today he cut the floor up until he found a floor joist (not sure if that's what they are called in a mobile home) so that he can attach brackets to it and put in another joist and then a stronger piece of plywood. Hopefully it will be complete in the next day or so. You can see all the staining on the sub-floor. That has all since been cut out. 

After this was discovered and I learned that this was going to be an even bigger mess than I had anticipated, I really started to think "what the hell are we even doing?" I had a miniature emotional breakdown for a few minutes... which can happen quite often to me right now since I'm 23 weeks pregnant.  Anyways, I went out to the kitchen and thought I'd just forget it and continue working on scrubbing it down. And then, in the filth, there it was: a dime. A little sign from up above. I think it was to say "believe in yourself a little more". 






How Did We Get Here?

I know what you're thinking..... "how did this even happen?"

Several months ago my husband and I sat talking one evening. Our house payment per month is an embarrassing $1,250.00. With all of our utilities including water, sewer, trash, electric, gas, etc. We are paying somewhere in the ballpark of $1700-$1800 per month just to live in our house. We wondered ... how would we ever truly own a home?  No banks. No mortgage. No monthly payments. How would we ever get to that point in our lives?  

It was then that my husband began thinking completely outside of the box. 

Within about six weeks we owned a home. Free and clear. Granted, it's the ugliest house on the street, but my husband had found a way for us to purchase a home in cash - no banks, no mortgage involved. It was a home that went up for tax sale.  We knew we were taking a huge risk, but looked the house over several times and felt it was structurally sound so we went ahead with the purchase. When we finally received the deed we broke into the house and Damien began working on it right away. We were so excited. He started knocking down walls and clearing out all the junk left behind.


A few weeks had passed and there we were again, sitting down having another conversation about money. How will we ever afford to do all the work that this house we purchased needs? The home has to undergo a total remodel. Every wall has to come down to put in new electric. Every wall needs to be put back up - and that is just scratching the surface! What will we do? 

Then it was time to think outside of the box again. That is when we decided it was time to make a drastic change. We simply could not afford to live in our large,development, cookie-cutter house and continue down the financial path we were on and be able to ever fix up our house to the point we could live in it. That is when the 1970 mobile home came in to our lives. We bought a second home that was also basically unlivable. It is about 550 square feet and the ugliest mobile home in the park. But we own it. There are no payments on it and the lot rent is $360 per month which covers water, sewer, and trash.. leaving us with roughly $1300 extra per month that can be put towards our other home remodel...once we get the mobile home livable of course.



We hope you will come along with us as we remodel our mobile home and our other home.  We will show the good, the bad, and the ugliest of ugly during our journey.  We hope to inspire others to think outside the box in life and allowing yourself to experience things you otherwise never could. 

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