Saturday, April 30, 2016

Dreams don't work unless you do.

This past week Damien took a day off work and rented a Bobcat to clean up the yard. I am so happy to say that the incredibly heavy bags full of plaster and lath are finally in a dumpster!  What a relief.  We easily have another dumpsters worth of stuff (which would be our 4th) but we are taking a break from spending money on trash and going to work on other things to start getting the "new" house ready to move in.






Last weekend we started pulling up all the disgusting stuff that is in the basement so that there can be access to fix the broken pipes. This is one of about 10 mattresses down there. They are almost all soaking wet which is so gross.  The one below was a queen size but the rest are twin so hopefully it isn't as hard. 



This weekend we are working on tearing up the carpet in the house. There is hardwood underneath but there is a couple different layers to get through before we get to it. We started tearing up small areas of each room just to see if it was all the same and so far it is: carpet, fake hardwood, some kind of really thick cardboard type thing, and then really old newspapers.  So it will be time consuming but the hope is that we can then just sand and refinish the floors and not have to lay anything else down.  Speaking of mattresses - look how cheap mattresses were back when this newspaper was laid down!  Only $18! I didn't find the front of the paper to get a date yet but hopefully I will at some point. 










Thursday, April 21, 2016

Because someone we love is in heaven, there's a little bit of heaven in our home.

We have wood floors! I am so happy! It's gonna take some hard work to get to them but they are there!




Isn't it pathetic how they pieced together all those pieces of wood? Ridiculous.  
But there they are - pretty wood floors! 

Also I wanted to give a little shout-out to this handy-dandy tool that my mom bought for Damien for Christmas one year. I used it to change a doorknob in like 5 minutes! If you do not have the "Flip Out" tool - you need to get it!  I've never seen the infomercial but I'm willing to bet they touch on changing a lock and how awkward it is, but this thing makes it easy as can be.









The view from the kitchen. 



When we went through the house we realized it's definitely more rough than we thought. I felt discouraged and sad. Then as I kept tearing up the carpet, 
I found an old, disgusting, dirty dime. A little hello from up above! 




Saturday, April 16, 2016

We got another house!!!

.... I know what you're thinking: "you're out of your mind!!!" but I promise you, we aren't. We now also have the other half of the house. YAY!  Now we can control who lives there. This side is in much better shape than the other half and has been remodeled. Certainly not the best remodeling job ever, but the electric, windows and everything is already done so with a deep cleaning and some new ceilings (which is our fault from demo on our side) ... and possibly a new furnace.. this bad boy is ready to live in.  So our plan is to hopefully have it done by the end of the school year and move in this half while we work on the other half and then move over there. It seems dumb I know but our half still has all the original floors and woodwork but this one doesn't so that is why we will eventually move to the other side.  Are you ever so excited about something that you don't know whether to scream, cry, or throw up? That's how I felt when everything was signed.  Here are some photos of the other side.





This side is basically identical to the other side just reversed. It is a three bedroom 1 bathroom. 





The carpets are pretty disgusting so I don't know that we can save them. We are crossing our fingers for wood floors underneath. Cross your fingers for us. 

Tomorrow we are heading there to change the locks and check out how bad the basement is because it flooded at one time. Oh, and of course tear up some carpet to see what's underneath! 






Tuesday, April 5, 2016

"Better Than Yesterday"

My husband has taken on the motto "better than yesterday" in the last few months. I tease him about it a lot, but the more he says it, the more it grows on me.  The truth is, as long as you do better than yesterday, you gotta be doing better, right?

This past weekend I finally got the final bedroom cleaned out and Damien got the bathroom demo done. Both of those things were weighing on us both quite a bit so to have them done feels really good. All I need to do is finish getting the carpet out of the room.




Damien went to court yesterday for some of our fines. We lost and now owe several hundred (ok closer to a thousand) dollars to the borough. It was unfortunate because the judge was honestly a total jerk to Damien and disrespectful. It was kind of disheartening and made us both feel like throwing up a "for sale by owner" sign out front but we aren't doing this for them - we are doing this for us and for our girls future. So we were mad about it for a while and then picked ourselves up and are moving on with things.


Everything is gonna be alright.




Saturday, April 2, 2016

Some days are better than others.

I promised myself when I started this blog that I would be honest. My biggest problem with blogs and social media in general is all the fake, dishonest posts about how great things are. No one ever seems to keep it real anymore.  Well, I'm here to tell you that you can always count on realness from me.

On Thursday morning I was feeling overly anxious and frustrated so Damien stayed at home in the morning with the girls and I went to the house to take out some of my frustration. I tried to clean up that back bedroom ..the one that we  paid someone to do but then they didn't finish. It really sucks cleaning up plaster and lath. First you have to clean up all the lath because you can't shovel it up. So I stopped at Ace for some bags and I found the ones pictured above. The answer to my prayer... or so I thought.


One of the worst things for me about cleaning up is lining the trash can with a contractor bag, filling it up, and then having to lift it out of the trash can, but that's the only way you can shovel the plaster into the bag without it falling over. Well, that is until I found these bags. 


What a joke.  They fell over like a thousand times and aren't even close to being as strong as contractor bags. So if you're wondering if they are worth the price.... they aren't. They are so worthless I'm considering writing Gorilla about them.

So I cleaned up the back bedroom for a while on Thursday and it isn't done but it's better than it was and less overwhelming. 




We had our 3rd dumpster dropped off this past week and it will probably be filled up in no time. We hired a different person who was supposed to finish the entire demo and clean up of the house in a certain time frame. Well he didn't. And I'm done paying people for jobs that they are unable to complete in a reasonable amount of time. Damien told him what to do and I told the guy one thing. Do you know what the one thing was? Do not put anything outside in the yard. Why? Because we get fined every single time we do anything that you can be fined for. We seriously have somewhere around 6 fines right now with one single fine being $540. So what does that guy decide to do? 

This. 



That is literally about 50 bags of plaster. Those bags weigh a hundred or more pounds each. Do you see the dumpster RIGHT THERE? One top of putting them there he also used them as steps to access the side door and the ones on the bottom broke open so there is plaster everywhere. Come on. 

So I'll say what I said last week (and probably the week before) again.... Hopefully within the next week or so the demo will be done. 

And we press on. 







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