new house

In the spring of 2013, I called our realtor.  For several years (maybe five) we'd been saying that we needed a bigger house.  Ours felt huge when we bought it in 2001. We had just three kids,  and they were young. Young kids don't need much space, and their stuff is small, and they all congregate in the same place anyway.  Also, our Bryan St. house had only been about 630 sq feet--so anything would've felt huge in comparison.  

Anyway, I called Laura to ask about rentals.  We'd had it with our no storage/stuff everywhere/poorly heated/energy-inefficient home.  Two years ago I wasn't working, and we assumed (wrongly) that we couldn't qualify to buy another home, so we had decided that even renting would be an improvement. 

Laura promised to keep her eye out for something appropriate, and then she said, "I should have you look at a place...remember the Penningtons?  Well, their house just come up for sale.  It's a foreclosure..."   A couple days later we were standing in the house, gingerly stepping around the sordid carpet stains while wrinkling our noses and simultaneously thinking, "This house is big.  I bet it could look really nice.  I wonder if they'd come down some more....?"

That was in May.  In late October, after a lengthy process (foreclosures are weird and the bank that owned this property was slow) we closed on our third house.  Yes, third.  We now owned property on Bryan St, Walker Ave, and Wallace Ave.  And we had a mountain of work to do before we could move into our home. 

It was filthy.  Completely, utterly, entirely filthy. 

The previous owners were dirty, less-than-moral people who loved animals and kept rescued cats and dogs in their home. Neighbors have told us that they had a least five dogs in the basement. They also  painted a room in the basement with marijuana leaves.  (We joked and wondered about those leaves, but we weren't sure if it really was marijuana till our kids were talking to their family members at school and the topic came up and their kids confirmed our suspicions: Marijuana. There was also a room with music staffs, complete with notes and treble clefs, but, well, it's the marijuana  wall that I remember best. 

But back to the dirt. 

The house was filthy, and it smelled like animals, cigarettes, and who-knows-what else.  Actually, one of my biggest concerns--and something I discussed with many people who bought and  sold houses-- was the smell.  It was horrid:  a mix of cigarette smoke, filth, animal smells, grease, and neglect. 

We deodorized the house the day we closed on it.  We opened windows, put bowls of baking soda everywhere, and sprayed a ton of air freshener, which says  lot, because I hate commercial air fresheners. Frankly, though, we couldn't stand to breathe the air in our new home!  We needed to feel as if we could set foot in the house, and even with the deodorizing, I still felt like I was walking into a disgusting, germy mess. We had a dumpster delivered to the house and we borrowed a huge metal trailer. Jared and Caleb threw away 2,000 lbs. of junk--furniture, dishes, trash, clothes, etc.  (We asked about having the owners do it, but since it was a bank-owned property and there was nothing at stake for the owners, there was no incentive. So the job fell to us.)  Caleb single-handedly tore out all of the upstairs carpet, which seemed to be more dirt than carpet--sand poured from it as he pulled it up and again as it was rolled and loaded onto the trailer.  The carpet itself was filthy enough that I didn't want to go near it.  (The removal job was bad enough that Caleb went from not wearing a dust mask to wearing it willingly.) And at the landfill, the carpet we threw away also weighed in at 2,000 lbs. 

While Caleb was ripping the carpet up, I started scrubbing. I began in the kitchen, using concentrated Lysol (not the new, colored, "wimpy" cleaner, but the old-fashioned brown stuff that has to be diluted--the same stuff my Grampa Fredette used to drain my infected elbow 20-something  years ago).   The kitchen was completely grimy:  The walls, painted powder blue, were brown and grease-splattered.  The cabinets we so disgusting that we abandoned the idea of saving them.  (We could have, but I was afraid they'd never feel clean, and a gross feeling in the kitchen is, well...gross!)

This photo was taken from the kitchen looking into the living room. The carpet had been removed, but the living room walls were still dark peach.  This photo really doesn't show the grime and filth. I had already cleaned this section of the kitchen wall. 

This is the old kitchen. The screens were so dirty that I had to wash them....just couldn't focus on everything when I kept seeing the grime in them. Notice that there are no cupboards behind me. Also, behind me to the right (past the oven) was an open doorway. We enclosed that. 

After a week or so of throwing trash away, tearing carpet out, pulling up laminate, scrubbing walls, and bleaching sections of the sub floor, we were ready to paint.  We hired my friend Holly (of Blue Spruce Painting) to spray the whole house.  With her spray gun it only took a few hours.  The entire house was white; she sprayed the ceilings, walls, and floors.  Now the house no longer looked dirty--and it smelled like paint.  Plus, with the scrubbed, painted floors and walls, it felt clean. 

By this time it was almost mid-November.  Initially, we had wanted to be in the house for  Thanksgiving. We now knew that wasn't possible. We still had a kitchen to remodel, tile, carpet, and laminate to install, and more painting to do. 

We began painting the walls--first the upstairs hallway and bedrooms. Because I was working so much and Jared was focusing on flooring (he tiled the bathroom and both entry ways), painting was a slow process. My parents helped us get a jump on it at Thanksgiving.   This photo shows Isaac and my dad painting Isaac & Corbin's room. 

Meanwhile, Jared began the kitchen project. We widened the door between the living room and kitchen, so he tore out a wall and rebuilt half of it, since we wanted an island where the old wall had been. The old kitchen had white tile on the lower half of the wall; at one point it had been a nice back splash, but it was dated, and, even worse, it was filthy. There was no way to remove it without gouging the drywall underneath, so we re did all of the dry wall. That was fine, since we also needed new wiring. Our friend Trent Loutensock helped Jared with the wiring. We removed the old light fixture and added 3 new recessed lights. Even now, sixteen months after moving in, I still get a lot of pleasure from having lights right where I need them. And I almost always think of what Jared sacrificed for the kitchen. He developed a rotten case of bronchitis, accelerated by breathing so much dust. He was sick for eight weeks, all while working on the house, often till 10 or later at night. Last winter, we didn't take a vacation. Jared used almost every one of his vacation days on the house.

By Christmas break, the kitchen was almost done. Jared finished the dry wall and we textured the ceiling and painted over break.   Then, Jared began the laminate and we made arrangements to have carpet installed and counter tops measured and installed. 

Jared laid all of the laminate and tile in our house, which is quite a bit. He'd done tile before, but not laminate. You'd never know!  I love my fake oak floors! They're bright and shiny (although we do have a couple of scratches; luckily, they're not obvious).  I'm not sure how many square feet he laid, but I'd bet it was about 450-500. He tiled the bathroom, the entry, and the steps between the laundry room and garage. He did a heck of a job!  

By January, Jared was tired of our house project!  And I was tired of making 2 house payments every month. Jared worked harder than ever to finish up the small stuff, and finally, on the coldest weekend of the winter, we moved in. We were still waiting on counter tops (I think we moved in on Saturday and they were installed on Tuesday), but we were home!  Our friends Mark and Melanie Vigil brought us supper and ate with us that first night. The next morning, I woke up knowing where I was, not  feeling disoriented. No one complained about being cold or not having space. Finally, we had a home that was perfect in almost every way.  

Sixteen months later, I still feel that way. We continue to work on things--we finally finished our garden boxes, but we still don't have grass growing everywhere, and there a few light fixtures we haven't replaced yet.  We're so thankful to have a home that's big, has a food storage room, and isn't cold and drafty.  I could go on! Plus, the kids have brought friends to this house much more than they did before. That's been something I've wanted for a long time.  Honestly, some of my favorite times here have been when the house is full: Christmas break, when Austin and Bo were here; Christmas dinner, with 10 of us seated around the table without feeling like we were on one another's laps; graduation, when we had 13 family members here, plus hosted a party for tons of guests; and meals with the missionaries and Taylor's basketball team.   I'm so very grateful for this home.  It's our place to do our most important work, and it's working out so well. 

Plus, all of Jared's work earned us an instant $40-$50k in equity. And that's really awesome! 

Posing for a picture while painting one of the family rooms downstairs. 

Corbin like unscrewing hardware from the fan blades. He also helped wash the blades and put them back together. Jared spray painted them for me. 

View from the living room looking toward the kitchen window. 

This is the same kitchen that I was standing in when I washed the screen.  The sink is still on the left. Among other things,  we added lots more cupboards.

This was taken on
Aug. 25, 2014.  We spent the entire summer of 2014 fixing the sprinkler system (well, Jared did), so it was the end of summer before we had nice grass in the front yard.