I told you I would do what I could and give you another before and after! For this addition, I bring you our family room.

The Before Picture There are a few things that had already been torn out before I had a chance to take a before picture. Around the fireplace, there was [...]]]>

I told you I would do what I could and give you another before and after! For this addition, I bring you our family room.

The Before Picture
There are a few things that had already been torn out before I had a chance to take a before picture. Around the fireplace, there was a very cheap looking mantle… you know, the kind where you had extra baseboard and a few extra finishing nails. To make things worse, the mantle also stuck further out into the little entry area so you were more likely to run into it if you were not paying attention. Another item that had already been removed was the cheap wood stand looking thing going from the little bar area to the floor. They use to have a large fish tank onto of the bar area and the stand thing hid the plumbing and pumps for it. It was ugly… it had to go! By this time, we had also removed the baseboards in order to repair the moldy drywall that was over by the sliding glass door. You can see where we rolled the carpet back a little bit to let the wall finish drying out before we dug into it.

The After Picture
This room took a while to finish. There are still a few things what we have to do to it… for example, finish installing the new light switches. But here is a breakdown of what we did to this room:

• Washed the walls and the roof with TSP TWICE! It was that bad.
• Ripped out a 2×2 foot chunk of the drywall near the lower corner of the sliding glass door because the slider was leaking that that area had water damage/mold. We also ran an Ozone machine in the house for a while to make sure everything was killed off.
• At least 3 coats of primer were applied to the red wall, 2 coats to the tan wall, and 2 coats to the ceiling.
• Painted the ceiling with super awesome ceiling paint… it went on PINK and then dried white so you knew if you missed a spot!
• The walls got 2 color coats of paint in “raw silk” It’s a white paint with a hit of yellow/grey that REALLY picks up the color for the floor.
• The carpet was pulled out and we put down laminate flooring. We tired something else that didn’t work… more on that below.
• New baseboards.
• All new outlets and switches.
• New ceiling fan… that seems to switch on from time to time on it’s own. Think the neighbors have the same frequency.
• The bar top now has a stainless steel finish.

The Learning Experience
When we bought the house, we didn’t have money in the budget to do the floors… but the carpet HAD to come out. We had both seen places where they had stained the concrete slab and it turned out beautiful! We thought this would be a great inexpensive idea to hold us over until we could afford wood floors. After all, I had stained wood in the past… couldn’t be all that much different right? WRONG!

We knew we had to prep the floor before we stained it. We tried everything we could to get the carpet glue off the slab… even rented one of those massive floor buffing machines with a super scrubber pad on it… nothing worked. The carpet glue would not come up.

Since we couldn’t get the glue off, we decided to do a very thin coating of concrete over the slab. Oh, I forgot to mention, we had already bought 4 gallons of concrete acid stain by this time. The thin coat of concrete went on very well, except that we put it on WAY too wet. This led pit marks in the concrete… at least now we know what we did wrong.

At this point, we were exhausted, frustrated, and almost out of money. Luckily LOWES had a sale on cheap laminate flooring. While still a challenge to install, it turned out pretty good.

The biggest challenge we have right now is time and money… [...]]]> It’s amazing how time flies these days. It seems like just yesterday we were pulling up carpet and trying to make the house at least slightly livable. There is still an insane about of things that we need / want to do to home.

The biggest challenge we have right now is time and money… and the lack of both.

A few of the project we have coming up are a new roof, and new front yard, and much more!

I will do my best to keep this updated. I will try to get some before and after photos of the living room… I know I have them somewhere on one of my hard drives!

While we were very lucky the first time part of the tree fell, we were as lucky this time… but it could have been much worse.

The first part of the tree that fell a while back completely missed the house and just smashed the gate next to it. However, this time, the main [...]]]>

While we were very lucky the first time part of the tree fell, we were as lucky this time… but it could have been much worse.

The first part of the tree that fell a while back completely missed the house and just smashed the gate next to it. However, this time, the main part of the tree hit the house straight on. The first picture show the initial fall of the tree onto the house… it hit the roof over the master bedroom, and luckily didn’t break the sliding glass door. We then started an emergency clear of some of the branches. Working feverishly, we removed some of the branches that were threatening the sliding glass door. Just as we finished doing that, the main part of the trunk that was leaning up against the stump began to shift in a wind gust causing the entire tree to rotate. As you can see in the second picture, this caused the collapse of the deck railing. Luckily, it lifted the mass of the tree up off of the roof… and other then some damages shingles, it looks like no structural damage to the house itself.

We are not sure how we are going to take down the larger branches since they are leaning on the fence and over into the neighbours yard.

While the guest bathroom isn’t totally finished, here are the before and after pictures.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to finish up the our DIY guest bathroom. The problem with this bathroom is that it has the only working shower in the house. Because of this, all [...]]]>

While the guest bathroom isn’t totally finished, here are the before and after pictures.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to finish up the our DIY guest bathroom. The problem with this bathroom is that it has the only working shower in the house. Because of this, all the work we did in the bathroom had to be done in sections that would allow us to be able to take our showers in the morning for work. For example, we used a quick drying tile mortar which allowed us to walk on it after 6 hours. We tried to do the same with the tile grout, however, the only stuff we could find was a resin synthetic grout that allowed you to walk on it after 16 hours. On the bright side, using a synthetic grout, we didn’t have to seal it! That saved a great deal of time.

Here is a breakdown of what we have done to this bathroom:

• Removed old sink (leaked), vanity, toilet (leaked), light fixture (rusted ugly), and vinyl flooring (nasty).
• Removed a 2 foot x 2 foot section of drywall that was covered in mold and replaced it.
• 2 coats of KILZ Primer, 2 color coats of paint.
• Installed tile floor with synthetic grout.
• Installed new pedestal sink and faucet.
• Installed new DUAL FLUSH toilet.
• Installed new light fixture.
• Installed new mirror that tilts.
• Installed new curved shower rod, and “rain” shower head.
• Installed new baseboards.
• Replaced old broken exhaust fan with high efficiency version.
• Installed new digital timer for exhaust fan.
• Replace all electrical outlets and switches along with their face plates.

There are still things that we need to do to finish it up:

• Resurface the Shower/Tub — eventually replace it with tile shower or claw-foot soaking tub when money allows
• Replace the bathroom door, and have it swing into the bathroom instead of out into the hall
• Hang pictures and shelves for towels… so on and so forth…

It has taken a great deal of time and frustration, but we finally have 1 fully functioning bathroom in the house!!!

The trouble with buy a home is that sometimes you find things that are just… well… troublesome. Here is a perfect example… in the “green room” while prepping for painting, we removed the crown molding to find that the original owner had painted over the wallpaper border. We figured that since it was already [...]]]>  

The trouble with buy a home is that sometimes you find things that are just… well… troublesome. Here is a perfect example… in the “green room” while prepping for painting, we removed the crown molding to find that the original owner had painted over the wallpaper border. We figured that since it was already bubbling in areas, it was a good idea to remove the wallpaper and repaint it.

After looking online, I found many tips on how to remove wallpaper that had been painted over. However, after trying some of these suggestions, we found that many of them didn’t actually work very well. So, I figured I would write up a tutorial on how I went about removing it.

NOTE: I want to make one thing clear… this will make a pretty good size mess. You may want to cover any flooring that may be damaged by scraps of wallpaper with paste on it. Also, this does have a possible risk of damage to the wall plaster… while there wasn’t any damage to our walls, every wall is different.

How We Removed Painted Over Wallpaper

THE SUPPLIES:

Most of the supplies and tools I mention here can be found at many local home improvement stores. The tools that we used were purchased at LOWES because it was near us.

1. This is the wallpaper scoring tool. It puts tiny cuts all over the wallpaper so the spray stripper can work it’s magic on the glue.
2. The wallpaper removal spray comes in both a liquid and a gel. I used the liquid stuff… you will use A LOT of this stuff. 
3.  The wallpaper scraper. Any scraper should work, but ours had a wheel on the back to roll against the wall…

THE STEPS: Time to get to work!

1. Get the wallpaper scoring tool and start scoring in a circular motion. You will want to push down pretty hard… Not so hard that they little wheels stop spinning, but hard enough that you get through the layer of paint. You may see little marks in your drywall, but that’s ok… the primer will cover most, if not all the marks.
2. Next we are going to spray on the wallpaper remover. Give everything a pretty good soak. Remember, you have to try to get under the paint and wallpaper to the paste. Read the instructions on your spray to see how long you need to let it do it’s job. The first attempt, we didn’t wait long enough and it was a pain. The second attempt we waited the 15min and it worked much better!
3. After waiting, it’s time to grab the scraper and get to work. This is where my technique differs from others. Try to scrap/peel the TOP layer of the paint/wallpaper off. Don’t worry if you don’t get it all off… All we really want to do is peel off the paint and maybe the color layer of the wallpaper. If it does all come off easy, then that’s great too!
4. Now, pick up the scoring too again and go back over everything you didn’t get off the first time. This time however, you may notice that when scoring, bits of the stuff you couldn’t get off before start to flake off. You may need to CAREFULLY clean the scoring wheels from time to time. Once again, don’t worry too much about putting marks in the drywall because the primer should cover it up.
5.  Just like in Step 2, we are going to spray the wallpaper remover again. Like before, give it a nice soak… and then wait. While you wait, it might be a good idea to get a trash back and clean up some of the larger chunks of wallpaper.
6. Once again, grab the scraper and go at it. You should notice that most, if not all of the wallpaper coming off this time with very little effort. However, there may be little areas here and there that still stick… but should be fairly easy to remove. If after this step, you still have large sections of wallpaper sticking to the wall, repeat the above steps.
7. This might be considered an optional step… but it doesn’t hurt. With a sanding block, quickly sand that areas that were covered in wallpaper.
8. Clean Up – Take a sponge and clean, warm water and wash the walls. This will help remove the wallpaper paste that was left on the walls.
9. Prime! Before you put your final coat of paint on, it’s best to prime all the walls. This will make a BIG difference, and is actually cheaper then having to use 2 coats of your colored paint.

It will take some time and some work, but the results are pretty good. We have primed the green room and should be putting on the color coat of paint this weekend. I’ll post pictures when the paint goes on. If anyone has other tips and suggestions on wallpaper removal, please put them in the comments below.

Well it took a blue moon to make it happen, but we FINALLY closed escrow! The last week has been insane trying to get this thing to fund. It seemed like everyday they needed something else in order to make it happen. The biggest challange was that [...]]]> - Originally Posted Friday, Jan 1st 2010 -

Well it took a blue moon to make it happen, but we FINALLY closed escrow! The last week has been insane trying to get this thing to fund. It seemed like everyday they needed something else in order to make it happen. The biggest challange was that in order for it to fund, we had to get them the documents or whatever BEFORE noon of that day. So we pretty much had a 3 hour window between 9am and noon.

It hasn’t fully sunken in yet that we own a home….. Maybe when we unload all the boxes in the garage….. But first comes the floors.

We started to do some of the things around the house that we wanted to get done before we had to move in. One of the first things we wanted to do was paint the entire house in hopes of removing some of the oder from the previous owners…. who smoked like chimneys.

This [...]]]>

We started to do some of the things around the house that we wanted to get done before we had to move in. One of the first things we wanted to do was paint the entire house in hopes of removing some of the oder from the previous owners…. who smoked like chimneys.

This home has been full of little surprises (not the good kind) that I will get into in later posts. As you can see from the photo, the walls in the family room were just full of color. I have to give the previous owner some credit for experimenting with dark colors… What you can’t see is that around the door frame it’s peeling and you can see the purple paint under it. Needless to say, the entire room is being painted… but not without a nice thick coat of KILZ Stain & Oder Blocking primer. Before we started to prime we of course washed all the walls and the TSP… it was amazing how dirty the walls were.

Some other surprises in this room were:

• There were 3 different types of baseboards running along the bottom of the walls… some were made of wood, some out of particle board, and some out of foam.
• The person who installed the floor boards and the half-round crown molding loved their staple gun and enjoyed cocking WAY too much…
• The big surprise, MOLD was found at the corner of the wall and sliding glass door… where the carpet is peeled back. It looks like when it rains, the run off from the roof hits the patio and splashes back onto the door. This then runs down and seeps in. We are going to have to cut out a 6″ square of dry wall and replace it. You know, to be on the safe side. Also, I’m 95% sure that when we install rain gutters, it will help to eliminate the issue.

More To Come!! 

– Orignally Posted Tuesday Dec. 29th – 

We were suppose to fund yesterday (12/28/09) and close today (12/29/09) but just like everything else in this deal, something got screwed up.

As it turns out, funding is usually done in the morning and has to be done by noon. We get a call from [...]]]>

– Orignally Posted Tuesday Dec. 29th – 

We were suppose to fund yesterday (12/28/09) and close today (12/29/09) but just like everything else in this deal, something got screwed up.

As it turns out, funding is usually done in the morning and has to be done by noon. We get a call from our lender at 2pm yesterday that they were not able to fund due to the fact that the lender could not verify where some of the money that we put in escrow came from. The funny thing is that the money has been sitting in escrow for a couple of weeks… and they are now just finding it?!?!?! Needless to say we are a little pissed off about it…

It gets better….

Turns out that one of the issues is that they can’t fund is because of a 401k issue… Basically, The Other One pulled money from his 401k (EdwardJones) and had them wire the money directly to escrow. Now the lender isn’t sure who EdwardJones is, and was thinking that EdwardJones was a real estate agent at the Other One’s office who gave him the money. So, we had to send in additional statements and paperwork proving that EdwardJones was the investing company for the 401k, and NOT an actual person…

We are still probably not going to fund today… and more info is coming… I’ll try to keep things up to date. All I do know at this point is that we are out of the rental Thursday night… and if this doesn’t close here fast… like it was suppose to on Dec 15th, 18th, 23rd, and 28th…. we are going to be homeless.

– Originally Posted Saturday Dec. 12, 2009 –

Just when we thought we were done the appraisals, here comes the sequel.

It looks like the underwriter for our loan wants to have a field review of the appraisal done on the home. The reason for the field review from the underwriter? “The extreme joy of [...]]]>

– Originally Posted Saturday Dec. 12, 2009 –

Just when we thought we were done the appraisals, here comes the sequel.

It looks like the underwriter for our loan wants to have a field review of the appraisal done on the home. The reason for the field review from the underwriter? “The extreme joy of watching a buyer squirm under the added stress!” Actually, here is the reason from an email we got from the lender… “…a field review of the appraisal will be required due to the high adjustment percentages and lack of comparable properties in similar lot size to the subject property.”

In plain English, there haven’t been any 1,500 square foot homes, on a quarter-acre, in town, with a view sold recently. So, they have nothing to compare the value of the home too. Of course they don’t trust the professional appraiser they sent out to estimate the value of the home at.

To top it off, a field review takes an additional five business days to complete. Mind you, we were all shooting to close the deal on Tuesday… which is the 15th. Our lender however was able to talk the underwriter into doing a desk review instead of a field review. That’s a good thing because a desk review only takes two business days to finish.

All in all, it looks like there is no way possible to close before the 18th…. and looking more and more like we won’t be home for Christmas either.

– Originally Posted Thursday Dec. 10, 2009 –

Where we last left off…

-Name Issue With Escrow: Somewhat fixed with an addendum to the contract. Was signed and sent off this morning.

But that has led to another issue… LOAN DOCs! We can’t go anywhere without the loan docs… They were suppose to be [...]]]>

– Originally Posted Thursday Dec. 10, 2009 –

Where we last left off…

-Name Issue With Escrow:
Somewhat fixed with an addendum to the contract. Was signed and sent off this morning.

But that has led to another issue… LOAN DOCs! We can’t go anywhere without the loan docs… They were suppose to be done on Tuesday and sent to Escrow on Wednesday… HA HA HA HA HA HA! The name issue has put all that fun stuff on hold… joy!

SHOW ME THE MONEY

We all know that it takes a lot of money in fees and what not to close a real estate deal… Because of how close we are to our max $$ wise, The Other One (I haven’t figured out a good name for him yet on here) decided to take some of it out of his 401k to give us a little cushion. The Other One’s boss swore up and down that getting the check to our hot little hands would be quick and easy. So, we asked for the amount to be taken out on Monday (12/07) so we could get the check by Wednesday and overnight it to escrow by Friday… cause you know, we have been shooting to close this whole thing by the 15th of December…. yeah… that’s next Tuesday.

Back to real time, The Other One asked his boss today about the check… and her response to him was “I haven’t ordered it yet.” WHAT THE HECK! You would think that the office manager of a REAL ESTATE company would know the importance of time lines and needing to get funds to escrow… I guess not. So now, I’m going to say the absolute earliest that we are going to be able to get The Other One’s 401k check is Monday… if we are lucky. All the work that both of us do for The Real Estate company, they should just write us a check and say Merry Christmas.

So what was turning out to be a VERY smooth transaction has turned out into this massive mess of crap… right at the end…. on a scale of 1-10 the frustration & stress level is a 14.