Fixer Upper Number 3

Remember I posted last summer and mentioned that our house sold?  Well, that post was slightly premature since we ended up waiting five months for the sale to go through.  That waiting period was so hard and we wanted several times to just quit the sale and do a rental instead.  But the sale did finally close the week before Christmas.  We are so thankful! What a wonderful Christmas present for us!
In the meantime, guess what we did? 

Dan started getting antsy about not having a project to do, so he looked for a house online, and found one which we walk thru and I didn't like or think was a good idea.  The next day he called a realtor on another house and he and the realtor walked through that house once.  He came home, told me he thought we should buy it, I agreed without looking at it, and three days later, we owned it! 

 

It had some foundational issues, so Dan did some extensive work digging the foundation clear and basically rebuilding much of it. 

It all happened so fast that I didn't get many pictures taken.  Two days after we made the purchase, Dan had the whole thing re-roofed. 

So there's my exciting bit of news!  Fixer upper Number 3! Who knows what will happen next!?

New paint = 100% better.

Have you ever cringed just walking into a room, seeing the paint color and thought,

"What were they thinking????" 

That was my reaction to first seeing this bedroom in the house we bought. 

Obviously, it was previously a child's bedroom and the child probably picked their favorite colors to put on the walls. 

**As a side note, I've never understood it when parents allow their children to pick paint colors...inevitably, the colors picked would be neon green with hot pink stripes, or some such monstrosity. 

My thoughts are these...if you want your child to have a wacky colored room, fine.  But at LEAST try to paint it well!!!  haha.

I laughed when I saw how poorly it had been painted.  For instance, the paint is like this in the whole room...

 

 

The light switch covers were painted over...

 

In general, it's just hideous in my opinion.  I've been longing to paint over it.  The other week, Dan and I were at Lowes looking for something entirely unrelated, and I said that we should walk by the "oops" paint section and see if they had any clearance paints.  Well, they did in fact have four gallons of similar-looking, nondescript, blueish- greyish paints.  We got them all.    

 

 

 

I started by pulling nails and tacks from the walls, and then sweeping and dusting the place. 

 

Since I can roll paint pretty well from a roller, I did that and Dan did the cutting in with a brush.  He honestly amazes me with how fast and accurate he is- and with no tape at all. 

 

 

I can still see orange, because it's only the first coat.  But to me, the improvement is huge. 

 

Dan did the next room by himself (since its really small and he is super fast).  Yellow isn't a disgusting color or anything, but Lexi (the girl whose bedroom it was previously) wrote threatening messages on the wall to her friends as well as drawing swastika's all over.  We felt that it needed to be covered up.   



 

 

He finished in record time.

 

 

 

While Dan worked on the Yellow room, I went to town on this room, peeling off the numerous stickers on the walls. 

 

Again, why a parent would allow a child to put hundreds and hundreds of round stickers all over their room is beyond me. 

 

 

 

And the finished product. 

 

By the way, we've begun making back part of the money we spent on the paint since I collected $2.31 in pennies and nickels so far in the bedrooms.  Not a bad deal!

 

So the walls might be boring now, but at least they don't hurt my eyes to look at. 

 

😄😄😄

 

 

 

 

Big News!!!!

I have BIG news!  It's late, but I'm posting it anyway.  On the last day in December, Dan and I closed on a house!  We'd been looking at this house for more than a month.  We loved it, and the price was good.  There were a few complications with the many different people involved in the sale of it however.  This house has some history too...

But everything finally worked out and we were able to get it for a little cheaper after finding out that there were quite a few problems with it. 

 

 

 

Both the front door and the back door had been kicked in multiple times, so the very first thing we did was go to Home Depot and get a security door and a set of locks.  

Here are a few pictures (blurry because they are taken with my phone) of the bathroom, hallway and some radiators. 

 

We love this old clawfoot tub, and Dan is in the process of remodeling the entire bathroom right now.  But we have decided to keep the tub because it is so vintage!

 

We had to replace five of the nine radiators in the house.  We finally got them working, the house is warm and there aren't any MAJOR leaks.  We found the major ones the hard way, by trial and error.  We filled the system with water and thennnnn found a HUGE leak in the upstairs bathroom.  The kitchen ceiling was raining!  We (and when I say we, I mean Dan ) fixed that though.   

 

There was a refrigerator left in the kitchen when we bought the house and I told the realtor that I was going to clean it out and see if it worked.  She thought that was disgusting and could hardly believe that I was going to do it.  I spent a whole day cleaning it out (there was old food left in there from the previous year, so you can imagine how gross it was).  When I finished cleaning it, we turned it on, and now we have a refrigerator that was free.  I'm sure eventually we might get a new one, but we can save that money now and use it on fixing the house. 

 

 

We also have a washing machine and a dryer downstairs in the basement that work!  We accidently spilled water pipe glue on the washing machine, so now it is a lovely permanent purple color...

 

This was a picture I took of me "helping" Dan to fix the water pipes in the basement.  All of the copper pipes had been stolen from the house, so he replaced all of them himself.  I'm so proud of my sweet, hardworking fiancé. 

 

Here is another picture of Dan, working on the radiators.

 

So that is my news about the house!  :)

 

Other news is that it snowed a few weeks ago.  I was not really expecting it, so it came as a nice surprise. 

 

It began on Friday at about 3pm and by that evening at 7, I was snowed in.  I made my favorite meal to eat while I was snowed in.  Mashed potatoes, gravy and ground beef....mmmmmm

 

This was on Saturday morning when I woke up.  We had a bit of a break since there was no church on Sunday and no school Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday!  It was like an unexpected spring break. 

 

 

 

SO that is my new news!  :)  There are only 65 days left until my wedding day!