dumpstersee the rainbow?

There are lots of questions I never answered about our house and when we are moving. Here’s what I know:

shutter fail

Our little house was built in 1987ish. It’s a cedar house that has been covered with white siding and weird sized shutters that I cannot wait to remove. I love a white house with no shutters, I love how this feels.

main floor plan

The main floor has a living room/dining room combo, kitchen, hall, master bedroom and an enclosed back porch that now houses the washer and dryer and also has a tiny third bathroom. The square footage of the main floor is about 1279.

master bedroommaster bedroom: someone had a thing for lighthouses

It also has an upstairs with two bedrooms and one bathroom with a square footage of 667. We are downsizing from the rental and I couldn’t be happier about it.

upstairs bedroomboy’s room

There’s also a basement where over half of the space is “finished” which is an insult to all real finished basements everywhere. If every inch of the basement were finished it has the potential to be 430 square feet. The basement in an old garage where a DIYer tried to make into living space. Along the way they removed a load bearing wall or column and now the upstairs rooms all slope the middle of the house. Work starts on the foundation next week.

back porch/mud room

We also have an enclosed porch on the main floor, with wood planked walls. No footings poured for this porch (why?) so it’s slowly sinking and is obvious. You can almost slide down the floor it’s at such a steep angle. Work will start on this porch in a few weeks.

diarrhea poolhave mercy.

So those two issues are at the top of our list for getting fixed. We are also on a well and have some not glamorous or fun things that need to be fixed with that which include a new toilet for the master bath, yippie! And a mineral in our well water that reacts with the pool chemicals and turns it diarrhea brown. Good times.

It’s been great to have a contractor and local engeneer hanging around the house and figuring out the best way to make it sturdy again. I’ll tell you about how it works using them and our experience as that plays out. Meanwhile, promise me you’ll never remove a wall without first finding out from a professional if it’s load bearing. It is SO worth it to get a profession opinion, even if you end up doing the work yourself.

dumpster boys

In other news, we’ve decided to put our boys (6th and 7th and 10th graders) into the local schools. We’ve heard great things, met with the Principal and toured the and it feels right for now. Here’s how we decide about school if you are wondering.

15 year old driver

But, the fact that our boys will start school this Monday demands we make some quick changes. We don’t want to live in our rental and send them to school 5 days a week and hockey practice 2-3 times a week when they are both an hour away from the rental house. It will be much less driving if we live close, in our new house.

But, we have gutted the kitchen and need structural work done and did I mention that Every. Room. In. The. House. Is. Begging. For. My. Attention. So far we’ve moved some mattresses, the desk from my office that we use for a table, and the boy’s furniture.

porch

So, instead of doing normal things first like pressure washing the filthy house or ripping down all that half ripped wallpaper, we are getting the boys rooms move-in-able. Which means removing all of the wallpaper and stickers, a fresh coat of paint and ripping out the pet stained carpet. And then we are getting the World’s Worst Barn floor ready so I can store a bunch of our furniture in there while the house is getting all fixed up. I’d love to do our big move at the end of next week but I’m not holding us to that.

kitchen

We also want to get the kitchen up and running as quickly as possible. Which means it would be really helpful if I could pick out cabinets already. I’m seriously considering Ikea and their sale ends Sunday, STOP THE WORLD.

Since the back porch is safe, just really crooked, the kitchen will get priority. The structural issues in the basement will be addressed now as well. I need that  support for my new stove that I can’t wait to tell you about and to make the kitchen square again so we can install cabinets without them being all wonky because the floor is so crooked.

kitchen guts

So our plan is to “kind of move” a few things this week. But just the boy’s stuff and maybe a sofa and a few other things we need like a grill. We already have an extra mattress there for us as well as my office table that we are using on the porch for an eating table.. Lucky for us we have that big metal shed/barn where we can store all my extra furniture. The contractors have prepared me for dust so I figure it’s better to put the non-essentials across the yard in the barn until the messy work is done. I don’t know if we’ll move the rest of the stuff next week or in three weeks.

We also have a 60 day notice we had to give on our rental–we gave that on August 5, once we knew for SURE we were getting the house so we’ll have to pay for this house through October 5th. So I have a big expensive storage unit in the form of my old house currently housing all of our stuff.

To top it off, no internet yet (we use more than any service can offer, no more Pandora and hulu for us) and we have to change our cell phone provider. It’s crazy town.

And I LOVE that we get to go through all of this.