Our New Old House

Wow. I’m exhausted. It’s been a helluva day.

Left work at 3:00. Brandon got a tetanus shot at 3:45. We met up with our realtor at the mortgage office at 4:30 to do the closing. Our mortgage person said closings usually take 20 minutes to half an hour, but the four of us are chatty people and we were actually there till 6:00!!! It was really fun, we got good information, and ended up with a house!

My mom called while we were there wanting to know when we were going to be at the house and what we wanted for supper. While I drove us back to the east side, Brandon ordered a pizza to be delivered to the new house. We picked up a few things at mom’s and then went over to our new old house. Before long, we received our very first pizza delivery at our new house!

Mom and her boyfriend, Craig, showed up with a pickup truck full of tools.

They took some pictures of us with our new house.

Craig helped Brandon fix the front storm door.

We set up a table in the house and sat down to eat supper.

Then we got to work!

First we pulled up the carpet. The padding underneath the living room/dining room carpet has crystallized under its fabric topside and has adhered lightly (more like crusted itself) to the wood floor underneath. Rather than spend the time to start scraping that mess up today we decided to leave the padding on the floors until the heavy work is done. Free drop cloths! The padding is actually really well intact and doesn’t pose a hazard for tripping over or anything, so it’s kind of a blessing in disguise. The padding in the back bedroom is another story. That carpet had its own padding attached to the back of the carpet. It was foam padding once. Now it is crunchy and brittle and pulverizes into fine yellow dust under our feet. The good news is that it was never tacked or glued down. We just lifted the corners it and folded right over. The bad news is that we were left with a very messy bedroom floor. You can see the back side of that carpet in the third photo here (the one with Brandon standing over the flipped over carpet looking somewhat incredulous.) The last picture in this group is a shot of some of the tack strips my mom tenaciously removed after we got the carpet pulled up.

Then we started pulling down paneling. Whoever installed it had added additional wood trim at the bottom that I had to remove from every wall before we could take down that section of paneling. Brandon said, “I can’t fault them for shoddy work. It was well constructed paneling at least.” I nodded and said, “Uh huh,” as I stuck a wonder bar under the side and wrenched it loose.

Here’s a picture of mom supervising.

I got tired of her staring at me so I turned her to face the wall and carried on with my work.

There was a lot of paneling.

When Brandon removed the paneling over the fireplace he found a big hole in the wall, so naturally I took a bunch of pictures of it. There was insulation inside similar to the kind of insulation in between the joists in the crawlspace in the attic. I have no idea what this material is made of. I don’t know if it’s flammable and whether or not it should be used around fireplaces. If anybody has seen this kind of insulation and knows what it is, please get in touch with me because I have no idea what I’m dealing with here.

Here’s a cool picture of the back of the wall and the chimney. I stuck my camera inside the hole, facing the ceiling, and this is what I got.

We revealed some interesting patterns of wallpaper by uncovering the walls. But what we revealed about the shapes of the painted vs. wallpapered areas has presented more questions than answers. For example, was there a chair rail in the dining room? What was hung over the fireplace that had to be wallpapered around? Same question around the dining room windows. Those areas look like there might have been something decorative or furniture-like attached to the walls there. Furthermore, to the right of the front door in the living room the whole corner was painted white on top of the wall paper. They put a strip of 2 inch wide masking tape on the wallpaper level with the top of the doorway, painted the tape and everything below it white, and left the tape up. I’m wondering if there was maybe a make-shift coat closet built there, but the walls don’t show any evidence of having had anything nailed to them there to hold up the walls. When we reveal the floor completely maybe that will give us a clue.

There were once wall sconces on either side of the dining room windows. Here’s the footprint of one:

Some parting questions for today:

• What is the brown color on the plaster walls? Is that some kind of surfacing material or old fashioned primer/sealer? It was never painted over when first installed and while parts of it have wall paper over it, the wallpaper doesn’t look like it could be original to the house.

• Is it worth it to repair the broken wall over the fireplace or will it keep destabilizing? Should we tear out that section of wall and drywall it?

And here’s the collection of little knick knacks that my mom and I found:

[tags]carpet, chair rail, closets, garbage, paneling, photos, wall sconce, wallpaper[/tags]

And that’s why I love him. 

From a chat with our friend Gianfranco, whose nickname is Pigeon  (Brandon’s nickname is Gamble.): 

Gamble: The APR is way too high, and not fixed.  But I still want one [Brandon types a link to a credit card with an adorable picture of two kitties]
Gamble: you would think that supporting the ASPCA the card would be fixed.  buh-dump-chick
Pigeon: Awww
Gamble: get it?  … “fixed”?  … eh? … come on… nothing?  FINE!  ..nuts to you!  
Pigeon head desks.
Pigeon: but laughs anyway

These people make me smile. 

Brandon’s in the blue trunks, Gianfranco’s in the red. 

Countdown to 4:30 this afternoon!  That’s when we’re meeting at our mortgage originator’s office to sign the closing papers.  I’m still trying to think of a small thank you gift to give to our mortgage originator and our realtor because they’ve both been so extremely helpful in all this and worked their butts off so we could close as quickly as possible.

 So tonight the craziness begins!  I’m so excited. 

Hopefully I will have a special treat for those of you with broadband connections… video of our work!

I can take short movies with my digital camera and in addition to my (almost) daily blog posts with photos, once a week I’ll put up a video post with highlights from the week’s progress.  I fear it’ll end up looking more like a blooper reel, but if it entertains you for a few seconds, then it’s all worthwhile.   

If you’re sick of the lolcats and their Engrish, too bad. I love them and I will emulate them on my blog.  So

 The point is, we have been given an insurance quote by someone who seems reasonably reputable!  So that’s a HUGE load off my mind.

Meanwhile, in all the excitement about the house and construction and everything, Brandon and I totally spaced out that we’re supposed to send a lot of things to our mortgage originator: 2 most recent pay stubs (each), our 2006 W-2′s, and our bank statement.  We were worried at first because most of our important papers are in a filing cabinet in our house in Clear Lake, about a 2 hour drive from here.  We were JUST up there this weekend and didn’t want to have to spend the gas and the time to go up again tonight.  Fortunately, we filed our taxes online and were able to print a copy of our 2006 tax return, which has all the information the lender needs.  Brandon put together an email with the tax return, our bank statement (LOVE online banking), and we’ll be scanning our most recent pay stubs tonight to send by email. 

It feels like life’s putting up hurdles in front of us and we just keep sailing over them.  So far so good.  Four days and counting.

Since I don’t have any progress to tell you about or new pictures to show you, I’ll show you a little collection of photos I took of really old wallpaper in my mom’s house. Her house is in the same neighborhood as mine and was built in 1909. I have no way of knowing when the wallpaper I found was put up, but it’s pretty fun.

I’ll include the medium size photos here, but click on the photos to go to my Flickr page if you want to see larger ones.

In an upstairs bedroom:

On the inside wall of the hall closet, over the door:

In a closet under the stairs that has since been closed off with a built-in dresser and mirror:

More from the same closet:

Another side of the same closet:

More of the same closet:

In another closet in the same bedroom:

I hope you enjoyed our little field trip today!

[tags]closets, wallpaper[/tags]