Officially Homeowners!

Yay! C&I are officially homeowners. How wonderful it is to have almost $100,000 dollars of debt! Wheee!

Actually, it is. Well, not the debt part, but owning a home. I've already started my first fix-em-up project on my own home! That is a very nice feeling.

It's a two-story townhouse just around the corner from our current house. While both are two-story townhouses, the one we bought is at least 6-8' wider than our current place. It makes quite a difference in what it feels like, and it opens up enough extra room that there are four bedrooms instead of two. Room to grow.

The process had a couple of points where we were about to back out. The biggest issues on the house were the roof leak which caused a massive mold problem in one of the closets, and the HVAC not working. The selling bank (it was a foreclosed property) fixed everything with a bit of prodding, but that was certainly a cause of much concern.

Now, the remaining issues are the bathrooms and a bit o sagging going on. The place has a nice, large bay window in the front of the house, but I suspect that pulling out a chunch of the wall weakened the support and has allowed the house to sag towards the middle. Nobody thought it was dangerous, including the home inspector and a couple other contractors, but it is noticeable if you look carefully. Eventually we want to crank the sagging back up and put in some supports.

That's a much longer-ranged issue though. More immediately concerning us are the bathrooms. The guy who owned it previously was remodeling the house, and got caught by the dropping home prices. Parts of the house are nicely done, and others are still original. One part that was redone was the master bathroom. It's a 3/4 bathroom (a shower instead of a bath), and looks great except for the base of the shower door. He needed to raise the shower door, and so he put in a riser. The riser was slap-dash and has come apart. So I'm re-making that. That's all that needs to be done in there though.

The main bathroom needs more - it's still original, and the caulking around the tub is moldy and dissentigrating. The bathroom tiling is very PINK too - both the tiling around the tub and the tiling on the floor. So, instead of just redoing the cauling around the tub, we're gonig to replace that whole tub area.

So guess what J and I will be doing this Thanksgiving? DEMOLITION!!! W00T!

I'm going to give J a hammer and let him whack away at the tiling while I do the actual work of cutting through the cement board to which the tiling is affixed and yanking it down en toto. Then it'll be time to get some waterproof cement board and a bathtub shell. I'm more concerned about the bathtub shell than the demolition - I can ALWAYS break things, but building things is tougher. Actually, before I let J take a hammer to it, I'm going to have some fun punching holes through myself. I try punching the walls at clogging (lovely rough timber logs) but everyone yells at me. :-( Now I don't have to worry about breaking anything!

C put up a post about our current housing abundance, and it seems to be coming together well enough that it won't be a major wallet-breaking time from now to June.

A definite thing to thank God for!