Thursday 20 November 2008 at 2:54 pm
The thing about working on an old house is, sometimes, as hard as you imagine it might be to do something, when you finally get around to figuring out how to do it, you wish it was only as hard to do as you thought it was going to be, not as hard as it turned out to be. If you get my drift.
Seriously, we're making good progress on the house, and yes we've encountered unexpected difficulties (such as the digested remains of termite lunch that were formerly, in their wooden state, a structural part of the upstairs floor) but all in all, despite the pain and suffering and bruised knuckles, we're starting to turn this place into our home. Plus it smells a lot better already.
And, as promised, I'll try to keep you if not up-to-date with photos, at least somewhat informed as to what we've managed to accomplish so far.
UPDATE: NOVEMBER 21 -- Click here for our MOST RECENT PICTURES OF WHAT'S GOING ON AT OUR HOUSE!
Thursday 06 November 2008 at 12:11 pm
As a wise man once said, "Why throw your money away on rent, when you can throw your money away on fixing up your VERY OWN HOUSE?"
The lovely Colyn and I have been happy renters in our cozy little cottage, spending our hard-earned time and money traveling and throwing great parties (hey, I just call 'em as I see 'em), and we've been content to go on like that for ... well, forever, really. I've owned a house before (or co-owned a house before) and frankly, there's a lot to be said for NOT owning a house. Like, when the roof starts leaking (as our rental house did, last winter) you just call your friendly landlord and he ignores the problem, but you don't care, because it's not your house. Works for me, anyway.
But I must admit, there were times I'd wake up on a Saturday morning and go, "I feel like building something today." Nothing practical or useful, I'm sure, maybe just nail a couple of board together ... and while we have a nominal garage-slash-workshop, it's really more of a garage-slash-bunch-of-boxes-and-tools-all-over-the-place-plus-it-leaks-when-it-rains. Also, frankly, I'm getting tired of peeling off the stickers the city keeps putting on the window of my Travelall, "This Abandoned Vehicle Will Be Towed in 48 Hours." The irony is, the Travelall is the one vehicle I parked on the street that is running. So the joke's on them.
Seriously, as much as we love our rental house, it has, in an ironically good way, helped us decide what we want and don't want in a house. And all the things we want -- a larger yard that we can garden, a larger garage to do more real "hands-on" project stuff, a front porch to lounge on in the summer, plenty of room to have even more great parties, a basement for ... well, a basement is just cool.
We weren't even looking around very seriously when we happened across the house that we ultimately and just recently bought, it was just one of those serendipitous things. If you believe in fate, call it fate; anyway, the long and short of it is, we're the new owners of a 1940's-vintage "farm"-style house, and we're very much looking forward to making it our home.
And very realistically, this house is definitely what you might call, a "fixer-upper." Emphasis on the "fixer" part. But we are of hardy stock and where other people see leaky pipes, spider webs, cracked plaster, and six layers of painted wallpaper that need to be removed, we see ... OUR NEW HOME!
And we're not afraid to get our hands dirty, so there's that. Stay tuned for much, much, MUCH more in the days, weeks, and even years to come!
