The house
Escrow closed on April 13, 2005. Its a quaint little bungalow in northern San Jose. Its a 2 bedroom, 2 bath house with a full basement, hot tub, koi pond, a little cottage thing in the back and a pseudo garage. It needs a lot of work but we're up for the challenge. Its next door to my brother and his family. They have a 15 month old son. We'll be swapping babysitting for power tools.
The guy we bought the house from has Alezheimers and his daughters put him in a home and sold us the house. The neighbor says the guy thought of himself as a handyman, although his "improvements" are more like hindrances. We're taking most of them out.
The first order of business is the termite fumigation. That's happening this Friday thru Sunday. So we decided to go to the house yesterday to do some preparation. We are planning to refinish the hardwood that's hiding under the carpet, so we ripped out all the carpet in the whole house. For some reason we thought there might still be chemicals in the carpet if we waited until after the fumigation to take them out. Since we didn't want to inhale any chemicals, we pulled up the carpet first.
The one koi left in the pond was also a concern. We brought a little 5 gallon tank to put the koi into so he won't get gassed either. But we waited a little too long and it was getting dark when we attempted to catch the fish. We gave up. Chris will get it today after work or something.
Some things on our to do list (random order)....
~Rewire the electrical in the whole house (Chris' dad volunteered to tackle that one)
~Paint everything
~Refinish the hardwood
~Replace all light switches and recepticals
~Install a garbage disposal in the kitchen sink
~Tile the kitchen and bathroom floors
~Install smoke detectors
~Install 2nd strap to the water heater
~Repair the chimney
~Change out the blue toilet for a white one
~Install closet rods (it has that wire shelving that's falling apart)
~New kitchen cabinets (4 doors don't match the rest of the cabinets)
~Update the lighting in all rooms
......
And the list goes on.
posted by christopher at 9:33 AM
2 Comments:
Congrats! Thanks for letting me preview the house before you both work your magic on it. I think working on the house is part of the fun of owning it. You can't know down walls when your renting. Hey Melissa, nothing says, "I love you" like power tools. I'm still trying to get Veronica to buy me a chainsaw for my birthday. I think she's afraid that I'll try to saw everything in sight. Like when I found a can of insulation, or when I learned how to use a marble cutter.. or that time ...
Nice little fixer upper. Make sure your foundation doesn't have any cracks. sometimes it settles in time. check for roofing problems, building that time had problems with leakage. Check for dry rot. Just a few things too look out for. If you need help with the manual labor, call me. Congrats on the house. - Glenn
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