Monday Funday at 900 N C St

I was so excited to come home today and see stuff getting done on the house!  



Scraping the paint off the wood siding.


 

Framing for the master bath and other upstairs bath.





HVAC for the upstairs!



Unit on the left is the new upstairs unit and the unit on the right is the existing downstairs unit.

Spent some time today talking with my friend Lori Posey at work.  She and her husband are doing a remodel to her kitchen and showed me her countertop sample and sample wall color.  It was exactly what I had in mind for our kitchen.  It was a green quartz countertop and a creamy yellow wall color.  I want to do this in our kitchen with off white cabinets and stainless appliances.  That's it for today.  Gonna go "try" zumba with Alisha Scarborough.  Hopefully it will go well...

The Money Pit

Everytime we get frustrated with our house we watch The Money Pit, 1986.  It always seems to lighten the mood.  We would watch it now cause we're extremely frustrated, but our TV is broken too.  Nothing seems to be going right today.  Reminds me of the words of Walter Fielding...

"In spite of all the problems...
In spite of the prospect of indentured
servitude for the rest of my life, in debt beyond
my wildest dreams...I love the house."

Lots of surprises

Gary and I went up to the house today and walked through looking at the skeleton of a house.  We took a tape measure and begun to lay out our upstairs baths.  We also noticed a few surprises.  Some were kinda cool, and some were not so pleasant.  We had the old knob and tube wiring (we knew we had this wiring).  And yes, it was still being used up to the beginning of demo.  Well, with all this old wiring we had two in-wall heaters.  Gary and I were deathly afraid to use them, so we disabled them when we bought the house.  Well, our fears were verified today.  Where one of the old heaters was, there was quite a bit of fire damage. 



Our wiring


There was also some termite damage.  That was suspected though.  And some of the studs were not really supporting anything like they should have been, so we will have to do a little extra framing than we thought.  Neither of these are really a big deal.  We had the home treated for termites several years back.




The "floating wall".  It's not connected to anything!

 Our home has had several additions put on in it's almost 120 years.  We were always curious of what order the additions were added.  Today we figured it all out by looking at how they were tied in during construction.  Super cool.  It's like solving a mystery.

The last surprise was kinda cool too.  In our bedroom over the roof trusses we found cedar shakes.  After we got home and looked at the original picture we have of the house we noticed that it did indeed have cedar shake roofing.  We had never noticed that before!


The cedar shakes



The roof in our oldest picture of the house.

Since I had the camera out taking pictures I decided to take a few of our rental house that's 2 blocks away.

The outside of the house



The inside.  (With Gary studying CPA material on the couch)



Downstairs demo

Few quick pictures from today:

Looking in from the back door. 




Second dumpster is almost full



Looking in from the front door

I can't wait for the demo to be done.  I hate to even walk into the house right now with all the particulates floating around.  This weekend/next week Gary and I are going to start picking out vanities, showers, etc so we can layout the bathrooms for the framers as soon as demo is complete. 

Day 1 = destroyed house

Demo day 1!  I can't believe how fast this is happening.  Can't turn back now!  Our entire upstairs was destroyed today. 



This is the view straight forward from the top of the stairs (old bathroom/office)



The master bedroom



The back bedroom and back stairway.



Our contractor, Thomas.



Getting started!!!

Gary and I graduated from Flight School on Thursday (March 10), moved from AL to TN on Friday (March 11), Moved from our house to our rental yesterday (March 12), and have been organizing and unpacking the rental all day today.  Not only have we had a full weekend, we actually lost two hours too.  When we moved from the central time zone on Friday we lost an hour, then last night was daylight savings time so we lost another hour. 

I will post pictures of the rental soon.  Our internet won't be hooked up for another week, so for now we can only get on the internet when we go to wi-fi hotspots. 

Work begins on the house tomorrow!  We have our appraisal at 9am, then we're going to our bank to get a $25,000 cashiers check to pay our contractor and demo starts as soon as the appraiser leaves. 

Everything is working out so great. I love how close our rental is and how smoothly everything is going.  Huge thanks to Kris Shallow for driving from Fort Campbell yesterday to help us move.  We are so blessed with great friends.

Modified Baby Steps

Some of you may have heard of Dave Ramsey or even follow his financial advice.  Gary introduced me to Dave Ramsey back in 2002 when we were dating.  We started following his plan and we even invited him to our wedding in June 2003.  Unfortunately he couldn't make it, but he sent us a wedding gift with a personal letter.  We keep a copy of the baby steps and every time we complete a step we mark it off the list.  Here is our somewhat modified list:

Step 1 1/2 was an Explorer that was the worst vehicle ever.  Even though we paid cash when we bought it, it cost us an arm and a leg monthly to maintain.  Finally it died in Florida and we left it there.  Step 4 is an ongoing step, so we felt we couldn't ever truely mark it off.  Step 5 we marked off when we paid for our college, but it will one day be unmarked when we have children.  Step 6 is where we are now.  Instead of "Pay Off Your Home Early" for us it's "Rebuild Your Home Completely".  Here we go....This shall be fun...   

We found a place to live!!!

We are a week and a half from moving back to TN!  The last couple of days we have been looking for a rental house in LC around our house for us to live in during the remodel.  Yesterday things were not looking so good...  Nothing in the price range or area we wanted and the few that did interest us a little had damage deposits, pet deposits, application fees, etc.  Gary and I feel we've moved past this point in our lives so we weren't interested in paying fees out the whazoo.  After calling numerous places he called the lady that owns the house across the street from ours.  We've met her a couple of times and she's told us she owns numerous rentals in the area.  She wasn't home, and Gary left her a message.

She just called us with something that has just opened up.  And it's literally around the corner from our house!!  It's around 1000 sq feet which is all we need, it has a garage/basement area for storage, and only $575.  No deposits....month to month contract....
Even this little things have worked out perfectly.  Because we know her, she is keeping utilites in her name and we're going to pay her directly for them.  This may not seem like much, but because of it, we don't have to pay all the connection and disconnection fees. 

This is definitely an answer to prayer.  Everything is coming together perfectly.  Hopefully the remodel will be just a smooth.  We can hope right?!

Here's how close it is!  Point A is our house, Point B is our rental house.