Week One

This is a photo of the family room before we got to it. Nice, huh?

We hired the contractor that James regularly uses. He was between jobs and does great work. He was to start right when the house deal closed - Friday 8/18. That meant I had to shop my head off and make sure he had all the materials in hand that he would need for the first couple of days work.

The first shopping trip was pretty fun. I bought tub surrounds, light fixtures, sheet rock, mud, painting supplies, paint, sinks, faucets, and more. I shopped my head off (carefully tracking how much I spent of course)! Unfortunately half way through Adam's first workday, there was something I'd missed, so he had to run off to the store. I hated that. It meant I hadn't thought through absolutely everything - bad Kat. For the next two weeks while Adam did the bulk of the interior work putting the bathrooms and hardwood floors in, I took multiple trips out each week after work, driving the hour trip (that's with no traffic - one way) out to Port Orchard.

By the end of the week...I'm dead. I think I've worked about 100 hours. I worked all weekend and spent several nights at Home Depot getting more materials and then making the trek out to the house.

Rod has met the neighbors. He thinks George is having an affair with the lady across the street. He went into her house, shut the door, and didn't come out for a long time. Hmmmm. He also tried to convince Adam that the nice big tree in the front of the house was incorrectly planted right on the drain field, while it is obvious that it is not. There's that nice big patch of green grass that denotes the drain field about 15 feet to the East of the tree that is a dead give away. Hah! Take that George. We're not cutting down the tree just cuz you don't like it dropping leaves on your driveway.

Problems. The heaters in the house don't work. Even though my first post on this does mention heat, we didn't know the heaters didn't work until later. We had to get an eletrician in to take a look. There we had our first cost over run. The house has individual wall heaters and none of them worked. I had to fork out about $800 bucks for new heaters and then the cost of the electrician. But I still feel pretty good because our initial estimate included some $$ for major roof repair and it turned out only to need cleaning. So, I think we'll be o.k. Yeah!

We now have a pile of garbage in the front yard that is taller than me. There was still some stuff from the original owners: tv's, chairs, broken toys, dressers, BBQ's, and other junk, plus the original tree trimming and blackberry brambles from our first furious cutting frenzy. Now we've added toilets, shower stalls, sinks, and a tub surround that is sawed in half. Our house is looking just great - kidding. Although Rod did come one day to find a neighbor lady pawing through all the junk. We also kinda had our eye on a bike that was left, but noticed it was missing a day or two later. We're pretty sure it wasn't George though. He seems to be pretty well off and doesn't look like the type to dig through rubbish.