Rental house is DONE!

Well, except for the appliances but there's no big rush right now. But, it's soooo nice to have all that painting, painting and more painting behind us!

We didn't have to do too much work outside this time. (It needs work but later, much later hopefully!)

 There was soooo much junk left on the property, included a truck (broken) muffler left under the house. We made two large trips to the dump - one shortly after we started work and the 2nd one, this weekend. The muffler ran the entire length of my van.

Both bathroom sinks needed to be reseated as they were popping out of the counter and that led to plumbing work below.

The entire inside needed to be painted, we stuck with white throughout the house. One of the renters had left thousands of pin holes in the walls. Dart board or push pins, we're not sure but they're gone now.

This tub was disgusting! But, I finally got it mostly clean.

 In addition to the sink in this bathroom, we had to replace the light fixture.

 The wood floors took a beating from the renters too. I don't know what they kept dragging across the floors and along the walls but this looks better too.

 The sub floor needed to be replaced in the laundry room. It seems like they had a freezer that leaked? Anyhow, we couldn't have a mushy floor so the guys worked hard to tear up what was there and replace a lot of wood below and then covering the entire laundry room and kitchen floor with new linoleum.

 The kitchen was just nasty, dirty. And, they not only ran off with the stove but left a broken dishwasher too. Thanks, renter people!

 They did replace the counters near the stove though. We had to finish them so they'd be easier to clean up after the next renters though.

We couldn't have done all this work without the help of some friends. Thank you Pat & Jan for putting in so many hours in helping us get this ready. It's a good thing I married such a handy guy and we have such handy friends :)

We listed the house on craigslist and had two people interested within the first two hours. When we were working on Saturday, a couple stopped by and fell in love. I think we'll have renters as of April 1st - they put a deposit down anyhow.

Cross your fingers for us!!

Rental house

We keep working, we keep wondering why we keep having more work to do!

I finally figured out to stain the floors. Some of them were a little worn looking but a little bit of stain makes them look so much better.

It took a bit to match the stain to the existing stain but I think we did pretty good. The door and wall stain are the old stuff, the base board is the new stain:

We're really making a lot of progress on the house and expect to get it back on the market soon but we keep finding new things. Like today, we finally figured out why they left the dishwasher behind (they took so many other things including the stove and every single light bulb in the house!) - Yep, the dishwasher is broken. It has a crack near the door and would leak all over the floor. So, we're not sure if it can be fixed or if we just need to replace it.

It was such a beautiful day, I thought I should take advantage of the weather and get some yard work done. So, I raked the back yard. It was pretty thick with leaves and pine straw but it looks like this now:

On top of all that, we had a flat tire on the way to the house this morning. Some days I feel like I'm not sure what I did to deserve my karma that day.

Quiet week at home

Just in case you were wondering, it's been a quiet week here - well, other than too much work. But, that's becoming the norm lately :(

The boys were great at getting their school work done. Franklin is not really thrilled to be writing a paper about Lewis & Clark but, oh well. At least he gets to write it on the computer! Not like when we were growing up and had to hand write everything. ;-) Franklin's cursive writing is beautiful, Patch's is coming along. They're just learning lower case right now, soon to be moving on to upper case letters. Franklin likes being able to sign his name. (Just wait until I start making him write sentences in it! hehe)

A little over a week until the roll out on our new boards at iVillage. I'm keeping my fingers crossed on how smoothly the transition goes. Next week is suppose to be Hell Week so wish me luck!

Sunday is Todd's birthday. He gets to spend most of it working on the rental house. But, we will take some time to celebrate the day he arrived into this crazy world. We don't know what we'd do without him. He's the best husband and father I could hope for! I love you, hunny!!

Another little update...

I didn't get as much done on the house today as I had hoped. I had forgotten that the downstairs rooms needed to be prepped for painting. DYK that taping is the most boring task on the planet? I did take some tape off some of the rooms that I finished yesterday and put some face plates back up. So, tomorrow, I can go work on painting! Hopefully, I'll get the two downstairs bedrooms done and maybe get some of the misses in the stairwell that I noticed today. Maybe I can find that longer stick and get all the way up to the ceiling in the stairwell too!

This Labor Day weekend is really turning into a lot of labor... I did sleep in until almost 8am today! WooHoo!

Anyone know where we can find a cheap replacement range, just let me know!

I'm enjoying finding things on this Mother Earth News website. The boys and I might tackle this giant bubble blowing thing :)

Another house update...

I know these updates thrill you all to death but I'm keeping track of progress so please bear with me. ;-)

We're hoping to get this ready for rental or sale soon! But, there's probably more work that I haven't thought of yet that needs to be done. Todd's been working on some migration thing for work which is taking a lot of his time and he still has school work to do every week. So, he hasn't been able to get over there much this week.

The boys and I got over there a couple of times but I didn't feel like I got a lot done - cleaning mostly. But, yesterday, Franklin & I loaded the mower in the van and headed over in the morning. Between the two of us we were able to get it in and out of the van. :) Franklin is so excited to start his own lawn mowing services and if you have a yard that doesn't have any thick grass, he might be able to do it. He was so tickled to get the mower started on his own. But, that thick grass defeated him. :(

Heck, it's hard for Todd and me to do it! And, I have to get Todd over to do the edging and weed whacking because those tools hate me.

After lunch, I went back over to do some painting. The upstairs is now DONE! I painted a lot of the stairwell but couldn't reach some because I need a bigger stick on the end of the handle. I also painted the dining room! So, now with the egg shell paint, we still have the two downstairs bedrooms, two small hallways downstairs and the living room. In the semi-gloss, we have the two bathrooms (oops - one of those is upstairs but the egg shell painting is done up there!), the kitchen and the laundry room to do. So.... we're making progress.

The boys are doing good. They refound their friends from the other house - Hannah and Harrison,  so they like going over there again. And, Franklin is being a HUGE help! Patch is such a card these days. His favorite game to play at the house is 'you'll never see me again' - where he runs away and then tries to sneak back near you without you seeing him. Not only do I keep seeing him, he expects me to keep feeding him too. ;-)

Oh! The boys are enjoying spelling quizzes on Fridays - Patch wanted to be quizzed almost all day Thursday so that he could get an A++ on Friday after his B last week. Franklin got all of his words right both weeks. Maybe I should go find a 7th grade list for him ;-)

Investment house status

We started painting this weekend! Still have a bit to do but we're making progress. We're painting it almost the exactly same color and it's sort of hard to tell where we've stopped or started. The main difference is that it's CLEAN!

This wall is half painted, can you tell which half?

Did I mention that it looks like they liked to play darts in the upstairs rooms? Without a dart board! We filled in most of those holes. :)

Franklin LOVED helping out. Patch stayed home w/ Jan who we couldn't have done without. She was awesome the way she fed us every time we came home. Thank you Jan!!

Todd and Pat worked awful hard too. Thank you guys for doing all this work! It looks sooooo much better already!

Before..............                                                           After...

It's a little later in the day but the  first picture is honestly YUCKY! The second pic looks so clean. :)

Let's hope my muscles will help me get out of bed in the morning!

Work, work, work

Yesterday, I wrote:

Tomorrow I need to:


vacuum & dust downstairs
clean the bathrooms
mop the floors
start cleaning the carpets

So, I started mopping the floors... I found a couple more fleas :( I have to find out if I can bomb the house again so soon or if there isn't really a point to it yet since eggs will be hatching in a couple days and I should just wait or what. I'd like to get over there this week and work on cleaning the carpets. Then I'll probably put borax down because I know that's a GREAT flea killer :)
 

Todd has a paper he needs to write by next Sunday but he got a great start on getting the floor up in the laundry room that is rotting away. I still don't know how people can live like they were. How do you shower or anything else in bathrooms like they were???

Mopped the dining room floor :)

Does anybody know if these truly are blueberries? They look like blueberries. The bush just seems awful large!

Things to get done...

Today I:

vacuumed the upstairs
dusted the upstairs
vacuumed & dusted the stairwell
swept 4 rooms & the bathrooms & hallways
put lightbulbs in every single light fixture in the house
removed screws, nails or anchors from every single wall in the house

Tomorrow I need to:

vacuum & dust downstairs
clean the bathrooms
mop the floors
start cleaning the carpets

Todd fixed the leaky the faucets, spackled and checked into the flooring that needs to be repaired. We'll have to bomb for fleas for a third time this week but we didn't get bit up today. YAY!

Lots of work ahead but we're thankful that it's not as bad as when we bought the place :)

Investment house

It's time to work on the investment house so we can get it rented or sold soon. For those who don't know, we've had the house with a guy who leases it from us and then rent to owns it with someone who doesn't have great credit and tries to help them get back on their feet. His contract is up so we're done with him and going to try to get this sold or rented on our own.

These last people were pretty strange. They seemed to be great tenants, always paying on time, supposedly fixing things up and I think they're the people that built a very cheapy (but LARGE) shed in the back yard. Last weekend, Todd and our good friend Pat worked hard at getting rid of stuff in the back yard - a lot of scrap metal, a lot of junk they took to the dump, some things for us and them (Pat & Jan) to keep. I wish I had taken a picture of the monkey wrench they found - it was about 4 ft long!

Anyhow, the tenant got into a car accident and the rent started getting delayed and then who knows what happened. The place is FILTHY! I know they had a baby there - child locks on cupboards & drawers, infamil left behind and they might have had an elderly person to care for - special handles were added to the tub and it looks like a chair lift in the stairwell. For some unknown reason, they took almost every light bulb out of the house. What I can't figure out is how they put the covers for the light fixtures back up with all the dust and bugs in tact.

One thing I do know about these people is that every picture they had hanging in the place was straight, there are pencil marks near almost every nail hole to show where level was...

I'm not sure anybody vacuumed there in the last four years or wiped off the splatters on the back of the stove. I guess they just didn't have a MIL to keep them in check.

Did I mention that I think they played darts? Too bad they didn't have a dart board to go with them.

So, anyhow... I'll leave you with some pictures and if you know anybody who wants to move to NE Columbia, let me know!