Oct
18
2013
That’s our closing date: November 22nd, 2013. The Friday before Thanksgiving. Yes, I know. We’re insane. Did I mention that we’re going to Pennsylvania this year for Thanksgiving? Got to love rotational holidays, they don’t care about huge life changes like moving into your first house! It’s going to be stressful, but we’ll make it work. We’ll get maybe three days or so to settle in before heading to Pennsylvania.
Today we had our home inspection and the inspector found a lot of stuff we didn’t notice. All of the sinks are leaking. There’s water standing in the dish washer and the garbage disposal doesn’t function. The porch they built onto the house is awful, they didn’t pour the concrete over the bricks, so the seal has broken and now the water just runs underneath and into the bottom floor. That’s going to be something we have to fix fairly quickly…
There’s also the huge issue of exposed power wires being near metal siding to the right (pictured above.) The seller will be fixing that as part of our contract. We’ll hopefully get the three windows replaced, the plumbing fixed, and the outside wiring done all on their dime. The rest is up to us. Whew.
The French doors leading out to the deck from the kitchen need replaced as they’re rotting. I won’t cry over this one little bit. I wanted to replace them as soon as I saw them! It’s mostly a faux French door, with only one actual door, the other is a window. I found some much prettier (and cost effective) ones I plan on nestling into that spot.
The deck requires some TLC, as well. The previous owners of this house fancied themselves DIY-ers, but they didn’t have the skill and they were incredibly lazy. Anyone with some sense of construction can glance at this deck and tell you two things: one, it would never pass inspection as there are gaps in the stairs with one side railing (needs both) and two, the deck isn’t supported in the center. Yikes. There needs to be a beam coming down from where the stairs meet the deck itself at the top.
The fencing in the yard makes me want to weep. The old west might be to some people’s fancy, but not mine. Ugh. There’s an entire section missing. You can see it in the shaded area towards the right. The yard is overgrown, overrun with weeds and clover, and just needs completely redone. Should be a fun undertaking. One we’d do come Spring. It’ll have to languish until then! The fencing doesn’t even cover the entire property line, which is just odd.
There’s a lot of work to be done in this house, but it’s kind of exciting. It will take us some time, but we’ll get to mold and shape the house into something we love. I’m sure it’s going to be stressful, though. Home projects are expensive and we’re already being forced to buy a washer and dryer right out of the gate. That’s around $900-1,400 right there. The porch also needs redone ASAP… I don’t even want to estimate the cost of that!
It was kind of weird leaving the house. The next time we see it, we’ll be moving in. We can’t re-enter the property again after this. I’ll be excited to see the fixes. I’m already making a blueprint in Photoshop with an attempt to situate our gigantic couch and bits of furniture. It’s going to be very sparse at first.
The next thirty days are going to prove interesting…