Prep Work

The first weekend we had the house, my mom and I worked inside cleaning every inch of the house. Because it hasn't been lived in for six months, there were cobwebs and dead spiders everywhere. Also, it appears that the people who lived there before never really cleaned anything thoroughly (example: there was grease on the cabinets near the stove. ew.). I cleaned the inside and outside of all the windows, vacuumed around the edges of the room (floor and ceiling), washed all the trim and other woodwork in the house, and cleaned the walls in preparation for painting. I am so thankful for our lovely shopvac! My mom was a great help as she was able to clean the kitchen and bathroom cabinets, as well as get the wallpaper border off in the laundry room.

Before

After

I was also able to pull everything off the walls - things like leftover nails, window treatments, the shelving that was left on the bedroom walls, and the horrible awful chair rail that was in the dining room (soon to be office). This made the house look so much more like ours and less like an abandoned building!

Due to the delay in actually owning the house, we will have to work on the house every spare minute once we close (again). Our goals before moving in are to patch walls and paint the ceilings and walls. Obviously we won't be able to get every room done before carpet and appliances go in and before we actually move, so we've prioritized certain rooms. We are definitely getting antsy to move. We've done some packing at the apartment. I am really looking forward to having rooms with a color other than brown on the walls.

Here We Go Again

Well, nothing is ever easy. Especially when dealing with the government. I haven't posted recently because we haven't been doing anything at the house. And that's because, even though we closed once, we need to close again. A slight change (that, by the way, is in the VA's favor) needs to be reflected in the paperwork in a particular way for the VA to accept everything. So, we are set to close again on May 10th. Hopefully they can work through their incompetence by then and everything goes through as it should.

In the meantime, we've gotten appliances ordered, carpet picked out, and I've ordered some tools. We also have paint samples, but haven't gotten a chance to put any paint on the walls yet, so that one's still pretty up in the air.

We'll be sure to post again once all this get sorted out, but for now I leave you with a comic from the wonderful XKCD. Enjoy!

#905 - Homeownership

One Weekend Down

Nothing quite like a major structural project to start things off...

We knew up front that there were some issues with the bonus room above the garage, but we weren't exactly sure what was going on. Luckily for us, Leslie's father has a lot of experience with seemingly every aspect of home improvement and he was willing to come down and help us. Leslie's mother also came down to help Leslie clean the house.

The only real indicators of the issue were a crack running diagonally from one of the corners of the window in the bonus room and what appeared to be a sagging floor as visible from below in the garage. Our guess was that the bonus room may have been added above the garage after the home was constructed, which could be an issue if the framing wasn't sized to support a living space like that. Well, luckily that guess was wrong.

We started by digging into the wall where the beam is housed above the two-bay garage door. It quickly became apparent that there was an issue with water coming in. The beam was soaked through and rotting - never a good sign. We then proceeded to strip the siding off the front of the house to find the source of the problem. There were a few different places with issues, but it basically came down to poor water management. A lack of flashing here, a gap in the channel here... things like that. We did our best to seal everything up with urethane foam and caulk and will be sure to do a better job than they did at the bottom of the siding above the garage door when we replace all that.

Taking the House Apart

Water Damage

We may have found the problem and done some patching, but the damage that had already been done still needs to be corrected. The water had damaged the Glulam beam and caused the floor above it to sink by a few inches in the middle. Our plan is to jack up the floor with temporary supports, cut out the old beam, and replace it with a new one. We began this process and have the temporary supports in place and are slowly (but not too slowly) raising the floor. We first cut holes in the ceiling to expose a few of the floor joists, then attached some 2x4s to the joists to hold the temporary beam in place while we got the jacks under it. I'm now raising those jacks up a little bit at a time to get the floor to where it needs to be.

Temporary Beam Supports

Ready to Install the Jacks

Raise the Roof!

The good news is that, as I said earlier, our original guess as to the issue being the framing for the second floor was incorrect. During our investigation we discovered that the beam was adequate (before being damaged, obviously) and that the joists were correctly sized (2x10s @ 12" OC). This means that the beam, although it is a lot of work, is our worry and not the entire floor structure. So at least that came out well. Also, the whole process went pretty smoothly without any real setbacks (like dropping the beam on someone's head or the whole garage collapsing). All in all, not a bad start to things.

Closing Time

No, I don't mean that in a Semisonic kind of way. We're closing on the house on Friday! Plus Leslie started her new job today! A very exciting week for us to be sure.

Here's a quick look at the place. Leslie's parents are coming down this weekend to start helping us with the house as there are some issues with the room above the garage that need to be addressed ASAP.

That's all for now, but I'm sure we'll have lots more to post after this weekend.