House Update

Update: I've changed out the blurry photos for normal ones.

I had Wed., Thurs., Friday off so let me see if I can remember everything that has happened. I blogged on Wed. night so lets start off on Thursday.

Pretty much all day we worked on the bathroom.
We pulled the window out right away (too much wood on it for a by a shower).


And did some more demo.



We initially just thought we'd extend the wall up from where that weird little cove was but then we decided to take the wall out to the next stud. This way we can slide the curtain the full width of the shower and just maybe open it up a little more.
So we took it out.

That is where the wall will be now.

About this time the plumber showed up and put a nice new shower in for us.

He also fixed our leaking pipe and our leaking sink. We are ready to go now!

During the process of tearing stuff out we of course ran across some old insulation.

I freaked out about this because it was so weird looking. Could it be asbestos? I put on a mask and when we uncovered a little more of it we found a label. Balsam-wool.

Hmmm. What's that? What did I do? Of course I googled it.
I found another wonderful blog that talked about it and found out that it is not asbestos. Thank goodness. Gotta love the blogging world. Real information from real people. Here is all the information they learned about it.

Balsam-Wool: Wood pulp - Not asbestos.

After toxic mold in the basement, wondering if the paint chipping in the basement could be lead based, carbon monoxide poisoning (I'll explain later) and asbestos, what else in the world of toxic household items could we come across?

We also had a visit from the Dish man. Yay! We have tv :) We have so many fewer channels than we used to have but oh well, less shows for me to be addicted to I guess.

And the furnace man came to visit. We were just going to have him service it or whatever they do but he said that he could tell it had been under water and there was a crack in it (could leak carbon monoxide) and that it would cost just as much to fix as to buy a new one. So we're also buying a new furnace. Luckily I have a friend who can help us out. It's pretty darn old and the duct cleaning guy said it had a weird filter on it that you can't buy any more anyway.


I also got the rest of this landing torn out.

This was in good shape but we're putting new flooring in these two attached rooms so we're gonna put the matching stuff in here.

Friday Adam went into work so I moved the kitchen stuff and our clothes from the apartment over to the house. I pretty much spent most of the day putting stuff away and organizing the kitchen. I still have some work to do but I'm so happy most of it's in one place again and I can cook.

I also brought Missy to the new house. Poor kitty. She was so scared. Of course she does her little hunter walk/crawl low to the ground and checks things out.

But then she decided she was scared so she went back in her box and hid for a while.

She normally HATES this box by the way.
Then she hid in the pantry cabinet for a while.

Then moved to another cabinet for a couple of hours.

When I finally kicked her out of there she went and hid in the closet for the rest of the day. She finally came out when Adam got home and did some exploring.
I'm happy to report that she now loves her new home and the fact that there is so much trouble to get into once again. She has two spots that I know are going to be her favorite. She can sit on the ledge in the front of the house and watch the world go by and she can lay by the patio door and look out.

With the bathroom being torn out we are going to have to use the downstairs shower. As I've stated before, the basement has issues and is scary. So I went down to spray it with some cleaner. It was at this time that I ..... dropped our camera. :( I put a chip in the lens. Now, I've been wanting a new SLR for some time but it sure would have been nice to wait a little bit since we've spent some money this month on the house and it would have been nice to have the new one before de-commissioning the old one. So going forward all pics are blurry but I took some anyway so you can kinda see the progress. I apologize.
Here's the scary shower.

I just got some stuff sprayed on it but didn't get it scrubbed out yet.

By the end of the day we also had a new window at the house ready to be installed. It's a vinyl double hung with obscured glass that we got for free. Can't beat that. A got the hole cut to size and a new frame built by the end of the night after he got home from work and that is where we stopped for the night.

Saturday I had another wedding cake to make. Of course since I broke my camera I had to take pics on my sisters camera and don't have them yet. I'll get some posted later.

We did get the bed moved right away in the morning and later that night Adam and his dad moved some of the other furniture over from the apartment.
We have our bedroom set up and got to stay in the house on Sat! This is the smallest bedroom but it actually fits everything nicely with quite a bit of room to spare!
King size bed, two nightstands and a dresser (with huge tv on top).


A got new insulation in, the new window in

the framing for the new wall up

and his computer hooked up so he can do some work from home.

Yesterday morning we had a visitor bright and early. A lady who said she was the last person to live in the house and that when she moved out there was a foot of water in the basement. Well that explains the furnace. But a foot of water? There are two drains down there that are working just fine for us. This poor house just needs someone to care about it and fix problems as they arise.

We spent a lot of time on the basement yesterday. I'd no longer classify it as scary. We cleaned out the laundry corner and dried it out. We swept the floors and got a lot of the paint chips out. I scrubbed the shower and sink. They actually cleaned up really nice and we got to use the shower last night and it was just fine.
Before:

After:


Sink Before (you can kinda see it here :) )

After:


Adam also installed some more lighting.

We got the couch moved in. Wow, it's amazing how much you miss a couch when you don't have one. It was a big feat but with the help of a neighbor and taking off a couple of doors we got it in!

I also got the rest of the bathroom stuff organized into the bathroom upstairs so we can use the sink and get ready in there. This is how we're living. Stuff in Sterlite drawers :)


I can say that the house is officially functional for us for now and we are happily living in our new home.

We finally got the backyard mowed down a little.


I'm going to try to borrow a camera tonight so I can retake these pics so you don't have to see everything through beer goggles :)

Closing day!

Today was closing day and we got a lot done.

First off I have to say Congratulations to Tami Sue! You can view her blog off to the right hand side here. She is finally engaged!Future Mrs. Logenhardt...oh wait, sorry. Future Mrs. Logsdon! :) Love Ya!

Yesterday as I had said, Adam took the day off and rented a fogger from Home Depot for our mold issue.

Doesn't he always look so happy to be in my pics?
He fogged twice on top of our already having sprayed it with vinegar the night before. Guess what. No change. Really. No change.
Now, I've always thought it to be a little fun to spray mold with clorox and watch it disappear before my eyes, but none of the website I read said ANYTHING about clorox. Yesterday before we left Adam suggested on top of everything else we've tried, to just spray the bad black mold with clorox. Guess what now folks. Clean as a whistle. Perfect! I don't know why none of the sites I went to said anything about it. Maybe because it's more dangerous? You do really have to be careful when using it. So this morning we got a big ol sprayer out, loaded it up with clorox and attacked the basement. I have to say the basement is looking up.
Before:

Now:


Last night we also took all the wooden articles out of the basement that had been left behind by the previous owners that were now homes to the mold. This helped the basement be less scary also.


This morning we got up bright and early to close on our new house. We're official owners.

Then we came back and got right to work. Adam started laying the flooring in the middle bedroom.

Here's where we are at the end of the day. Sure doesn't seem like we got much done here but it's hard work and there are always lots of distractions.


I spent pretty much the whole first 1/2 of the day in the kitchen scrubbing appliances and putting lining in the cupboards, etc.

We had a visit from Windstream and we now have internet at our fingertips again! :) You have no idea how happy that makes us. We also have a home phone now....although we don't have a phone to hook up so you can't call us yet.

We had a visit from the duct cleaners.

This was an experience. They hook this huge hose up to this huge vacuum in their van and do all sorts of stuff to get all the gunk out. Ours needed it bad. After they got all the gunk out they also fogged the ducts to kill any mold growing in there. I think we are winning this battle :)

We had a visit from the plumber this morning who said he could put a shower in for us and fix the pipe leak so we had to tear out the wall. We also have to tear out that little weird half wall thing in order to use a shower here.


Demo!

This was my afternoon job and I'm still not done.

We breaked for supper and to run the fogger back to Home Depot and to spend more money and we decided to quit for the day. We're pooped.

G'nite.

Mold

I admit it. We have a serious problem. It's mold.

The power to the house was turned on yesterday and when I could finally see the extent of the mold, it was a little scary and I thought "how in the world am I and my little spray bottle of vinegar going to win this war?" Well, the answer is we're not and I'll explain more later.

All I can say is that it's a very good thing that we got into the house early. If this had been left alone for a whole other week with the house locked up it would have been bad. As it was, it had made its way up into the kitchen and latched onto the cabinets already. When I went to the house on Thursday I noticed something on the fronts of the cabinets but I just thought it was something that had dripped down when someone was doing something at the sink. By the time I went back on Saturday it was on most of the fronts of the bottom cabinets. And you can see how it did it.



When you go down to the basement and look straight ahead at the walls you can see how it crawled up from the basement floors to the basement walls and then around up to these walls and then up and into the kitchen.
Like this.


Here is what these walls look like close up


The basement walls, well, they're a totally different beast.



I attacked them with my spray bottle and vinegar just to try and get a start, we set up 2 dehumidifiers and 4 fans to try and dry it out a little, and I encountered a huge scary spider. Yikes. Anyway, we know my vinegar isn't going to do the trick so Adam took today off and is renting a fogger from Home Depot to attack it in a major way. We are going to fog today and then tomorrow we will tear out the effected drywall and fog again.

Here are a couple pics of the basement for a greater understanding.

There is a bathroom down there that at the moment is very scary.





Also because it's so wet down there, paint is coming off the walls and floor. The right kind of paint was obviously not used and so we have to deal with this scene also.



We also found some mold upstairs in the closet on Sunday.

This is after being sprayed a couple of times

This mold however, didn't come from the basement. It came from a leak in the roof. We didn't know exactly where on the roof though so one of us had to go up on the roof with a hose and one up in the attic to find the leak. I chose roof. No idea why. Anyone ever gotten on a roof and not known how to get down? That would be me. It was pretty steep where the ladder was and it had also gotten wet in the process and I was scared I was going to slip trying to get to the ladder. Heart attack time. Needless to say my hubby came to the rescue and I made it to work today. The leak? Oh yeah, back to the leak.
Here's where the water is coming in. The house was added onto and there is an old chimney type thing that water is getting in around. Here is a shot from in the attic.


Like I said the house was added onto so there are sort of 2 roofs on the house.

Interesting.

And we have a couple other places where there is water getting in. This is under a window.


Around the patio door


From the pipe leak behind the tub.


That leaves only one bedroom without any water damage and its of course the smallest one. This one.

It's ready and waiting. I think since we are doing hardwood flooring throughout, this room at this point is the only one we can lay flooring in. This may be our bedroom for a while. Even with this as our bedroom, the dining room as our living room and a full kitchen and bath, it's more space than we're living in now. We'll be just fine :) The awkwardness of living in a renovation in progress house...it's give and take. The house gives you a bedroom w/o water damage? You sleep in it.

Here's the pics of the newly lined pickup.


Ohhh. Ahhhh.

And I leave you with some more mold.