floor plans

It's not every day you look around at 20 houses or so and pick the one that is not inhabitable. It may have a huge yard and loads of potential, it may even have a garage and a full basement. But it does not have safe floors, there are pieces missing, and there is rot. Also, someone decided it would be fun to see how much water a basement can hold.

Truth be told, this isn't our first rodeo. We've successfully moved into two old, dirty, paint-flaky, stinky houses that had lots of potential that we were willing to paint, clean, deodorize and live in. And we did paint, clean, deodorize and live in them, and they turned out great. Nice, even. We just haven't bought one before.

As it turns out we kinda like this sort of thing, and here we are on the verge of something a little bit crazy. We have no idea (really) what we're getting ourselves into. Neither one of us are carpenters (or plumbers or smithies or window replacers or basement fixer-uppers). We've never sanded our own wood floors or tried to replace a door frame. We've painted (a lot) and we have drawn up 37+ floor plans and even created them in SolidWorks in 3D. We've studied hundreds of kitchens and bathrooms and asked questions and put the kitchen where the bathroom is and the bedroom where the other bedroom was.

And we've signed papers. Lots and lots of papers. And it's nearly ours (but not quite yet).

You know what that means: You're about to the join the adventure, too. Because I have a feeling I won't be able to hold back when I get oh-so-excited about finding a salvaged glass door knob to fit the pint-size door upstairs, and I know I'll probably go hog-wild when things get too crazy and the total bill is waaaay more than we expected (it always is).

But  it's nearly ours.

And we have help.




Pretty kitchen photo courtesy of House Beautiful, the others: that's what we're working with. yep. There is the before.... and the wishes for the after.