Why I love this house...

If our house had cheeks, I'd pinch them like the crazy old Italian lady I truly am. There are so many great things about this house, I just can't wait to bring it back to its former glory.

Doorway between living room and dining room. Before it was painted. I'd like nothing more than to take down all of those sconces and strip the paint off them, but I have no idea how they're stuck to the wall.

The "living room" upstairs. I'm going to use this room as my bedroom since it's so gorgeous. Still have all three of the leaded glass windows!

My view from those windows.

Built-in dresser in the closet.

Awesome coat/shoe closet thingy upstairs.

Door to the downstairs living room from the front door of the house. I can't wait to restore it. Or possibly steal it if my mom doesn't want it.

The house is coming along, we definitely still have a lot to do, so it'll be a hot mess for the next few weeks as we're living and working in there. Luckily, my mom will have two weeks off in the beginning of July to get things done. And I'll be able to do a lot of work in the mornings before I have to go to work in the afternoon.

I'm really over trying to clean these floors though.

Day Whatever, I'm crap at updating...

The last week or so has just been utter madness. The big furniture/appliance move is two days away; my mom doesn't think we're going to have enough help to save this from being a huge back-breaking disaster.

We started pulling up the carpet this week, which was an adventure. The bedrooms didn't have padding down, so the carpet came up pretty easily and we just need to pull up the carpet staples (hate) and clean the floor. But the dining room was a total mess. The padding was stuck down in places so badly we ended up--at the suggestion of a Home Depot employee--covering it in a mixture of fabric softener and water and then scraping it up with a putty knife. The upstairs bedrooms weren't that bad, thankfully, because if I had to get covered in more carpet padding sludge, I think I'd cry.

So now, I'm just going to show some photos, so I don't have to be clever. My brain hurts.

Dining room floor. All of the nasty bits are carpet padding stuck to the floor. Also where the stain had worn off.

Bedroom, post carpet removal.

Bane of my existence. I want to punch these staples in the eye.

I'm going to actually end here and do another post with some of my happy photos from the house.

Days Five and Six...ranty-rant-rant.

If I get another person warning me about how we are moving to such a dangerous area, I'm going to scream. Gee, I thought houses for less than $5000 were available in really nice suburbs all of the time!

I'm really not sure who on my block I'm supposed to fear...the kid across the street who desperately wants to mow our lawn? The older couple next door with a little dog, a swing set in their yard, and a sweet-looking Harley? Or perhaps the daycare down the street? Well, preschoolers are pretty frightening.

I'm getting a little agitated at the people who assume that I'm planning on leaving my doors unlocked, putting my purse full of cash on the windowsill, and prancing down the street in my underwear. We got a security system, we're putting alarms on our cars. I'm being realistic.

The distinction between the "bad" of Detroit and the "good" of the suburbs stopped being 8 Mile Road a looong time ago. If people don't start investing in the city, that blight won't stop at the city limits. The 'burbs will decline and people will just move further out. And eventually, they're going to hit Lake Michigan.

I get it, the big D-word scares people. But you can't tell me that if I moved a mile north, I'd be magically more safe in Warren.

On a happier note, the security system was installed today. And we had a plumber come and look at the pipes in the basement. He made it sound like it'd be a pretty easy job, so I'm hoping the price he quotes won't be a choking hazard.

And I primed most of the second downstairs bedroom. My dopey dog came with me today since our mobile home temperature is pushing triple-digits during the day and she's crated when nobody is home. She christened the floor a bit when she met one of the security installers. Luckily, he was a dog-person, so he was naturally charmed by her goofy demeanor.

More priming tomorrow. We want to be done painting by the end of the weekend so I can start tiling on Monday and Tuesday, my two days off before my schedule changes.

Ugh, apologies for any misspellings or grammatical errors. I'm too exhausted to proofread.

Day Four

The plumbing area of Home Depot is a little terrifying. A giant wall of pipes and fittings of different types and sizes. Luckily, Patrick from DTE Energy told me exactly what I needed so we can eventually get the gas turned on.

A part of the pipe to the dryer got snapped off in a t-valve, so when Patrick turned on the gas, we had a leak. But it's an easy-ish fix though. And I went to Home Depot alone, which meant I was there at least twice as long. I get really unsure when I'm there alone. I look like a frightened kitten. Thankfully, Home Depot has some of the nicest employees who are very helpful despite probably not getting commission.

Day 5 is going to be painting day part one, so I should probably get off my butt and buy the paint so I can start. Day 5 is also security system installation day and plumber estimate number one day. Yay!

Day Three, in which I ponder the former occupants...

Today was cleaning day (part one)...mom tackled the kitchen, which was covered in grease, while I scrubbed the walls of the downstairs bedrooms. This led to me wondering about the former occupants. Were they miners? Industrial Revolution-era factory workers? Did they communicate only using smoke signals?

Before.

After.

Holy carp those were some dirty walls.

My mom also decided that she was thoroughly disgusted with the kitchen cabinets...after we pulled the tile off, we saw that the boards underneath were pretty gross, so we figured we'd replace them and install the new tile counter top over them. But she's pretty much over the entire cabinet structure, which we're pretty certain was original to the house.

Like this, except all naked on top.

I'm all about keeping the historic beauty, but I'm picking my battles. So we've priced new cabinets, not too bad actually, and I'm still going to do black and white tile on the top. Not the awesome little tiles that there were before, but standard 4 1/4" x 4 1/4" because they're much cheaper.

I'm back out at the house at 8am tomorrow to meet with the gas company. Then I'm off to Home Depot to see how much it would cost to rent a paint sprayer. Because even after all of that scrubbing, we definitely need to paint all of the downstairs walls. And that job is going to fall to me. Since we're going to pull the carpets out after we paint, all I'd have to cover are the windows and the outlets.

I'm going to moving things by the car-full all week after tomorrow...that should be fun and exhausting :)

Day One and Two

My first day actually inside the house. Our realtor, Eugene, showed it to my mom and I had peeked in the windows and seen photos to love it just from that. After we did the closing paperwork, we went to the house to put a padlock on it. After the break-in, Eugene put a padlock of his own on the door, so we were swapping it out.

This was also the first time I got to see the damage done by the jerks that busted in. I want to find them and yell at them: "You're contributing to urban blight!"

Anyway, the beautiful tile counter top in the kitchen was broken beyond any probable repair. The bathroom tub was ripped out with such force that the floor boards were broken. My uncle Joe came by to help us evaluate the damage. The bathroom floor was concrete under the tile, so there's no pulling up the entire floor and starting over.

Today, we tore up the rest of the tile counter top and started in on the bathroom. We took down the mirror that was on the wall and found a Coke and Pepsi can behind it, in what used to be the hole for a medicine cabinet. Best before May 1999. Ew.

Uncle Joe looked at our plumbing and may have had a slight panic attack. Our galvanized pipes were corroded so much that we would probably be having water pressure problems. He suggested we find a plumber to just re-do everything in copper. The funny thing is, we probably wouldn't have even noticed that if someone hadn't come in and ganked our stuff.

So here I am, on a Saturday night, doing research on copper vs. pex plumbing, pricing replacement tile for the kitchen counter, and how to repair broken plaster on a ceiling.

We're up tomorrow for some heavy-duty cleaning of the walls and I'll be moving/cleaning for the next week or so before mom and I start in on the heavy things. I also plan to tile the kitchen counter this week.

Mom and I finally decided on who gets which unit. Originally she wanted me to have the downstairs since I can hear better if someone decides to break in (despite the fact that we're having an alarm system installed this week) and my dog has a weak and excitable bladder. But now she's decided that she wants the downstairs so nobody will have to lug her furniture up to the second floor.

So I lost the fireplace, but gained the beautifully sunny windows and the ugly pink tiled bathroom (that'll get pulled out quickly, ew).

Holy crap, homeownership!

all of the days before...

The point of this blog is to chronicle the renovations of a "new" home buyer. I say "new" because the house my mom and I purchased was built in 1928, making it older than both us put together. But I should probably rewind a bit just in case someone who doesn't know me stumbles across this thing.

Last summer my dad passed away, and at 27 years old, having been out from under my moms roof for about nine years, I moved back. I had accumulated a lot of things, including a 60-pound dog who jumps around, steps on your feet, and knocks things over with her tail. So the addition of me, all of my things, and my dog was a bit much for a two bedroom mobile home that already housed my mom and her dog, weighing in at around 50 pounds.

When my mom floated the idea of renting a house to me, I told her that houses in Detroit were going for a few thousand dollars. We went to look at a few and she was sold on the sheer convenience: if we got a house on the east side of Detroit, her commute would go from an hour (longer in the wintertime) to just a few minutes. We would also have a backyard for the dogs and more space for us.

Cut to several months later: we got a realtor (Eugene Love, of Love Realty), looked at probably over 50 houses, made several unsuccessful offers, when we found it. Built in 1928, it was a two unit brick house with beautiful plaster walls, rows of big bright windows, and a large front porch. After a few weeks of being on the edges of our seats, it was ours.

I should probably mention at this point that there are a lot of foreclosures in Detroit. Some are better maintained than others, some are more well secured than others. While our house hadn't been messed with much before we saw it, a week before we closed, someone broke in and stole the kitchen sink and the bathroom tub, toilet and sink. Fun. By this point we had already sold the mobile home, and I was convinced that we could replace these things without too much trouble.

That brings us not-so-swiftly to day one.