A Busy Three Weeks

Warning:  prepare for a long post.  It is hard to believe that we have had a house for three whole weeks… yet at the same time, it is hard to believe that so many things could have possibly gone wrong in only three short weeks.  I kept saying to myself and things happened, oh I want to blog about this, or can’t wait to blog that… but alas in the chaos of new homeownership and the sheer ridiculousness of the last few weeks, time got away from me.  So here you are:  the first three weeks of our house…

Within the first week of owning our home we already had a bathroom ripped our and completely replaced.  That will be a whole post in and of itself once we paint.  We have ridiculously ugly before pictures, so I really want to wait until it is actually finished so show the contrast in the after pictures.  In addition to wanting good before/after pictures, there was so much that went wrong with re-modeling that bathroom that it literally HAS to be its own post.  (it was ridiculous… and still is)

Literally the first whole day that we had our house, our bathroom re-model began.  It is good to have a contractor in the family (and yet not good at the same time…again see later post)  We had to be out of our apartment the same week that we moved in.. so as things were being ripped out of the bathroom, our belongings were being moved into rooms.  By the end of the first two weeks, I had just about everything unpacked.  (hey it helps that one of those weeks I was on Christmas Vacation)  It has been fun settling in, unpacking our things, and really making this house feel like a home.  What hasn’t been fun is all of the things that have been going wrong.

We literally haven’t been able to do ANYTHING the easy way. (you will hear more about this in the bathroom post)  The first week we owned our home, we had a sewage back up.  My father-in-law  called a bunch of people and he said the most expensive guy was $800…. the cheapest guy was on his way.  He did the rotorooter.  Apparently he also said that he needed to do this hydrocutting thing or it would get backed up in two weeks.  My father-in-law said we didn’t need it.  Guess what backed up two weeks later :) 

On the same day our sewage backed up… again… we learned that the main pipe that carried water into the house was busted.  :\  You see… we didn’t notice it before because we have been getting an uncharacteristic amount of rain.  We also had this huge trash pile in front of our house… which actually had grown since I took this picture to include all of our torn out bathroom.  So, when the rain stopped we assumed that it was just our trash pile leaking water and that is why our driveway never dried… nope. 

We finally broke down the big screen T.V. and shower stall… and toilets… and all other kinds of debris and put it in the truck to take to the dump, but our mini puddle was still there, and growing.  That was when we could actually see water coming up through it.  Great.  Lan called that Vietnamese plumber that his dad had called and asked him to come out the next day to hydrocut our sewage line, and hopefully fix the guiser that was in the middle of our drive way.  He said “Your Vietnamese, I am Vietnamese, your wife is white, my wife is white, ill work you out a deal, and he did.  He highered five guys for the day and in the pouring rain they cut a like through our driveway, laid a new pipe and re-did the cement.  Fixed in one day :) 

It may not look the most beautiful, but hey it was the cheapest and most permanent solution.  He said that we had a really bad leak.  All of the dirt under our driveway had been washed away so he tried to backfill it with concrete.  He also said to expect our water bill to be $500 or more this month…. yeiks!  glad we got that one fixed.

Here is the kicker… we had just bought a beautiful new fridge that morning.

We had a fridge when we moved in but it was an apartment frig that didn’t have an ice maker.  The house had a water line for one and it kept leaking because it didn’t have anything to be plugged into.  So we decided that with our Christmas money,we would spring for the luxury.  So between the new bathroom, and all of our pipe problems (0h and the frig) we are officially out of our house fixing up budget for the time being. 

Thankfully after all of that chaos, the last week of our vacation was spent cleaning, throwing a New Years Party, and finally enjoying our house.  Our toilets flush wonderfully and we no longer have a puddle in our driveway.  It is such a wonderful feeling to come home from work to our house which is now truly becoming our home (yes, for the first two weeks it was just our house)  I am so excited for all of the DIY projects that we are planning.

We can now safely say:  “We love our home”