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millysdaughterIdol 6: You're Gonna Have to Show Me That...
My house is old.
Not "OMG-they-had-shag-carpet!" old, but "there is still some bark on this board" old. Not an antebellum plantation mansion, not a stately Victorian...but a northern plains homestead farmhouse.
Built in 1895 by homesteaders, there were some interesting and "creative" building methods used. Homesteaders on the northern plains did not have the abundant wood that homesteaders enjoyed available further south, so they had to get creative.
No scrap of wood was ever wasted -- we found several places where several boards were nailed together to make a longer board. In fact, one of the joists holding up the second floor started out as a nice solid 2x10. Because it was several feet short of the opposite wall, a 2x4 was nailed onto the joist to complete the span, and the floorboards were then laid atop the joist.
Oopsie.
I can't claim we did not have any warning. We ran into creative challenges from the very moment we opened the door to enter our new house - and the cat ran out. The previous owners had moved out two weeks before our arrival, but they seemed to have forgotten their cat.
We were limited in choices when we first bought our house. Because the internet as we know it today did not exist in 1980, we bought it by mail. We looked through pages and pages of house listings, searching for an assumable mortgage with a payment we could attempt. The real estate guy suggested we check out this one -- it didn't actually fit our price requirements, so we hadn't considered it, but the sellers were running out of time and they needed to sell fast.
He sent us photos. There is an old saying "A picture is worth 1000 words." It is funny how easy it is to lie in a photograph, especially since they had not yet invented photoshop at that time.
The tan living room had a fresh coat paint. It had needed fresh paint to cover up the peeling wallpaper they had scotch-taped back up, but the pictures did not show that part.
The butcher-block kitchen countertops looked nice in the photographs. It turned out that they were cut from the discarded bowling lanes that had been replaced at the bowling alley, and had never been sealed. Anything spilled on the counter went down between the boards into the cabinets below.
We decided we'd spend a few years fixing it up, and then sell this house and find our dream house.
Well....we spent a few years fixing it up. Then we spent a few more years fixing it up. Somehow, there is always "just one more" project to be done...
My house is old.
Not "OMG-they-had-shag-carpet!" old, but "there is still some bark on this board" old. Not an antebellum plantation mansion, not a stately Victorian...but a northern plains homestead farmhouse.
Built in 1895 by homesteaders, there were some interesting and "creative" building methods used. Homesteaders on the northern plains did not have the abundant wood that homesteaders enjoyed available further south, so they had to get creative.
No scrap of wood was ever wasted -- we found several places where several boards were nailed together to make a longer board. In fact, one of the joists holding up the second floor started out as a nice solid 2x10. Because it was several feet short of the opposite wall, a 2x4 was nailed onto the joist to complete the span, and the floorboards were then laid atop the joist.
Oopsie.
I can't claim we did not have any warning. We ran into creative challenges from the very moment we opened the door to enter our new house - and the cat ran out. The previous owners had moved out two weeks before our arrival, but they seemed to have forgotten their cat.
We were limited in choices when we first bought our house. Because the internet as we know it today did not exist in 1980, we bought it by mail. We looked through pages and pages of house listings, searching for an assumable mortgage with a payment we could attempt. The real estate guy suggested we check out this one -- it didn't actually fit our price requirements, so we hadn't considered it, but the sellers were running out of time and they needed to sell fast.
He sent us photos. There is an old saying "A picture is worth 1000 words." It is funny how easy it is to lie in a photograph, especially since they had not yet invented photoshop at that time.
The tan living room had a fresh coat paint. It had needed fresh paint to cover up the peeling wallpaper they had scotch-taped back up, but the pictures did not show that part.
The butcher-block kitchen countertops looked nice in the photographs. It turned out that they were cut from the discarded bowling lanes that had been replaced at the bowling alley, and had never been sealed. Anything spilled on the counter went down between the boards into the cabinets below.
We decided we'd spend a few years fixing it up, and then sell this house and find our dream house.
Well....we spent a few years fixing it up. Then we spent a few more years fixing it up. Somehow, there is always "just one more" project to be done...
