As per request

We spent the weekend ripping up old linoleum and carpet from the house. The unfinished softwood floorboards in the living room allow a peak into the basement on the particularly spread out beams. No wonder it costs an arm and a leg to heat in the winter. We priced out shingles for the 2600 sq. ft roof ($2500 materials) and metal roofing ($9500 materials). I hate asphalt shingles, with their crapy lifespan (especially here by the water and heavy wind) and non-environmentally conscious production but I don't think we could afford metal. Sigh.

Since my camera met its demise in Ireland, I have gone without. But I wanted to document the "before", "during" and "after" renovations so I picked up the cheapest digital camera I could on Saturday : a no-name $39 jobby and started snapping away. There is no hand-steadying opton nor flash, so apologies if these are blurry.
A documentation of our decrepit "mansion":

The front (a reminder):


Circular driveway leading to the road and the Bay


View of the house from one end of the driveway


View of the barn from the road

The neighbours. heehee. (Our house is on the right, with realtor sign still up)

View of the Bay from the road (and the front step, though obscured by trees)




The front entry, complete with ornate carpet, exposed ducting and hardwood.


The trash left behind in the front den + gross carpet.



The dart board in the back den (?!?)


The dining room (our pizza), where we tore apart the built-in looking for old treasures. All we found were tacky vinyl placemats with Christmas kittens on them (pictured left corner).


View of the pantry off the kitchen.


Storage behind the kitchen



View from the front porch, out to the barn.

Stairwell to upstairs.

Top of the stairs, looking down the hall.


Nice furniture left behind :)

View from the little room with dresser drawers out onto the barn and driveway.


Second bedroom, sunny window, hardwood floors in decent shape.

Third bedroom, sunny window, vinyl floor in gross shape.

Fourth bedroom with okay hardwood. Pictured through the doorway is one of three large closets, all exterior to the bedrooms.

The tiny room with a balcony, separating the bathroom from the stairwell landing. It will be the upstairs bathroom and laundry once we are done renovating.

View from the balcony, side garden (that is no more, but will be once again) next to the rabbit house (cute rabbits all the time hanging out around here) and the white picket fence (hahaha!!)

Into the dark bathroom (only one in the house). My least favorite place in the house. It does have a nice claw-foot tub though.

Close-up of the outside of the barn. The inside was too dark to photograph, unfortunately.

>

Something Happened...

...when I got a real job. I work the same amount as I did in grad school, but now I feel guilty when I blog at work. And my personal computer (which I use at the apartment to steal wireless internet) has been held hostage by BigBox Store for repair (today ends week 3). Before I was stealing from a big, nebulous funding agency when I goofed at work. Now I'm stealing from my bosses. My feelings are stupid, because I:
1. Still surf as much inane internet content as before
2. Don't log all my hours in an attempt to make up for my non-productiveness.

Bad cycle. Made worse by the weird exception I've made in my head about blogging.

On the other hand, it seems it was only this past Monday where I was able to catch my breath a little. I had traveled to multiple out-of-province conferences and meetings that kept me running, and wore myself out teaching little (and big) kids at two different science outreach camps. I became much more self-reliant at work, and found an increase in requests as a result. Everything culminated in a wedding she-bang for a good friend of mine this past weekend. I was the de-facto wedding-day organizer, stepping in for the bride (as she rushed around town getting hair/nails/pictures done) troubleshooting the flower arrangements, seating, decorations and food preparation. Then I MC'd her reception and made sure nothing went terribly awry during the celebrations. We managed to beat the hurricane headed up the coast by a measly 12 hours- but that was good enough. The 2:30 wedding rehearsal on Friday lead to a fun session of go-carting, lead directly to a massive (and delicious) family BBQ, that lead to staying overnight in her bridal suite (where Queen Elizabeth stayed the year of my birth!), that lead to rushing around in preparation for her afternoon wedding, that then lead into her evening reception meal and finally to an outdoor party where we drank until the wee hours and passed out in a tent. (A soggy tent by the morning).

I woke up on Monday with precious little to do. The wedding was over, the requests from the bosses had been fulfilled in the lab, the house buying ordeal was moving forward and the apartment was clean.

So I rented Season I of Mad Men.

I also borrowed ThisOldHouse magazines from the library. I keep day-dreaming about houses that look like these (which looks just like ours if our front porches were not enclosed):



And of course, thinking how much it will cost. Sigh.

Hubby and I have already narrowed down the style and colour of the new roof, the exact colour of the exterior paint and the types of windows we prefer. So far, the planning has been conflict-free.


Tomorrow morning we do our walk-through for the closing. Our landlord in town was hoping for a months notice, so we will probably stick around the apartment for awhile still. The bulk of our furniture, still in storage, will be moved at a later date. I don't think we will get around to fixing much of the interior until the spring, so we can live in it as it is currently and start building back up our savings account (our bank appraised the hose at 120 K instead of the 130 K we paid - they don't account for the 134 acres of land we also purchased along with the house. As a result, they would only fund 80% of the assessed price and we needed to come up with 8 K extra right quick. It happened but we don't have money for shingles anymore. Boo.)

Off to read about the pros and cons of keeping versus replacing old windows. :)

New Deal

This morning we can to an agreement with the sellers. Our closing will be pushed back to Aug.28th. In the case of a further deadline change, they will knock off our rent price from the asking price. They must pay for the survey-less severing of the land. We will eat the cost of the power being changed (again), the mortgage (which is in repayment for a house we don't own), and the increased legal fees associated with this ridiculousness.

I am still pissed but also want the house. It'll happen eventually.

On the upside we had a lovely dinner last night with young people from the town. The night ended at 1 am, after having consumed some Port while playing cards. I am officially an old person now.

Uh-oh. This week is gonna suck.

Yesterday was supposed to be the closing date for our house. At 4:30 pm, the sellers lawyer send us the official letter of extension, with the points that: they are granted until mid September for a new closing date, we could "rent" the premises starting Aug. 28th for $1 to "accommodate our need to find new living space" (we are on month-to-month lease and were prepared to move out at the end of the month. Our landlord is nice so we can probably extend our stay no problem, but the sellers don't know that), but we would be required to pay an additional $1000 deposit. If we didn't want to wait that long, we could poney up $100 to have the land severed in a non-survey dependent way (even though the original contract stipulates that severing costs are the sellers responsibility).


So basically, even though we are out another months rent (which they didn't offer to pay for) as well as the connection fee for the power bill which had already been changed by 4:30 pm yesterday, they want us to pay $1101 because they weren't ready for the closing when they said they would be ten days ago. And they sent us this at the end of the business day last night.

Fucking wankers. I am super pissed.

My boss is starting to treat me like I know what I'm doing. This is starting to freak me out, as I obviously don't. Her reasoning is that since she is away this week (to another conference in Montreal which she says is very scientifically stimulating. Looks like I went to the wrong one), it will actually be less stressful, as she won't be hovering. But this week we have two high school students who are attending a science camp (that they paid for) and who were assigned to me. My boss informed of this early last week, whereas I was told mid last week. Day one just finished and I'm already beat.

My inbox just chimed-an additional test to be done by weeks end, please.

I guess the bad news is that I'm not going to Sweden anymore...a distinct lack of enthusiasm on my part (it would be a lovely vacation, but of what worth scientifically?? I couldn't justify the expense) and piling bills on my employers end fueled the apathy to get tickets booked. I want to celebrate my friends wedding properly, not be rushed out in time to prepare for a red-eye to London. The good news is that it may have been replaced by a trip to a real science conference in San Diego in October. Both bosses will be teaching, so October is no good for them, and I will be able to follow up on some of the (scarce) science buddies I made in Montreal.

The forever house

After a defeating appointment with a structural engineer last week regarding the little blue bank re-po house in Hometown, we decided that maybe a full-haul renovation for profit was not our first choice anymore. Several factors, most notably the impending changing of seasons, swayed our decision. The other was a visit to an old farmstead about 10 minutes from town centre here in our village. I had just happened upon the listing, as it didn't stand out too much from other listings in price nor scale of home. The thing that almost slipped by was that this house had 135 acres attached to it, which surprisingly was not reflected in the asking price. Thinking it was too good to be true, we visited the exterior this past weekend. Memories dawned on me as I had already visited the house when it was previously occupied by a tenant, and so I knew the place was far from uninhabitable. A further stroll around the grounds yielded discovery after discovery; a charming circular grassy driveway, a lawn surrounded by giant spruce trees and decorated with impressive elms, a creek that runs just behind the house that may be large enough to harness hydro-power (at least for part of the year), multiple out-buildings including a gigantic barn with impressively straight roof lines and tons of old barn beams, a 100-year-old orchard, a blueberry field beyond that, raspberry bushes, a bunny rabbit or two (seriously!) and a peaceful view out the front porch to the Bay. Seriously. So we called up the listing agent, fully expecting a "sorry, just sold it last week, haven't been out to remove the sign yet" (which has happened on three different occasions already) BUT we were in luck. Still for sale. So we called up our realtor and she let us in later that night - basically it is a huge old farmhouse that was built in three stages. The first stage had a front den, formal dining room and kitchen with stairs leading to four bedrooms. This was prior to indoor plumbing, so when that modern luxury was introduced, a second phase was built which created an extra-large kitchen/pantry/sunporch off the existing smaller kitchen, turning it into the formal dining room and creating a front den/back den out of the former dining area and den area. Then upstairs, a walk-through room was added that lead to a small & awkward bathroom. Finally a third phase, which we suspect started out as a stable of some sort, created a further bedroom/storage area at the back. All in all, 2400 square feet, 6 bedroom, 1 bathroom house. About the exact opposite of a tiny 500 square foot home. I suspect there will be some disagreements between my husband and I in the coming months about what should stay and what should go: I would be in favour of sacrificing historical aspects of the house in order to reduce the foorprint into a more liveable (and clean-able!) house. This may include moving the gigantic kitchen back into the smaller room, consistent with original footprint of the house. This would reduce the amount of dens from two to one, and still provide a formal dining room (which I would also prefer to open up to the kitchen as a single flowing room- again, not very historically accurate but more in keeping with our preferred way of living). He would like to keep the first and second phase of the house with minimal re-arrangements (perhaps bringing the upstairs bath to a more central location or adding a half-bath downstairs somewhere).

This of course is all contigent on money. We were able to get the sellers to agree to 130 K instead of 150 K. But the plaster walls, crumbling shingles (overlaid onto old-school cedar shingles), thermal pane windows and oil heating system will all have to go eventually. Hubby and I talked about living in the gigantic house for one season (winter, unfortunately) to decide how best to re-arrange for our lifestyles. I've also been educating myself about the energy rebates for retro-fits, which I notice tend to be much more generous than the incentives offered to new-home builders.

And the bunnies! I'm excited about the land as well. Considering acreage tends to sell for +/- $1000 an acre around here, paying 130K for 135 acres PLUS a useable house is fine by me. I should buy my realtor some flowers. (Update: makes it seem like there will be something seriously flawed with this structure. I'm optimistic though- the listing agent AND the seller are from away...plus my agent is good. That doesn't mean we won't spend an arm and a leg fixing up, but I'm prepared for that part. Especially if the large repairs can be paid for by the savings).

So now the next journey of home-owning will happen: how to transfer our skill set form building
a new house to fixing up an old house. I heart Bob Villa!?!

The front of the house as seen from the drive-way:


The side (creek along the left-hand side of this picture):


Den #2 window


Big "phase two" kitchen:


Den #1 fireplace:


Stairwell:


Massive barn:

Grand Slam

Asking 149 K

We offered 126 K

They countered 138.5 K

We countered 128.5 K

They countered 130 K

WE ACEEPTED!

I'll post the details shortly.

sunshine and lollipops

After a two-day jaunt to my old haunting grounds for a quick conference, I'm back home frantically cleaning to keep two steps (well, okay, one step) ahead of the fruit flies. Its that time of year. The biggest news is that we may have found our "forever house", but I don't want to jinx it until the papers are signed. There have been so many start-and-stops that it is wearing on my nerves. Suffice to say it checks all the boxes, including a tree-lined grassy driveway, acreage, fruit trees and ocean view, within a 10 km radius of town. This is why I like living in a village. We can actually afford this house here, and I'm pretty freaking excited.