Skipping Town

We eagerly saved and planned for this renovation, so there is no point at all in complaining about it. That said, I will, for the record, say this: 1. It is annoying to have to turn off all the lights in the basement whenever I microwave anything so I don't blow a fuse. 2. Having to journey from the basement to the attic--three flights of stairs--every time one of the girls needs to use the bathroom is tedious. 3. It is unpleasant to wash dishes in the laundry sink which is usually filled with dust and paint chips raining down as they work on the kitchen above. 4. It is dusty. 5. It is a sad fact that I actually enjoy eating and (semi-)cooking in our makeshift basement kitchen than I did in our "real," now-demolished kitchen. That is all.

A post by our guest blogger, Andrew In February, 2012, Margo and I went to visit our first house with our new realtor Maggie in Maplewood. We had taken a few trips out by ourselves and gone to some open houses, but this was the first time we were really serious about things. We’d looked online and emailed  Maggie a few listings that had caught our attention. At the very end of that first email we included a link to a house that was well over our budget and that appeared to need a ton of work. But it was charming and old with lots of character -- all things Margo and I prize above most everything else when it comes to houses -- and so we wanted to see it. I included a comment to Maggie that said “Way over budget, but this may be our dream house.” When we arrived out in Maplewood, it was the first house on the tour. “Let’s see if we can get you the dream,” Maggie said. We pulled up outside the house for the first time, and somewhere deep inside us, both Margo and I knew we...

Our house has a lot of space. Much of the space, like the uninsulated sleeping porch and wood-walled room in the attic, is only somewhat useable. The “rec room” in the basement, though a large, appealing extra space, has been completely unusable for various reasons, namely crumbling asbestos tiles and all around dismalness. Itching for another DIY, and needing some runaround space for the girls during the winter, we decided to tackle this room as our next project last month. Painting the wood paneling and the ceiling was pretty easy. We also painted the bureau thing that covers up the water and gas meters, which stick out of the wall. But then we had to address the asbestos-tiled floor. First, we talked ourselves into just carpeting or tiling over it. But some research led us to believe that this wasn’t the safest choice, since many of the tiles were already broken. Andrew sent a sample away for testing, and the asbestos was confirmed. So we decided we had to have the tiles profess...

When we moved in, our house was pretty much left as nice as it could be. Everything was freshly painted, and the wood floors had been refinished. There wasn’t much the sellers could do about the ancient kitchen or second-floor bathroom, which need to be gutted. But you got the sense that they’d done what they could to make this house appealing to people like us—ready to fall in love with a real gem of a home, and willing to put in some work. Then…you get to the attic. There, you get the sense that the sellers just threw up their hands and prayed the rest of the house would carry its deadweight. The attic is kind of a mess. There’s one really great wooden room, billed as a bedroom and ideal for an office or playroom someday, once it gets insulated. There’s a large raw storage space. There’s also a guest bedroom and guest bathroom, and it’s in these rooms that Rochester would have found ample comfort for his insane wife. The guest bedroom is a DIY project for another time, so I’l...

We have no DIY experience. We own a small toolset, a drill with a cord, and a cordless drill. That’s it. Our house came with an elaborate workbench in the basement, along with a large selection of nails, bolts, and other misc., but it has yet to be used for anything but piling things on top of. I say all this by way of introducing the next few posts I’ll write here, highlighting the DIY projects we’ve completed so far. I’ve taken lots of before-and-after pictures, but I haven’t yet put them together. So, here we go, with DIY #1: The Sleeping Porch, which we undertook at the end of the summer. “I didn’t expect this part to be so…difficult.” If we’d been featured on the HGTV show Renovation Realities, this comment from Andrew would have flashed onto the screen, immediately after an arresting image: Andrew and me in our painting clothes, winter scarves tied tightly around our mouths and noses, the “sleeping porch” we were attempting to renovate barely visible in a swirl of whi...