A to Z Challenge - H

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H...        Home

For those of you who are new to my blog, I recently bought my first home. My fiance (now husband) and I got the opportunity to buy his great-aunt's home as she was in need of more daily care than she could get alone.  So, we bought the home and provided her with some income. Good deal for all...

Or so we thought!

We moved in prior to the paperwork officially going through because it was a family deal and could, and also we had to rent our existing condo to ensure the mortgage.   

Being a bit more anal than my fiance, I demanded we get a home inspection and low-and-behold the house needed "some work" (above and beyond the obvious pea-green rug, wallpaper, and tacky plastic-aqua counter-top issues).  


Peeling paint (bad paint job with no primer), the roof "dipping" a bit (due to broken rafters holding it up), electrical systems that needed upgrade, leaking plumbing, a disgusting carpenter ant problem (ick!), and then we discovered a huge whole in the porch floor...WTH?!?! 

Can you say Money Pit?

We spent weeks freaking out about whether the house was worth it. It is a really small, neglected, dated interior, ranch on a teeny-tiny piece of land...on a quiet dead-end street in a very, very nice neighborhood, less than two blocks from a gorgeous lake and a beautiful downtown area, with a fireplace (that had actually never been used), and beautiful woodwork - all a short drive from Boston.  Ugh...what to do?!


Eventually, we worked out a deal that would benefit everyone.  The house stayed in the family, but we are actually able to afford to fix the thing, and the deal went through. 

As this was being processed, I broke my foot! My fiance got unmotivated and nothing got done until almost the end of last the summer. Then, his buddy (read "Godsend") and he spent several weekends fixing the roof, fixing the porch which had not been waterproofed and was just rotting beneath us (and which we discovered was the source of the ant problem), and patching the paint to just make it through the winter.


As spring approaches, we have a lot of work ahead of us! But the work we will do this spring will actually be visual and obvious - outdoor paint job and some much needed gardening (curb appeal), indoor painting and "vomit-rug" removal, replacing the nasty kitchen linoleum with something new and clean. These changes will really make it begin to feel like our own home... 

I am actually getting excited, kind of.

I guess you're just going to have to come back to see the "after pictures" later this summer!