The Fixer Upper

We move in two days, and I am not even stressed about it. I've finally reached the point where I've sat down and strapped myself in for the ride.  Whee!

 I've brought some before pictures of the house we're moving into this weekend:

The front entryway, in the process of being coated with paint primer.  Terra cotta tile on the floor, 90s sponge-paint job on the walls, in terra cotta over yellow.

Yay, a front door with windows! I've always wanted one of those!

The living room is enormous, with a 12' vaulted ceiling. The fireplace is gas (and needs to be refinished/restored).

The floors here are concrete, once painted blue with a darker blue rag/bag job over it. 

In the next few days (as we move in, hooray?) there's a contractor coming in to replace the flooring in the whole house with a wood-look ceramic tile, in a pale grayish-pine color.

Looking into the dining room from the living room.  There's laminate floor here and in the kitchen, which will also be replaced with the ceramic tile.

A yellow kitchen with a popcorn-encrusted soffit above the upper cabinets. 

The island will be removed by the tile guys; Sylvan and I plan to get a rolling work cart instead, that we can move around as needed.

The stove and fireplace are gas. I haven't cooked with gas since my last apartment, back in '03.  I LOVE cooking with gas!

The sink faucet, sprayer, and disposal were replaced just last week.

Looking through the dining room door at the other end of the kitchen, into a breakfast nook.

Sylvan's bedroom - it's Smurfy!

More painted concrete flooring and popcorn (there's popcorn throughout the house).

My bedroom, with peel-n-stick brick-look floor tile and a decorative wooden shelf across the top of one wall.

CAN you believe this window? I can't think of the name for this type of window (it's not a bay); but I LOVE it! The seat area is 16" wide, and some of the panes are covered with a decorative privacy film.  I can't wait to fill it with plants.

The ceiling fan in my room.  LMAO.  (This was a kid's room, once upon a time).

I am so happy that there are ceiling fans in every room. This is Texas.  The heat does NOT screw around, y'all.

The master bedroom, which will become a shared craft space for Sylvan and I, just like in our current/old house.

Red walls, clean but old carpeting, and some gold wall stenciling.

The master bathroom.  Lavender walls with gold glitter mixed into the paint, pretty vintage-y shell sinks with brand-new faucets...

...and a ginormous walk-in shower with a tiled bench and body sprays. Woohoo!

There are also two closets here, one on either side of the shower. Those will be great craft closets! (I wonder whose will fill up first. I bet it'll be mine - I'm a costumer. I have a LOT of fabric).















As you can see, there's a lot of work to be done here. The new flooring will be going in over the next few days, and we've already begun priming and painting - the whole house needs to be painted from top to bottom.  Those two things will make a huge difference; everything else is small stuff like replacing outlet covers and doorknobs.  Most of the fixtures and about half the appliances have been replaced in the past year, and everything works great.

The next couple of days is going to be all about moving, but after that's done and everybody's toothbrush and underwear are unpacked, I can get back to painting. It's already making a HUGE difference.  I can't wait to see what this house can become! :)

The Final Push

Well, my (old) house is a total war zone right now. You've moved, you know how it is.  Boxes everywhere, nothing on the walls or windows, walls full of spackle and half-painted, and so forth.  The dogs are mostly okay with all the chaos - Daisy's being clingy, but is calm; Shelly's enjoying the ever-expanding empty floor space to lay on. The cats have pretty much lost their collective mind, but, you know, cats. 

I've also been losing my damn mind; though the more information I have, and the more I actually get *done*, the better I feel about everything.  My roomate has been a freaking rockstar throughout all of this. She's handling most of the packing while I tend to repairs and painting; but more than that, she's been a rock and a source of perspective and calm when I've needed it most. She must have the patience of a saint to deal with how nuts things have been with both houses lately.

Most of the house is packed; we're down to just the things we'll use this week.  I've taken off this Friday to do last-minute stuff; the movers are coming at 8am on Saturday.  Eek! 

The new house is kind of in limbo at the moment.  It's empty, and there's someone replacing the flooring in the whole house this week. At some point before Friday, I have to go over there and paint the two small bedrooms - I'd love to have time to paint the entire thing before there's furniture in the way, but I'll have to get to everything else later as I have time.

I also need to stop for five seconds and take some pictures, in both houses.  Hopefully, I'll have some to post here soon.

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The Fun Part (?)

Here's a very rough floorplan of the house we're moving into in a couple of weeks a week and a half:

 

When I say it's a rough floorplan, I mean it's *extremely* rough.  As in, none of the measurements are even remotely correctly sized, but they're at least in the right place with relation to each other.  Later this week I'll be able to get into the house to start cleaning and painting, and I'll get exact measurements then so that I can fix this, and so that I can have a better idea of what's going on here. 

But you get the gist.  It's a big house. There are lots of rooms. When I'm overwhelmed, or when I'm on a break at work and stressing about a house while I'm miles away from being able to do anything about it, I like to play with this and try to figure out where all the furniture will go, what colors to paint the walls, etc. Which, you'd think I'd have that figured out by now, considering that in the next 10 days, I have to:

• finish packing
• finish cleaning out the garage so I can start staging boxes out there to get them out of the house, because I live in a box fort now and I'm tired of tripping over things
• clean two houses
• paint two houses
• finish fixing up the backyard in the old house so that the nice lady who's repairing the back fence next week can do her job
• Oh yeah, and MOVE on the 1st

Rollercoasters and Butts

So far, I've learned two big things about the process of fixing up a house to sell/fixing up a house to move into:

#1 

This process is like a roller coaster.  Everyone says that, and I get it; but I'm actually living it right now, and it's more than the "emotional rollercoaster" that I keep hearing about.  There's:

• waiting in line for hours and hours and hours - when it was just an idea and I wasn't sure if it was actually going to happen or not
• climbing the hill, clicking along on the rails trying to reach the top, getting more and more nervous the closer I get to the drop - *click* omg there's so much to do *click* I have no idea what I'm even doing *click* I can't even *click* what if something horrible happens? *click* can I get this done in time?? *click* where am I going to get the money for ____? *click* 
• reaching the top of the track where you pause for a second and can see for miles - wow, this is really happening! and it's going to be great! just look at it all, isn't it grand? :D
• the descent - HOLY FUCK SLOW DOWN AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!! 

So yeah.

#2 

Deferred maintenance is nobody's friend.  Don't ever do this to yourself again, me.  To be fair to myself, there have been lots of things I should have/could have done to my house years ago but couldn't because I couldn't afford to.  But there are SO many things that I'm killing myself trying to get fixed or completed all at once, as fast as I can, so that I can list/show the house that would have been (1) free and (2) easy/fast to do if I had done them years ago instead of doing the fun stuff first and putting off the tedious stuff I didn't feel like doing at the time.

Complete your projects. Don't half-ass things and make more work for yourself (myself) later!  Always use your whole ass.

So anyway, 

This weekend was awesome.  And by "awesome" I mean that I worked myself to the bone on 3 hours of sleep and pretty much feel like I've been run over by a truck. But I got stuff done!  I cleaned up the backyard and disassembled old garden beds, pruned trees, packed, filled nail holes in walls, installed a new garage door (with the help of a friend, and OMG I am SO thankful he was around! That was HARD!), cleaned and reorganized and packed half the garage.

And there's still SO much to do! ACK!

Damn. If Only We Had A Holocaust Cloak.

When this is all over I'm going to write a beginner's guide to selling a house (as in: written by a beginner who understands exactly nothing. There will be lots of foul language).  I know this must be just one phase of however-many are involved in this process, but right there it seems like there are nothing but questions, and it's eroding my brain tissue as we speak. 

When is my exact move date? 
What if I don't get any offers on the house at all?
How do I balance fixing up two houses when both have time-sensitive issues? 
How do people stay sane throughout all of this? 
In what order do I paint the rooms in the new house?
How do I ask my neighbor politely to put her scary dog away so my contractor can repair the back fence?
WHY IS THERE SO MUCH MATH? 
Should I be keeping count of all of the things I'm signing for, like, posterity, or something?
How much do auto-signers cost, anyway?
How often is too often re: going to the hardware store for "one more thing"?
What's the best way to store all of my receipts so I can track all this stuff later? 
How the fuck do you even organize a side-by-side refrigerator?
Once we get into the castle, how do I find Count Rugen so I may kill him?
Once I kill him, how do I find you again?
Once I find you again, how do we get out?? 

 

 Going to go soothe my soul by looking at pretty paint colors and the Ikea catalog now, bye.

COMING SOON

I keep starting this post and deleting it, because I can never figure out exactly what to say, or how much to say.  So, I'll get right to the point:

I'm selling my house, and moving into a new one.


I'm not going far - I'm not even leaving town. The new place (actually an older house, built in 1984) is about 8 miles to the west of where I live now. A friend owns it, and is moving out of state;  my BFF-roomie and I will be renting the house from her. It's around 100 square feet bigger than my current home, on an enormous corner lot, with 4 bedrooms and 2 full baths, massive mature oak and elm trees, in a vast, tangled neighborhood in a part of south Austin that I absolutely adore and have missed since the last time I lived near there (about 15 years ago).

My friend is moving out next week, and as soon as she's gone, there's a crew coming in to put down new flooring throughout the entire house and replace the siding.  After that, I'll be going in and doing what amounts to a make-ready on the place myself - cleaning, painting walls, some minor repairs that will be easier to do before I move in.  My roommate and I are hoping to move in the last week of September.

That gives me three weeks to get all of our stuff packed and my house prepped to put on the market - lots more cleaning, painting walls, and minor repairs.  Also some major repairs: parts of the back fence are going to be replaced, and I'll be installing a new garage door the first week of October to replace the one I backed into with my car two years ago and couldn't afford to fix until now (oops).

There is SO much to do, and so little time to do it. Thankfully, I have a fantastic realtor, and a bunch of awesomely supportive friends who've volunteered to help out during this whole process.  I'm a bit stressed out (read: running around with my hair on fire 24/7), but the more I get done, and the more I learn about selling a house, the better I feel about the entire thing, and the more excited I get about the move.

I can't wait to have a new house and yard to play with!

I'll be back soon.