Tuesday, February 28, 2012

My House Might Kill Me

Because having a newborn on top of my usual hectic schedule left me with too much time in my day, we decided to move in the middle of all of this. And not just move, but buy a house that needed to be renovated. We roll hard.

We've always bought new houses in the past, so this was an adventure for us. Did I say 'adventure?' I meant 'soul-sucking nightmare.' The prior owners seemed to have (A) never cleaned anything ever, ever, ever, (B) had daily mixed martial arts fights in every room, and (C) painted every wall to look like a circus tent on acid. I don't want to give too much detail on the house because we found a bunch of Twilight paraphernalia squirreled away in the most unusual places and I fear the prior owners read this blog. The last thing I need is for me to talk shit about someone who knows where I live. That whore Jenny Jerkface excluded.

A few weeks after being cut open and having a person removed from me, I was at the new house (with a lovely case of the flu) gathering trash, priming walls, beating down cobwebs the size of Rhode Island, and coughing up a lung. I've taken to watching old episodes of Hoarders to see if my house was ever featured. We paid a professional to remove all the trash (and I can assure you this was NOT another man's treasure) and it took his crew three trips. The garage was waist-deep with just stuff from the attic.

 
Not my house, but every room looked similar to this. Coincidentally, this is exactly what the inside of my stomach looks like. (Whataburger and Shipleys? These peeps are totally from The South.)

We cleaned up some of the overgrown yard (Seriously, nature had reclaimed this place.) and found a wheelbarrow in the weeds. A motherfucking wheelbarrow! Every time we would think we had a handle on the trash, we'd open another closet or cabinet and find more. I swear it was reproducing in the dark. The kitchen was a whole new level of OHMAHGAWD!  Literally hundreds of magazines were squirreled away in the cabinets. Did you know Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston divorced? If not, I can lend you some tabloids and you can read about it like it's 2005. Better yet, if you're worried about Y2K, I can hook you up with some handy preparedness articles. Now I just feel stupid for keeping plates and glasses in the cabinets all these years.

 This is pretty much what my kitchen looked like after I cleared out all the cabinets, except with a few inches of dust on top. *wheeze*

I seriously can not talk about the master bath. I'll just say that I have used an entire bottle each of Soft Scrub, Comet, and Kaboom in the shower and it's still pretty frightening in there. We've had a ton of work done on the house, but there's still so much left to do. I think we've single-handedly bumped a couple of plumbers and electricians into a higher tax bracket.

We're still not done unpacking because we have to demolish part of each room, decontaminate it, and paint it before we can use it. I feel a little bit like the canary in the coal mines and I keep expecting to kick the bucket any day now. Speaking of kicking the bucket, my washer and dryer did.  Yay me! Money that was set aside to replace kitchen appliances went into buying a shiny new washer and dryer. It was either that or trade in my La Perla panties for Brawny and Scotch tape. I really considered going with the latter, but I have three other people in the house and one of them spends most of their day peeing, pooping, and spitting up. But enough about Mr. TK.


These are all attributes I admire in a good pair of underpants. 

If I don't knock down this house in a fit of rage one day, these little bastards will. Meet the new cats we adopted.

She doesn't come out much, so this is the best photo I could get. This is Echo. In the background is the leather bean bag she peed on. Could've done without that. 


This is Persephone. They are named after a goddess and a nymph, but they are bitches. Bitches who owe us a couch now. And a bean bag.

I really do like the house and it will be beautiful when we finish renovating it. I just hope I can survive the renovation. Please make me feel better and tell me you have similar housing stories. Please.

23 comments:

  1. 8 hours in 1 corner cleaning God Knows what off the wall and floor of a house that the previous owner had lived in for over 60 years. And I totally relate to the book pic. Luckily this was not my house, so I just was in charge of the corner and helping haul the National Geographics and Readers Digests out. However, I was reading them as I went. LOL! Hence the 8 hours in the corner??

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    1. If you subscribe to National Geographic or Readers Digest, are you legally obligated to keep every issue? Because it seems like those are hoarders staples.

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  2. All I can say is, more power to you kid.

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  3. first day in brand new freshly built house, i go to do a load of towles,because i had not had a chance to do them before we left our apt, five minutes after i put them in and leave room my daughter comes in our bedroom and says the hall, living room ,her bathroom and some of her bedroom floor are sopping wet........the fucktard people who put the washer in had forgot to hook the hose up!!!!! needless to say they had to tear out all my carpet over the next 2 days. and they put crappy replacement carpet down . hated that house from then on,.....oh did i mention i am MAJOR superstitious and we closed on the house on FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH!!!!! yaeh it was all down hill after that!!!!!!

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    1. That sounds lovely. That house would have been dead to me too. The dryer vent didn't get hooked up in our last house & it's a wonder we're not all dead. We lived there for 3 years and had no idea.

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  4. Good luck with the money pit ;)

    Just hire the Brawny man to come and clean the rest... sounds like Momma needs some rest!

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  5. My first thought was "How the fuck did TK get pictures of my house?" But when you said What-a-burger, I realized it couldn't be mine. We don't have good eatin' like that around here!

    Actually, my place doesn't look quite this bad, so Ima walk away proud that I'm not THE WORST housekeeper/hoarder around.

    Oh. And for that bathroom, get one of those pump-up pressurized sprayer/applicators from the garden store and fill it with (as much) bleach (as you can stand) and water. That's the ticket!

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    1. That's actually not a bad idea. We plan to gut the bathroom eventually, but it's going to be a few years before we have time and money to get to that. I'll mail you some Whataburger.

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  6. I'm with Dangrdafne - WOW. The fact that you adopted cats - not one cat, but multiple cats! - on top of everything else? I FLOVE YOU. And you are mad - MAD I say! xoxo

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  7. Wow, are you sure you aren't me 10 years ago? When I had a 17 month old child and was 8+ months pregnant we moved into a dump. When my water broke at 2am I had to scream at my husband to get out of bed and bring a flashlight to make sure it wasn't blood (no lights in the 1/2 renovated bathroom). When I got back from the hospital (post cutting) we had carpet but no pad in some rooms and unfinished concrete in others. You seem a bit more adventurous though adding the cats. We waited a few years to do that.

    By the way... has anyone told you it gets better? It does, I swear!

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    1. Oh my. I don't even have words for that awfulness.

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  8. Woman, you are crazy. Like you didn't already have enough mouths to feed? Those cats are cute though. I have a soft spot for fat cats.

    I've done a house renovation and am about to undertake moving with an eight month old, but that's not even close to what you've done. Is baby TK getting drunk nightly? I wouldn't blame you for ordering wine by the case at this point. Just remember, pump and dump.

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  9. You think that's bad? Try living in a house with peanut butter face prints on the window, torn up tax papers thanks to your eleven year old, and a son who's obsessed with dumping liquid from one cup to another. No shit, he really does that! It's like living with Tom Cruise in Coctail.

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  10. That does not sound fun. Back before I was married, I bought a really old house that had been rented to students. My bf (now dh), his brother and I renovated that thing. It took forever. Just the trash in the kitchen took at least 10 bags. It was disgusting. I remember trying to clean the linoleum floor and it just ended up sticky like fly paper. Your feet actually stuck. The refrigerator was black inside plus the renters let their cats use the basement as a giant litter box. Disgusting. Anyway, it took a really long time but we survived. I moved (into another semi fixer upper) with a 3 yr old and a 1 yr old and that wasn't fun so I definitely sympathize with you for the plight you find yourself in. Just remember, someday you'll look back and laugh!

    We're renovating our kitchen right now which has turned into a really giant deal. Basically half of our house is unusable and all of the furniture, etc is wedged into two rooms. My "kitchen" is in the basement...which is not finished and is basically a dirty 100 year old basement. We are into week 4 and I'm ready to scream. We also only have two electrical outlets down there too. Makes it fun to cook trying to figure out how many things you can plug in without tripping the power strip. (The answer is 2 most of the time)

    Good luck with all of this. You will survive and you'll have great stories to tell (and a lovely house). And just think, little TK won't even remember any of it.

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  11. Two adopted cats and a new baby. I am going to call the Pope and get you on the list for Sainthood. Seriously, that is impressive.

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  12. Holy Shit Woman!
    I bow down to your bravery. We went with a three year old house, it's been six months since we moved in and I'm still not totally unpacked.
    I couldn't do it.
    Although my sewing room is starting to look like a horders episode.

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  13. Mine isn't NEARLY that bad, but know I has a sad for you and hope things turn around soon. I have a puppy, she just turned a year old. She's a shar pei mix and is wrinkly and adorable. What is NOT adorable would be that I must now re-floor my dining room, living room and POSSIBLY bedroom because she apparently enjoys RIPPING carpet up. She started with tiny little holes where she picked at the fibers enough to make it bare. Last week she insisted we no longer NEEDED any in the dining room, SO she took a corner and ripped it back about a foot and a half. Did you know there's foam under carpet? I do now. . . *Headdesk* does anyone know a cheap floor company? Preferably in wood floors? In Michigan!?!? Oy!!

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  14. TK, this house is a little too much what my house was like when we bought it....my house was actually unlivable....so full of crap and it had major plumbing issues. We found uncashed checks in the kitchen cupboards and a cereal box from the 60s...I kid you not. There was also some unopened canned salmon in the fridge that was like 20 years old. Nearly 16 years later it is still not done...that's what it's like to be married to your contractor. My youngest grew up in a major construction zone as we decided to tear our roof off and add a second story about 6 weeks before she was due to be born. It is still a wonder to me that she did not swallow a nail or a staple in her crawling months. She did, however, eat some gypsum from some wallboard. When I called Poison Control they said they had never heard of that happening. Since she seemed fine, and by all accounts gypsum is a naturally occurring product, we sat and waited...I am happy to say she is a snarky, thriving, nearly 7 year old today.

    Congrats on the house...and the cats...but most of all on baby TK. It will all be worth it someday...at least that is what I keep telling myself. ;-)

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  15. I'm 10 years into a renovation that's still not done. We just ripped up the bathroom floor a couple weeks ago with the intention of gutting the whole thing and starting from scratch. We got as far as the floor. Now I'm looking at a half crappy hardwood/half crappy pine plank floor that I don't even want to touch with bare feet. My house will never be finished. EVER. That's the downfall to having a fix-it handy guy for a husband. Sometimes they get to a point in a project where they think "that's good enough" and they never return to it. I JUST WANT THE FUCKING TRIM IN MY KITCHEN FINISHED!!!!! No, I'm not bitter. At all.

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  16. I went through a similar experience which I swear has left me with post traumatic stress disorder! We moved into a brand new house literally 14 days before I also had a person surgically removed from me, not to mention battling a cold / flu from hell while "glowing" through the last couple weeks of pregnancy. Did I mention we had a 5 yr old who was NOT looking forward to being a "big sybling" AND my mother (completely co-dependant but that's a WHOLE nother saga) AND my 88 yr old grandmother who'd been living with us for about 2 months after relocating from her birthplace and leaving behind the family she had left... Did I leave out the part about said "new house" had a butt-load of issues which needed addressing / fixing / redoing by the builder... if you've never experienced the potential joy of moving into a new home let me share with you my aversion to blue tape - we were told to "simply place a piece of blue tape on the item or area which needed to be addressed by the builder" WTHell!? I will never see blue tape without suffering flashbacks! (Did I mention it was our first two-story home AND since the one and only downstairs bathroom some how sprung a leak and some what flooded the one and only downstairs bedroom I was forced to ascend the stairs - oh and I was only three days post c-section?) Needless to say, I feel your pain!

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  17. I was ready to shoot myself (and pretty much everyone else) when we bought our house but my experience was like a day at the spa compared to yours. Between the kids and the cats alone, that must have been insane.

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