Hello Blogger My Old Friend...
It would seem that Facebook has ruined my life. My blogging life, that is. I'm sure I've mentioned this before because as I get older, I also get more repetitive. So, right, Facebook = life ruiner.
The thing is, I often have things to say. Quips to quip. Witty little nuggets of hilarity. But just as I'm like, "I should write that down", a cat vomits or hurricane minions destroy the kitchen, or work bursts into flames and I get distracted. Sadly, "cat vomits" is probably the most frequent reason. Seriously, what are we feeding those damned animals that causes so many problems?
I suppose I could write about the joys of renovation. Except there are not so many joys. We got geo-thermal installed. Apparently, being environmentally friendly is not only expensive, but also a giant pain in the buttocks. My only hope is that it's so awesome, it blows our minds.
Home renovation. Hmmm...that is a good topic. So here's the story...
We bought another house. It's like 4 miles from the house we currently live in. We didn't want to be too far from our favorite ice cream store. We have priorities. It's a cool house, on 2.5 acres of lands and has a .5 acre pond (filled with snapping turtles and muskrats, but it's OURs, so yay?). We knew the whole thing would need renovation due to everything in it being completely outdated, oddly configured, and gross. But it was a good price and we were looking to diversify. (We'll use our current house as a rental property. It's like we are grown-ups). Plus mortgages where at like 3% so we probably should have bought like 10 houses because that will likely never happen again in my lifetime. Anyway...
Everyone was all, "you just knock the house down and build a new one" and I was like "I don't want a house that looks like every other boring Indiana builder home". I like the A-frame style of the house. I just didn't like the 1970 kitchen, smelly everything and possibility of electrical fires. So, we demoed the inside. The house had been sitting unused for like 3 years...which led to all sorts of interesting finds...if by "interesting" I mean "aweful".
For example, one of the front door lights was filled with bees. I was like "oh, it's like a horror movie. Are we going to open up the walls and find bees". Only it wasn't a joke. The wall on the other side of the light had a giant beehive in it. Like all the way through the drywall. The only thing holding it in was the wallpaper. Apparently, bees have no problem making a hive through drywall, but they draw the line at wallpaper. Fortunately, the hive was dead. That would the only reason I didn't immediately lose my mind. Still, ew.
In addition to the bee hive, there was about a billion dead mice in the walls. When we took the drywall off the ceiling in the basement, it rained dead mice. That was super fun. I spend like a day on a google downward spiral trying to determine if I would die from inhaling so much dead mouse. It will be a few years before I know for sure. It seems that some mice are just dumb. They go down the wall between studs and then can't get back up, so they just die there. Then their stupid friends follow them and then after a few years you have a billion dead mice in the basement walls. To add to that, the people who owned the house must have had an exterminator come, so that added more dead mice. Because the mice don't leave the house to die. They just die. In the walls. Gross.
Then there's the bat. It lives way up high in the overhang over the front door. From this spot, it craps right on the front porch. Like on the welcome mat. A lot. I mean for an animal that eats like mosquitos, it really produces a lot of feces. At our current house, we put little houses all through our back woods to actually attract bats so they will eat the mosquitos, yet no bats have made themselves at home. At the new house, we welcome you with bat shit. So, yeah.
As we started demoing dryway and learning more, we found that the electric was way out of code, actually a few places had obviously caught fire. There were spots where the framing is super out of code. Good times.
Geo-Thermal...
We got geothermal. Apparently, doing right by the environment is crazy expensive. That was a painful process. They basically tore up our entire driveway and front yard without any warning. Like, when we were planning it, they were all "oh, we will drill these 5 wells and you'll barely notice we are here" and then it was like massive destruction. When Brian was all "what the hell!?!?", they were all "oh well you'll fix that during landscaping." Um, we weren't really planning on doing any landscaping for a few years, jerkoffs. Ugh.
The Shining Light...
We met some Amish craftsmen at the Indianapolis Home show. They will be building out all our kitchen cabinets, bathroom cabinets, front doors, wood ceiling in living room, and probably do all the trim work in the house. They are amazing. And the most reasonably costing thing that will be in our house. I kind of love them.
Ok, I'm bored with house stuff. I'll post before and after pictures if it ever gets done...
Jenn
