House -Before

This is the story of a house.

and its transformation into a home.

grab your popcorn and snacks now...I stop for noone.

Green and Maroon. Not exactly my favorite color combination. But lets stay positive.

Look! A floridian garden!

get it? get it?

its ok to laugh you know.

When we first viewed this house we were pretty excited. Compared to the other short sales we had looked at this...this place was amazing. The problem with short sales is...a lot of them become vacant for several months before somebody buys it. The entire process takes at least 4 months and thats bare minimum. So after being vacant for so many months, the house isn't being taken care of properly.

We were happy to see the owners still living in this house until it sold.
However, they did have small pets that peed on the laminate floor which was....really gross.
We ended up having to strip the dining room, kitchen, and living room of its flooring right away because the smell made me want to take a sledge hammer to the wall.

We went to look at the house a second time in order to take pictures of it...it was then that I started noticing all the little things.
Things like cobwebs, pet hair, missing baseboards,
bubbling laminate, missing tiles and grout, and bad bad paint jobs.

just to name a few.

You don't really notice those sort of things when you're used to viewing vacant houses with gaping holes in the drywall and blood stains on the floor.

ok...I'm just kidding about the blood stains.

-cough-

The house! right...View 1 of the living room. The large window looks into the kitchen and is right over the stove, which prevents a range hood from being installed. We closed that in.... The flooring doesn't look bad in theses photos...but when you're right up on it...you see that whoever installed it did a really poor job of tapping the strips together.

If you don't tap the flooring together...dirt will gather between the strips and the layers will begin to peel away. So says me...who knows about these sort of things.View 2 of the living room. We set up our couches pretty much the same way. Don't look now, but there is an inch of dog hair, dust, and bugs on that window sill.

And don't even get me started on the blinds.

the bliiiiiiiiinds....

-eye twitch-

Kitchen View 1: See what I mean about the range hood? rar. The cabinets are actually very nice. We think they bought them off of someone and installed whatever fit in this kitchen. The rest were in the garage taking up space. And when I say whatever fit, I do mean...

whatever wherever however it fit.

What I really like is this little drive-thru window above the sink.

Really, I do!

ok...not really.

We took out a very large portion of this wall above the counter in order to make a bar
...which means we don't have ANY upper cabinets and now have access to all sorts of alcoholic beverages.

...wait. wrong bar.
my bad.

We're currently saving for new cabinets...since we want to adjust the position of the stove. Our plan is to move it over to the right in order to have a more servicable space on each side of it. We'll also put in upper cabinets along that wall including a microwave above the stove.

From these pictures, it looks pretty nice. However, the counter top is bowed across there....a good two inches down in the middle compared to the ends. The sink is built into the counter top and the faucet is one of those pull out sprayers that never tends to work right.The tilework was attractive at first glace...until you see they just stuck it up there and didn't bother grouting it. Which means it was basically useless in repelling water from the drywall. Nice.

I'm so negative aren't I?

Here's that meaningless window from the other side.

Oh, what a wonderful idea!! How handy!

...not.

One side of the dining room...complete with useless window.

Other side of dining room.

complete with dogs who peed on floor.

They stuffed this room sooo full.
Then again, you don't need me to tell you that.
We ended up pulling that large cabinet out and selling it to some guy down the street. Thank goodness.

You'll be shocked to see what this room looks like now.

paaaatience my very few readers that I can count twice on one hand.

patience.

The hallway!! And some grassy looking...thing.

The bathroom!!! Which I liked.

even more so after I painted it and added a toilet seat cover.

...weirdos.

They must have had someone come in and do the tile work..because its actually really nice. I don't think it was the same guy that did the laminate flooring.

The duck was not included.

There's not really a point in including pictures of the two bedrooms...since you can't really tell anything from the angle and lighting. They were boring anyhow.

So thats the house tour.

I feel so much more fulfilled now.