Would a beam by any other name smell as sweet?

We officially have permits.   When we dropped off the paperwork yesterday we were told we needed to wait until Tuesday, Jan 2nd.  Then we got a call today saying they reviewed our permit application and asked if we could come down and fix it.   Once we fixed the errors, they assigned us our permits within an hour.   So we're ready to work!!

Except for the framing.   Just in case you didn't know, pieces of wood can be 'beams', joists', 'studs', 'boards', or about 10 other words.   So when I wrote my application for the wood replacement, I just wrote "replace beams".   Apparently beams are what supports the house and if you want to replace beams you need to have an engineer come out and check them first.  But what we want to replace is 'joists' and once we can confirm that, then we can get a permit for that too.

So today, with the help of Ryan 'Dr Drywall' Donovan, we:

Painted the first coat of trim and base color on the upstairs rooms.
Worked on getting the bathroom ceiling smooth
Put up half the 1/4" drywall in the kitchen
Fixed more drywall in the laundryroom
Installed a front handrail
Fixed the striker plate on the front door - now locks easily and securely
Installed the new handle on the rear screen door

Hair of the house that bit me....

Well, its been a little while since we made a post about the actual house.

We won our hearing to be considered a duplex.   We're just so relieved.  We're still a bit bitter about the fact that it's delayed our plans for 2 months, which means that we're doing the bulk of our work in the cold weather.  But it could have been worse, we could have been doing the bulk of this work in the cold after having LOST our status.  So there's always a bright side.

We've been doing some random things.

• We repaired a few concrete bits while the weather was still ok.  
• We worked on our fancy doorway.
• We fixed the large holes in the walls and spackled most of cracks and imperfections.  This takes a lot longer than you might think.
• We cut out the window between the bathroom and laundryroom and bought some wood to frame it out.
• We replaced the broken window on the back of the 'princess' room.(below).

The window that we replaced was a gas filled window where the outer panes had been broken - so it looked ok, but didnt have any insulating properties.  A replacement window would have been about $200, but we found this brand-new one at ReStore for $30.  Its woodgrain unlike the rest of the house, but there are no other windows in that room, so its looks just fine. 




We got cracking on the ceiling in the bathroom.  The ceiling had a large hole in it from a water leak which has since been fixed.   We thought about just doing a patch, but because the ceiling is plaster and our patch would be greenboard, the seams would be odd and the textures would be different.   So with Ryan's help we put in a crude patch to make the surfaces level and then re-drywalled the entire ceiling.

We then took some 1/4" drywall and re-walled the back wall you see in the photo with the big chunk missing.   1/4" drywall is our new friend.  There are quite a few spots in this house where the walls are damaged, and using the 1/4" goes over and makes a nice smooth resurfacing of even the worst wall. 

Taking apart some parts of the house, we found some cool things.  In fixing the door we found the original lock still inside the door, with a stamp on it from 1862.  Also, in doing our wall repairs, we had to take out some more of the plaster from the walls to make a good shape for the patch, and found a some human hair.   It was quite common back in the 1800s to mix hair with the plaster to make it stronger, so people would go to the barber and take the old hair and mix it in.   I found a website of a guy who was able to find about 12 different colors of hair while restoring his house from 1875.

WE WON!!!!!

On the fence

So we've been plugging away at the house, little by little.  One of the problems we had was that our house is on the middle of the block and had no fence in the back yard.  That meant that anyone could cut through, and a lot of people did.  We were always picking up beer cans and other trash from the back and side of the house.  We also had zero privacy.  Quite often we'd be working in our back yard, only to find people cutting through, once even stepping over the wood we were cutting.   So we planned early on to put up a fence. 

Months ago we found a guy on craigslist selling some old fence bits.  We drove over and picked up as much fence and posts as we could carry for just $100.   It was so heavy, we nearly tore the roof rack off the poor old Previa in the process.  

Oddly, we were allowed to get our permits for this fence work.  The lady behind the desk said, "well, you're going to do this work anyway, if its a single or duplex."  I replied that we were going to fix the plumbing if it was a single or duplex, but that seemed to fall on deaf ears.  In any case, we're happy that we could at least put up the fence before the frozen ground made that impossible. 

Rather than wrestling with shovels, we just went ahead and rented a 2-man auger.  It was the biggest tool that Effie or I have ever used and took a bit of skill to get used to.   Being as it took 2 people to operate it, no one was available for photos, so I photoshopped this image to give you an idea of what we look like operating it.  We realized we forgot the shovels which are needed to move the dirt away from the holes so dad brought them over and helped us auger the last holes as well. 

Then in with the posts and cement, wait a few days for it to harden (it takes longer in the cold weather), then up with the fence.  We put some pieces along the side of the house to completely enclose the area.

When it was done, we just sat and looked at it.  It completely transformed the house.  It was as if we now had our own space.  Before our house still felt like public property.  There was zero privacy and people always in our yard.   Now we HAVE a yard and privacy and it finally felt like ours.   Awesome. 

While we were waiting for the cement to dry, we spent a couple days spackling the holes in the wall.   We fixed a couple of the bigger ones with drywall today.  We'll get to sanding tomorrow. 

We've also been painting over the graffiti with a Kilz primer, its almost all gone.  

We bought 3 pieces of glass, 2 to fix broken windows and 1 to make a transom over our new interior doorway.   Unfortunately, I cracked that piece while using the nail gun to put the trim around it.  I must have just nicked it.  The crack doesn't go all the way up, so we're still going to use it.  We thought about frosting that piece anyway, so the crack won't show much.

Lets give it another go

Ok - not much news that's new. 

We spoke with a lawyer about our options to file a complaint about the realtor who sold us the property and we may go with that option.  Turns out there's a good chance he knew this would happen to us, so he was in the wrong.   We're not interested in suing, just filing a complaint.

As for the duplex status, we've filed our appeal which should be heard on Dec 27th.   We've heard some people say its unlikley, but we've also got some positive feedback from the people at the Borough as well.

In the meantime, we've learned that there are some things that we're allowed to do without permits so we're going to start going back to the house to work.   We haven't been there in a couple weeks, mostly because it's getting cold and there won't be any heat in the house until we get the plumbing fixed, which can't happen until we get permits, which cant happen until we get zoning, which won't happen until Dec 27th.  So until that time, we're going to paint and install a fence and a couple other things.  We'll keep you posted.  

Unexpected help

In the middle of all this paperwork craziness, we got a couple of very nice and productive days. Rick's brother, Alan, volunteered to come up from DC and help us for the weekend, as well as Rick's dad, and Ryan, his friend from Highschool. With so many people coming over, we put on our happy hats and went to the house to get some stuff done. In what would have been a week's worth of work for the both of us, we got quite a few projects done : we fixed the window to the back door, took off the kitchen tiles, put up a few doors including a nice double door with side windows, spackled half of the house and finish a few randoms projects. It was nice to see the work getting done and crossing so many things off the looong list of stuff to do...

Crash!!!

The crashing sound we just heard was not anything inside the house.  Unfortunately, it was our spirits.

We expected getting permits to be a tedious hassle, but we didn't expect the encounter we had at the county office the other day.

Our house has been a duplex for decades.   We don't know how long, but we do know that the last lady who lived downstairs lived there for 11 years.   (And she really wants to move back - she was evicted despite the fact she never missed a rent payment - she was evicted because the landlord didn't pay the mortgage).  So, the house has been registered as a duplex for as long as anyone can remember and has 2 mailboxes, 2 gas lines and 2 electric boxes.   Yet, because it's been vacant for over 365 days, we're being told it needs to revert to a single family house.  I asked the zoning guy if I need to re-apply to become a duplex again and he told me that he's pretty sure it's going to be denied.  Once it's denied we'll need to file for an appeal which would happen on December 27th, and there's a good chance we could lose that. 

Well, I don't think I need to tell you that there is not a great demand for 5-bedroom houses with 2 kitchens in Norristown.  Which means that our plans have totally been destroyed if this becomes true. 

We will keep you updated, but in the meantime, we have halted work.

Mrs Clean

The last few days, my time has been dedicated to cleaning. First the window frames, that looked like they haven't been cleaned since the house was built (that's right, that would be about 110 years), as well as the bathroom vanity and kitchen cabinets we decided to salvage. They came off looking pretty good, but they require a hell of a lot of elbow grease...

The room we don't speak about is almost all scraped out and we finally figured out why one of the walls around the bathtub is looking so weird and is tiled with a different color : before they added the laundry room, the bathroom was looking outside, and had 2 windows; one that we just re-opened, and another one that they boxed in and tiled over ! (yes, it is weird) We have decided to take down the tiles and the box, then put up a new wall and a sheet of tile board. We were looking for something a bit creative to contrast with the yellow tiles, but the ones we found so far are boring ! So we keep on looking.

Also, the work from the contractor is a bit delayed (duh), because the borough we are in requires diagrams of all the work we are going to be doing. So Rick took his ruler and pencil (well actually his computer and printer) and made drawings of all the fresh water and heating pipes. Our contractor took them to the borough this afternoon, so we are hoping it will be accepted soon so the work can start (although we are still waiting on the permit for the fence that we requested 2 weeks ago...). I can't wait for that because it means we will have running water, which will make all this cleaning so much easier...

We're popular people.

Today was a short but good day.   Our contractor came by and seal coated the roof.  We only wanted him to fix a couple minor leaks, but his estimate to coat the whole thing was reasonable, so we did it for the peace of mind. 

Then I worked on painting around the front door while the weather was still nice.  Well, you can't do much around the front door without everyone stopping by to say hi or see what we're doing.   I think we had literally 7 or 8 visitors today.  The neighbors around our place are all very friendly, and we even gave a tour to a couple of them.  Most people ask when we plan to be finished and how much we'll be asking for rent.   One lady said she rents a 1-bedroom place next door which is half the size for $600.   We planned to ask $700, so I think we'll be very competitive.   Someone else also mentioned that the previous tenants who lived there for 13 years would love to move back.   They only left because the house was foreclosed upon.  So we called them up and they may be moving back in.    Would be great to have such long term tenants in there.

Yesterday I also repaired a few steps in the back.   They looked nice and new, but now have a little tar on them from the roofers.

Show me the money.

Another thing we worked on today was trying to get financing.  Having lived outside the USA for so long, I have no credit history from the past 9 years.  Despite the fact that we've lived withing our means and have saved enough to buy a house, we're still considered a risk by the banks.   I would think that NOT having credit cards would be a good sign, but it's not.  So we've finally found a bank who's willing to lend money based on the value and income of the property, and not the history of the applicant.   So Effie and I took a ride over to this bank this moring armed with all the documents we could gather on our property.   Hopefully we'll hear something back.  It would make us breathe a bit easier if we knew that we wouldnt be stranded if we went over our budget due to unexpected things.

The room we don't speak about.

The upstairs bathroom.  For the longest time the light didn't work in there, and it was just the scariest room in the house.  We kept avoiding the room and even talking about it.   Every now and then we'd ask each other, "what ARE we going to do with that bathroom??", then we'd change the subject.

The tub was just caked on with gunk so bad, we figured it would need to be replaced, and the tiles were so awful, we had no idea if we'd need to take them down or tile over them.  Then the fact the ceiling was falling down from a leak (which has since been fixed) and the room got all musty - it really just became the room we didn't speak about.   Until today.

The light actually worked - it just needed a bulb.    The next order of business was cutting out the drywall on the other side of the window in the bathroom.   Yes, it's a weird set up.   The bathroom wall used to be an exterior wall, but an addition on the other side created a window between the bathroom and the laundry room which someone drywalled over on the laundry room side.  So you had a wall in the laundry room, but a window looking at drywall in the bathroom. The laundry room has a lot of natural light, so we've removed the drywall which was over that window to let some of that natural light through to the bathroom.   The glass in the window is opaque so privacy shouldn't be an issue.

Removing the drywall and scraping the window frame gave us the added benefit of actually being able to open the window and get some nice fresh air in the bathroom.   And then with a little sweeping and a little vacuuming the bathroom looked like a real room and not even so scary.

What really made this room dingy was the fact that someone has painted every single tile in the room.  We're not sure why.   The tiles are a few different colors, but they're not too badly contrasting.   Not bad enough to justify painting them.  The paint has gotten really dirty over the years which really made it look drab. \ And these tiles are tough!  We've spent the afternoon scraping some of this paint off (maybe about 20% of the room), and we need to scrape pretty hard, and not a single tile has scratched.  The tub has also been painted, and we're hoping that scraping the tub will clean that up pretty well also. 

So now we've got a nice plan for the room.  We're going to scrape all the tiles and based on how they look, we may re-tile parts of the room, but we're going to keep the tub as well.  Hopefully it will also look good with a scraping, but if not, we're just going to re-coat it.  Its a nice solid old tub, so it should be good for another 50 years.

We didn't do a lot of photo taking today, but we should get some more tomorrow.

We also wanted to give a shout-out to all the people working at McNiell in Procurement.  Apparently they're our biggest fans, and by my calculations make up about 95% of the visitors to this blog. :)

The heavy work is about to start

 Yesterday and today were easy days of finishing what we started and also running errands. We got rid of the rest of the carpet that was on the third floor and disposed of it at the recycling facility. While removing the carpet, we found beautiful hard wood floors in the bedroom of the third floor and contemplated keeping them until we took out the carpet in the hallway : unfortunately when repainting the spindles of the staircase's ramp, the previous owners omitted to protect the floors, which are now spray painted white... with spindle prints !


We also decided to take out the old broken appliances. Again, we got quite lucky as not only did we find a neighbor to take them from us to recycle scraps, but he also helped to us (or should I say he helped Rick, as my watching them was not terribly helpful I'm afraid) to take them out of the second floor. So far, we are quite happy with the neighborhood, as we have met a bunch of helpful and friendly neighbors, knowledgeable landlords and crafty recyclers !

Then, we decided to take down the second kitchen (which was much easier than the first one) and overall clean up the house. We have found out a couple days ago when taking down the first kitchen that our back wall was in pretty bad shape and is gonna need serious fixing. We met with our contractor yesterday, and he is going to take care of this along with replacing the beam under the kitchen that rotted because of a leak, recoating the roof, and replacing the stolen copper pipes. He will be starting within the next few days so he needed the cabinets gone to access pipes and floors. So now, without the carpet and the old rotten cabinets, the house is like a blank slate, it's kinda cool !

Finally, we went to our favorite Habitat for Humanity store today for an orientation tour as we will be volunteering there once a week starting next Thursday. We got some pretty great deals there and met some very nice people, so we thought it would be nice to help them in return, and it is also a great way to meet people from our community !

It pays to do the right thing.

We've had 2 very good days of working on the house.   We finished removing the downstairs kitchen, and unfortunately found that the exterior wall has rotted pretty bad.    We budgeted about $2000 to build a porch out back, and decided that would be the last thing we'd do.   If we were within budget at the end, we'd build the porch, and if we were over budget, then it would get cut.   It looks like repairing that wall may eat some of our porch budget, but that's fine.

We've removed about 80% of the carpet - an absolute necessity as it was quite smelly.  I don't think I've ever seen carpet so stained in my life.  I wanted to throw it in the dumpster next door (which the guy said we could use for FREE) but Fanette convinced me that we should recycle it, even if it meant driving it 30 minutes in to the city to the carpet recycling center.   We're trying to be as ECO as we can with our rehab.    Anything that can be saved, is being saved.   We're taking screws out of wood and if it all looks good, saving the screws and saving the wood.  You never know when you're going to need a little piece of scrap wood.   Rehabbing can generate a lot of waste, and generally its easier/cheaper to throw everything out and just buy new stuff, but landfills are filling up due to that train of thought, so we're doing our part.   Anyway, it turns out the carpet recyclers had a container where we could make a drop off stationed just a few miles from us, so the ride wasn't so bad.   The container was located at a flooring warehouse and they used it discard all their scraps from jobs.   Turns out there was a huge half-roll of linoleum in the container which was big enough for us to do our bathroom AND laundry room, so we grabbed it.   And it looks like its better quality than the stuff we would have bought anyway.   It does pay to do the right thing.

We've also selected the contractor we're going to work with.   We found a good General Contractor that can do all of the work we need.   His time frames seem to be great and the price is right.   So hopefully we'll have running water in the next week or so.

Other than that, we've been spending our time going around pulling out all the old nails and screws from the wall, and making lists of what we should be doing next.    Oh, and we set up a little 'chill out' area.  Someone discarded an old 3-legged side table in our backyard (it only had 2 legs, but some of that aforementioned scrap wood and recycled screws fixed that right up) so we brought it in and paired it up with a couple of lawn chairs and we've got a sitting/snack area.   We've also moved over the fridge and just bought a mini-oven tonight so we should be cookin' in no time.

And then there was light...

For our second day, we decided to go around the house and check all the outlets and change the lightbulbs so we could finally see what our house looks like... Now the whole place is equipped with the low energy light bulbs, that we picked up at Habitat for Humanity a few days ago for 1.5 dollars for a pack of 4 (isn't that an amazing deal ?... Well, we thought so too, so we bought 10 packs).

After we were done with that, we started taking out the carpet on the second floor. It took a bit of time (especially to take out the hundreds of staples that came with it...), but the place looks much better now and along with the carpet, the nasty old smell is gone too !! Let me tell you one thing : it is amazing what you can find under an old carpet... numerous pennies, old batteries, the carpet installers old razor blades, pens, combs, you name it, we found it. 

Day 1 - Kitchen bashing

Today we finally got our hands dirty... We have been waiting for that for a while since we found this property about 6 weeks ago, but with all the paperwork and closure and stuff, we could only get started today.

So we started by putting on new locks (duh) and then we tackled the downstairs kitchen. We watched a lot of rehab shows on TV where they smash perfectly fine kitchen cabinets, and it always annoys the hell out of us, so we decided that we would do our best to save what we could and use it in the basement. Well, that didn't happen. Those cabinets were on, and had no intention to come out without a fight... So we did what we had to do and smashed the kitchen !... Damn, I will even admit it, it was a lot of fun !

So we got all the cabinets and a half-wall down before dawn and luckily enough, we could put all the trash in our neighbor's dumpster, who was nice enough to let us use it for free !

Kitchen : one out, one more to go !

Where to start???

There's a couple of big items that need to be done to this place.  The house has been abandoned for some time and during that time it was squatted and lightly vandalized.   When I say "lightly", there have not been any major holes punched through walls and no spray paint.   What they have done is write with markers on the walls and they stole most of the copper piping in the house.   Luckily they were lazy and didn't steal the stuff in the walls, just what they could see outside the walls and in the basement.   But replacing the pipe will surely be our biggest expense.   Next is going to be carpets and fixing some basement leaks.   Then, both kitchens will need to be redone.   Normally, this is where people spend a tremendous amount of money, but we've found used appliances and HFH cabinets, so we're actually looking at remodeling each kitchen for less than $1500.

Craigslist crazy

When our offer was accepted on the house we were told we could not start any repairs until we closed.   There is always that small chance that something could come up, and if you start any work and can not close, then your money and time are lost.

So we made the best of our time by scouring craigslist.   We made a list of what we needed and searched regularly for things.   If something popped up and it was a good deal, we'd go out and buy it.    Now we've got a garage AND a shed full of cabinets and applainces at my parents house just waiting to go up.   So far we're UNDER budget for everything we'd planned to get, and a lot of these things we didn't plan for much.   We still have a few more big items to buy, but we feel better knowing that we already have a lot of it ready to go.   One thing with craigslist, is that you always run the risk of an item not working.   And if thats the case, theres no returns - you just have to write off the loss.  But its amazing the quality of some of the stuff that people sell.

We've also had amazing luck finding good stuff at the Habitat for Humanity store.   I called a kitchen remodeler to find out if he was doing any remodel jobs and might be removing any usable stuff, and they said if they remodel a kitchen and take out useable cabinets, they donate it to HFH.   So Fanette found that they can't use everything that's donated, and they sell a lot of it.   We found the nearst HFH store and go there at least twice a week as the stock rotates a lot.    So far we've gotten 2 complete sets of kitchen cabinets ($275 per kitchen) which were actually unused demos donated from a Lowes, and a ton of other stuff.    Everything but the kitchen sink, no, wait we got that too.

We're mobile

We knew that our whole plan with coming back to the USA was to do a renovation.  Part of the plan all along was to do as much as we could by ourselves, and as much as we could with recycled materials.   That doesn't mean that we're building a house out of old beer cans, but rather, we're buying all the old (but still good) stuff that people don't want and are selling on Craigslist.   If you're buying fridges and washers on craigslist, you need to be able to go get them yourself.   If you have to wait a couple days to borrow a truck, it could be sold to someone else, and if you have to pay to rent a truck, it's no longer a good deal.   So we decided to buy a truck, and ended up with a van.     We were looking at old Toyota trucks and found that even older ones were selling for $3000 if it had what we wanted.   But I wanted 4wd so we could work through the winter.  So I started looking at the Toyota Previa van.   They made them in 4wd from 1991-1996 and they can haul as much as a truck.   You can even fit a 4x8 sheet of wood in the back.   The bonus is that we can also use it for more practical stuff, like luggage, which you cant always do with a truck in bad weather.   We also plan to take a little trip up to Canada sometime in November, so we'll throw a bed in the back and if the weather is decent, make a little camping trip out of it. 

Right now, we've pulled out the seats and laid down some old carpeting so we can haul dirty stuff without messing up the interior of the van, which is actually very nice for a 20 year old car.   The other odd thing about this van is that the engine is located under the front seats.  If you're a car guy - that means is a 70* inline four.   If you're not a car guy, that means that you can fit a 16 foot roll of linoleum almost entirely inside the car, running it from the headlights, between the seats and all the way back.

Lets get ready to rubble.

Well, its official.   We close on the house tomorrow.  

To back up a little bit and give an idea of what this blog is all about:   Effie and I have been living in Thailand for the past 7 years.   We know we want to settle in the US someday, but not just yet.   However, we have no credit history and nothing established in the US.   So we decided that we'd come to the US for 5 months and buy a house to renovate and then rent it out while we hop around the planet for a little bit and builds credit while we're away.  

We wanted to get something like single-family house in the burbs, but we can't get financed for that.  So we've got to buy what we can afford to purchase and rehab with our savings, and then finance the property once its appraised.   Which leads us to this place.   

Its a 3-story duplex located in Norristown (that's just outside of Philadelphia).  The first unit is a 1-bedroom and the second unit is a 3-bedroom. Effie has put up a few "before" photos of the place, which can be seen here at this link.  

What we're going to do here with our blog is post the progress, as well as some before and after photos.   

Our purchase price for this property is $40,000.   Our total renovation budget is $28,000.    Our projected total rents are $1700/mo and we hope to have everything finished and ready to go in 6 weeks.   We'll see how close we can stick to that.   This is our first rehab.   So if you've ever thought about doing it yourself, come check out our progress and see how it goes.