Would you buy a house that looked like this photo? Let's to go back in time to our move from Apex to Fuquay Varina, which is related to a recent topic about why we wanted to leave Apex. While our Apex house was up for sale, my wife searched for houses with land - meaning more than 1 acre lot. After months of driving around, she located what is affectionately called a fixer-upper on 2 wooded acres backing up to a small lake. Now there are houses that need to be fixed and there are houses you should walk away from as they are beyond fixing. Looking back it was clearly in the latter catgory. I still remember the first time I walked into the house as it smelled awful and looked even worse. The owners had built the house 25 years previosuly and to save energy had burned wood in a pot bellied stove to heat the whole downstairs, thus the stale wood smell throughout the house. The wallpaper was the yellowed with age and from smoke. One of the oddest things was there were fabric needles everywhere on the walls, so instead of small nails, this is what they used to hang stuff on the walls. The vinyl flooring in the kitchen was torn in several places and the carpet was well worn brown and yellow shag. Would you buy this house even though it was over 2800 sq.ft. and cheap? Did I mentioned the outside with all of the beautiful trees? Only a picture can describe it.
After buying the house in January, I started gutting the whole thing in the hours after work and on weekends. It is actually a fun task and was one of the most enjoyable parts of modernizing the house, as realtors say. Just by removing the carpet the house already smelled better. Then my wife's parents came up for a family house painting party. The wallpaper was so old we could not remove it, so we had to use special paint called Kilz which specializes the removing stains and smells. This was bad in that it meant we had to paint every wall twice. Even worse you have to paint over Kilz within 24 hours or no paint would ever stick on it! My wife's father painted the drab brown kitchen cabinets white to brighten up a dreary appearing, yet large kitchen. The transformation had begun and was already paying off.
I paid to have someone come in and install vinyl in most of the downstairs, since the laundry, downstairs bath, kitchen and breakfast area were all connected. We bought two different shaded of berber carpet, one for the dining room and another for the living room. I eventually installed tile in the entry way, but that is a story in itself and will be left for another day. I completely destroyed all of the bathrooms and remade them from scratch, since the faucets all leaked and toilets were completely brown from the lime in the water. The water smelled like pure sulfur, so we had a water softener and conditioner installed. In order to get them to work we had to get a new water pressure tank. In doing so we noticed the hot water heater was under the house in the crawl space and because of the limited space was only a 40 gallon tank. We hired a plumber to install two new 40 gallon ones, just to make sure we never ran out of hot water, which we never did! And the hits just kept coming.
About half of the wall sockets did not work so I relaced every one of them, which took me days. Once we were all set to move into the house and the wife started up our first load of laundry, smoke started coming out of the fuse box. Half of the breaker panel had shorted out due to the overload. That alone was $900 to repair using a local electrician. Soon after moving in we noticed other things, like the roof needed fixing to the tune of $4500. The following summer was a severe drought in this area and our shallow 60ft deep water well dried up. No wonder our water was so bad in the house as we must have been sucking the water out of the pond behind our house! A new 250ft deep well only cost $5000. Then one of the heat pumps died and since you cannot repair 25 year old A/C systems, we had to replace them both to the tune of $5000. Looking back, I wonder where in the world all of this money came from, but it sure did disappear quickly.
There were many other repairs, but I have blocked most of those out of my memory. I did stain the whole outside of the house one summer. We had cedar siding so you cannot paint it, you have to stain it. The smell of new oil based stain was quite overwhelming. I would try to get the kids to help stain the lower parts of the house, but they were quickly over powered by the intense burning fumes. We had wood bores eating up the cedar siding, digging holes everywhere, so those had to be killed and the holes patched before the staining began - that is a bad memory still there. I almost forgot about the kitchen cabinets project, where we all tackled it as a family after a couple of years living in the house. That was fun destroy the whole kitchen and then building the cabinets from scratch.
The final repairs happened when we sold the house and moved to San Antonio. We found buyers for our house, as that was one of the things we learned from the last time, don't move before you sell the house as two payments are not fun. Once we arrived in San Antonio, the buyers complained the septic tank was not large enough for the house. After much haggling, we clearly lost and paid to have a new one installed, which was $6500 down the drain - pun intended. We had lived in the house for 4 years and all of our hard work resulted in us loosing tons of money, but many good memories are still in with us from those times, not related to remodelling of course.
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