Our REAL First House

If you don’t remember the story of our first house, go here.

So after 2 years, we were emotionally ready to try again for a house.  We weren’t actively looking, just talking about it.  It was scary.

One day my mom called me and said she had seen a cute house just a couple blocks away.  I lived right around the corner from her, so I went over to her house and we drove over. 

This is what I saw from the front:

It looked so cute.  The house was locked up, so we went around looking through the windows.  When we got to the backyard, this is what we saw:

Wow.  It was a mess.  Those are all weeds.  Completely overrun.  They were taller than me in most cases.  It was bad.  Come to find out, the inside had been worse.  The people that had lived there had several families living there, including:

• a man with a warrant out for his arrest who was living in the crawl space underneath;
• several people who lived in the detached garage;
• a man who lived in the backyard, and took care of his personal needs, including showering, in the backyard, in full view of the neighbors; and
• multiple cats and dogs who lived in the house and took care of their personal needs in the house.

We did not do the fixing up.  We bought it from the man who bought it and fixed it up.  He basically had to gut it and start over.  There was new carpet and tile, new kitchen, new paint, and new windows.  But he did not touch the backyard at all.  We got to do that.

We bought the house and moved in October.  In the first 3 weeks, we had Roto Rooter out 3 different times to clean out different drains.  He even had to go up on the roof and clean out the vent pipe.  It was bad.  In February, the furnace went out, and we ended up having to put in a whole new furnace and we replaced all the duct work.  We found multiple empty liquor bottles hidden all over the crawl space, and in the rafters of the garage!  It was quiet interesting!

In the spring, we started working on the yard.  We mowed all the weeds down, with the help of my Dad.  It was a huge undertaking.  We then hired someone to come out and basically scrape the yard down to the dirt.  We found garbage “dumps” where they had buried their garbage, including bike tires!  There was so much broken glass.  We were going to just seed the yard, but I was really worried about the kids getting cut, so we had to put sod down. 

The Doctor hated the house.  There was a lot of work to do and he is not handy by choice.  But we survived in it and have since moved on.  I just shudder when I think about how much we had to do in that yard!!  I don’t ever want to do that again!