Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket

This is the first bedroom upstairs. This will be the nursery/kid's room. Not a whole lot see here. Just more ugly. It's a decent sized room with a crummy view and a small closet.

Will Wonders Ever Cease!

Wow long time no see. We're still alive and kicking. Blogger has had some issues recently as you have seen. Hopefully this is not a fluke and they fixed their problems.

What you are looking at here is the front entrance, the stairs looking down, and the hallway upstairs (in that order). In the front entrance you can see the closet the barely functioned as a closet. It was too narrow to hang a jacket. And a vanity that served to purpose at all. This whole wall is coming down anyways so all that stuff is now gone and we found a doorway to the room on the other side.

Under floors in the hallway (the same everywhere upstairs are hardwood floors). Please note the BLACK painted trim again. This guy had a real problem with natural wood. In the last picture the stairwell is behind you. The door on the right is another bedroom and what you see straight ahead is yet another bedroom. You can't see it from this view but there is another door in the hallway that lead the VERY ugly bathroom. And just back a little to the left is the third bedroom upstairs. I'm feeling luck and I will try another post right away to show you guys those rooms. Wish me luck!

Ben

Blogger is All Messed UP!!

I have tried several times to upload some pictures for the last few days. I apologize to everyone that checks this blog often and there are no updates. We have made all sorts of progress on the house and we still have more of the house to show everyone. We haven't forgot about you folks and we are still working on the house. It just seems that blogger is having some issues at the moment and I am thinking about moving the site to somewhere else. But this is free. I guess the saying stays true. You get what you pay for.

Still trying to update.

Ben

So this is the first thing you see when you walk in the front door of This Ugly House. Notice the beautiful green shag carpeting. The banister has at least 37 layers of black paint. The closet on the right hand side is very dark as well. That whole wall on the right side is going to be removed. On the other side of this wall is the "mirrored" wall in the other bedroom.

So this is obviously the view up the stairs. The stairs themself seem to be in decent shape. Nice and solid with no creaks. Unfortunately for all you shag lovers out there the carpeting is coming off. And just incase you are asking...yes the stairs are paineted with 37 layers of black paint as well. Thankfully some wonderful advances have been made in the field of chemical paint strippers.

So this is the view from the other side of the accordian door. You can see a small closet on the right side there that we are not sure what we want to do with yet.

Part two of drywall and we are done

Well now that we have sanded and mudded and sanded and mudded and sanded and mudded some more, we are finally done, done, done with drywall, for the time being anyway.
We also have the first coat of paint on. What do you think?

Here is just a preview of what is to come!

Drywall Hell Part 1

If you think this looks painful. It was. We rented scaffolding so we could work up high but with this sloped ceiling it backfired on us and since I am the shorter one. Yep, you guessed it, I got to be up top.
Tearing out the drywall was fun, I have to say that it's all the other stuff that I really hate.

Here is wall #2. Measuring and LIFTING THE DRYWALL sucked bigtime. But we got it all up and mudded. Yeah for us.

This is what we looked like after. It was fun cleaning up. Look it all missed Ben's ring. How nice was that.
Stay turned for our next adventure.
SANDING THE DRYWALL!

Poo, Part 2

Well as you can see the city came out to dig up their side, so I went out in the rain to see what they could tell me. Well they had a camera and sent it into the poo line towards the house. So I got to see how bad it really was. Well folks this is where it gets interesting. You see the roots and grease and who knows what else I saw (an old rusted auger that broke off in the hole), well any way you get the idea, it had to be replaced. And if you can picture my face at this point in time. Yeah, well just be glad you didn't.
So they come out and give me a estimate and told me the worst case the middle and the best case scenario.
The guy was very nice and respectful, the whole crew was, they answered all my questions and didn't mind my nose in the way.
We had the middle case scenario, they didn't have to dig up our whole yard to run the pipe. They cleaned it out and put a 4 in pipe inside the old 6 in.. CLAY pipe. The Only problem they had is that the place where they wanted to connect it was rotted and they had to put a hole in our floor in the basement. Wonderful (I am thinking) so I call Ben and tell him what's going on. Anyway it wasn't to thick and he did a good job and they even cemented it back in for us.
and of course the outside you can see for yourself.

So that was this weeks adventure. We now have a new sewer system. All the way to the main. That should hopefully hold until after we are dead and gone.
Oh and by the way if you were wondering about the city's side. It was a whole lot worse then our side. Thank goodness the really bad part was on theie side.
So stay tuned for next weeks adventure.

There Was and Incident This Weekend

Well we had our first major disaster happen over the weekend. We were doing some drywall work in the kitched and needed to move an outlet. Trish went down into the basement to turn the breaker off and she hollered at me to come downstairs. She thought that the basement was leaking. Well not exactly. What had happened was worse. Much much worse.

Our sewer line was clogged and backing up into our basement. The spot above is where the drain is for the basement. I will spare you people the much more gruesome photos. There was a poo pond about 10 feet in diameter emnating from the center of the drain. This was Sunday evening.

Our next door neighbor owns a sewer cleaning service and he was home spending some time working on his yard and playing with his kids. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin this guy's idyllic Sunday afternonon and have come over and wade through our poo pond.

So I call him Monday morning to come over instead, not realizing that the guy works a 12 hour 6pm to 6am at one of the local factories as well. So the guy came over Monday morning after getting an hours worth of sleep or so to auger out sewer. The first run pulled a sizeable pile of roots and we assumed that was the major problem. After several more runs of the auger and some more piles of roots the drain had still not gone down. In the picture below you can see some remnants of the roots in the plastic bag. Our neighbor (Kent) tried a couple of other tricks of the trade to no avail. So Kent calls someone with the city to see if that maybe there is a problem with the main. The city says that there is no problem that they are aware of. This is three hours later and I need to get back to work. So I leave it in Trish's capable hands.

Kent tries a couple of different ends for the auger and eventually gets the poo pond to drain. This leaves a dry pipe that will allow the poo cam to see what the issue really is. So after some nasty TV watching on Kent's poo cam (I'm kind of sorry that I missed that part) they determine that the problem lies in the last bit of pipe to the city main. This means that it is the responsibility of the City and not us. Kent goes home and gets some sleep and the City prepares to dig up the last 12 feet of pipe.

To be continued...

OMG!! Blogger Worked

This a picture of one of the bedrooms downstairs. Right now we are just going using it as storage.
The wall to the right there is going to be removed. This will open it to the front room when you walk in the door. Please disregard the mess. All of the ugly stuff in the room (the fake plant and the ugly lamps NEED to be thrown away).
Another shot of the bedroom. The window on the right is on the porch and the one on the left faces north. The window on the porch needs to be replaced. We are thinking about using the windows in the theater room to replace this one with.
This is our current bedroom. Notice the detail work on the closet that the previous owner did. This room will be our guest room/office when we finish our master suite upstairs.
Another shot of our bedroom. Notice the vinyl "wainscoting" along the walls. It's hard to tell but it's upholestry quality vinyl. Think vinyl interiors of cars. In these pictures it looks like wood but I assure it is not. Also notice the extravaggant work around the windows. One more expample of the previous owners taste in design.