Tuesday, January 6, 2015
First Christmas in Mississippi
I thought I would post pictures of how we decorated the Living Room for Christmas. This room is probably one of the rooms that needs the least work. We have to paint the ceiling, strip and stain or paint all the trim and sand/stain/finish the floors.
Monday, January 5, 2015
The Kitchen Ceiling
See how disgusting and dirty the ceilings are/were...the previous owners must have been pretty heavy smokers...
Sunday, January 4, 2015
The Kitchen
The kitchen was rather disgusting. In fact it was really disgusting. Your feet stuck to the floor as you walked. The cabinets had years of grease on them and the windows were filthy...one of the windows was held in by expanding foam a previous owner had used to fill in the holes in the frame.
Inside the cabinets, the previous owner had lined them with a sticky back plastic film...hunter green for the sides/walls, and white with green flowers for the shelves. You could see quite clearly where insects had walked. The smell was really not very nice. We did our best to try and clean things, but soon discovered that just cleaning was not going to work.
Here are some before pictures of the kitchen.
Original dishwasher which even had some dirty plates in it...
An outlet and wall covered in fly droppings
A good picture which demonstrates the foam under the window and level of grim that was on the kitchen floor and cabinets.
Even with all the grim, I could still see that this kitchen could be reclaimed. Eventually of course we will put in a brand new kitchen, but we were working on a budget and figured that at least the cabinets would work for us for a few years.
Just look at the color of the water in the red bucket!!! Yuck!
Betty trying to clean the floor with her tail!
The fan with pretty gross too - we decided to throw away the fan because after trying to clean we knew that it was too far gone!
Below is a picture of Betty trying to hinder our chances of working on the kitchen cabinets!
So, Charlie, who is an awesome little worker, decided it would be his job to pull up all the nasty sticky linoleum from the floor. He ended up having to pull up 2 and sometimes 3 layers of linoleum from the floor. I think it took him 3 days to finish. Once complete the floor finally looked clean, and then we moved onto the cabinets. I removed the doors, and removed all the sticky back plastic from the shelves, walls, and drawers.
Again we were hoping to just be able to clean the doors, but we had to scrub so hard to clean, the doors were losing the polyurethane finish and were patchy and really did not look very nice. For a couple of weeks we had doors stacked up on the front porch in varying levels "donedom".
Between Jessica, Sam and I we managed to get the all the doors sanded, stained and clear coated the doors, drawers and cabinets.
Below are some pictures of the kitchen in varying stages.
Inside the cabinets, the previous owner had lined them with a sticky back plastic film...hunter green for the sides/walls, and white with green flowers for the shelves. You could see quite clearly where insects had walked. The smell was really not very nice. We did our best to try and clean things, but soon discovered that just cleaning was not going to work.
Here are some before pictures of the kitchen.
Original dishwasher which even had some dirty plates in it...
An outlet and wall covered in fly droppings
A good picture which demonstrates the foam under the window and level of grim that was on the kitchen floor and cabinets.
Even with all the grim, I could still see that this kitchen could be reclaimed. Eventually of course we will put in a brand new kitchen, but we were working on a budget and figured that at least the cabinets would work for us for a few years.
Just look at the color of the water in the red bucket!!! Yuck!
Betty trying to clean the floor with her tail!
The fan with pretty gross too - we decided to throw away the fan because after trying to clean we knew that it was too far gone!
Below is a picture of Betty trying to hinder our chances of working on the kitchen cabinets!
So, Charlie, who is an awesome little worker, decided it would be his job to pull up all the nasty sticky linoleum from the floor. He ended up having to pull up 2 and sometimes 3 layers of linoleum from the floor. I think it took him 3 days to finish. Once complete the floor finally looked clean, and then we moved onto the cabinets. I removed the doors, and removed all the sticky back plastic from the shelves, walls, and drawers.
Again we were hoping to just be able to clean the doors, but we had to scrub so hard to clean, the doors were losing the polyurethane finish and were patchy and really did not look very nice. For a couple of weeks we had doors stacked up on the front porch in varying levels "donedom".
Between Jessica, Sam and I we managed to get the all the doors sanded, stained and clear coated the doors, drawers and cabinets.
Below are some pictures of the kitchen in varying stages.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
What we found when we arrived in September...and nasty stinky carpets!
1. A totally overgrown garden. You could not see the house for the 8ft tall weeds, over grown trees and bushes. When we were here in March when we first got the keys, things were over grown but no where near as bad as this. I can only assume that the bank who owned the bank paid for a landscaper to come in and cut everything down when they listed it for sale.
2. More trash than you can ever imagine. We knew that under the house there was a lot of trash, and also some littered around the garden. It seemed however, that since March, our house had been used as the local dump. I even found several broken garden chairs, and of course in the pool....uh pond....there was tons of trash floating around.
3. The dining room roof was far worse. Where we had laid down plastic in March to somewhat protect the floor, there was now a pile more of roofing material and drywall that had fallen down from the whole in the roof/ceiling.
4. An even nastier smell in the house from all the mold in the dining room.
We got straight to work and our focus was the kitchen, pulling out and removing any wood in the dining room wall and ceiling that had any mold on it whats so ever, and pulling out any carpets that were in the house (Living Room, Office and Blue Room)
Jessica and her boyfriend arrived and were a great help with all of these things, although I believe we had removed all the carpet before they arrived.
In the Living Room, there was hard wood floors under the carpet. Sadly in the office and Blue Room there is no hard wood floors so we will have to put some down.
Below are some pictures of the before and after carpet in the Living Room and the Office and the cleared yard.
This is the office prior to carpet removal - sadly I have no pics of the office carpet during removal or after, but will post some when we finally get around to putting down hard woods. This carpet though was more disgusting than the one that was in the Living Room. Once both carpets were gone, the difference in just the air in the rooms was remarkable.
2. More trash than you can ever imagine. We knew that under the house there was a lot of trash, and also some littered around the garden. It seemed however, that since March, our house had been used as the local dump. I even found several broken garden chairs, and of course in the pool....uh pond....there was tons of trash floating around.
3. The dining room roof was far worse. Where we had laid down plastic in March to somewhat protect the floor, there was now a pile more of roofing material and drywall that had fallen down from the whole in the roof/ceiling.
4. An even nastier smell in the house from all the mold in the dining room.
We got straight to work and our focus was the kitchen, pulling out and removing any wood in the dining room wall and ceiling that had any mold on it whats so ever, and pulling out any carpets that were in the house (Living Room, Office and Blue Room)
Jessica and her boyfriend arrived and were a great help with all of these things, although I believe we had removed all the carpet before they arrived.
In the Living Room, there was hard wood floors under the carpet. Sadly in the office and Blue Room there is no hard wood floors so we will have to put some down.
Below are some pictures of the before and after carpet in the Living Room and the Office and the cleared yard.
Living Room before walls and doors being painted and the carpet being removed...you can see the beautiful hard wood floors that were revealed when the carpet was removed.
This is the office prior to carpet removal - sadly I have no pics of the office carpet during removal or after, but will post some when we finally get around to putting down hard woods. This carpet though was more disgusting than the one that was in the Living Room. Once both carpets were gone, the difference in just the air in the rooms was remarkable.
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