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.

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.