Sold!

We bought a house! There will be lots of work to do, but we agree that once we get it completed, it will be a wonderful house...... Although the list of work keeps growing......

So we closed on the house last Thursday. We knew going into it that there is some work to be done, but in the few days of starting to work on the house.... the excitement from closing is wearing off.


I'll start from the beginning. We bought a foreclosure, which also means we bought the house as-is. :-/ About two weeks ago, the property management group finally dewinterized the house (this was supposed to have been done 4 weeks ago). When they did, water went EVERYWHERE. The damage caused the plaster from the dining room ceiling to fall and soak my beautiful hardwood floors (now they need some love). So plaster goes everywhere, as does water. The house sits like that for 3 days when the selling agent checks on the house and sees the damage. He arranged for the water leak to be fixed and the plaster to be repaired. They traced the leak to an upstairs toilet, although I'm not convinced that it is the culprit. After repairing the toilet and a shoddy plaster job, we close and the house is ours now. Thankfully, we have already found a contractor to help us and he already anticipated water issues and has planned to rip open the dining room ceiling to repair the problem and properly repair the ceiling.

So this brings me to the days after closing, when I'm scrubbing dried plaster off the hardwood floors for 4 hours. They still don't look great, but hopefully they can be fixed. Fred and I are at the house yesterday and it's hot so we turn on the AC to try and cool down the house. As we're sitting on the dining room floor resting, Fred places his hand over the vent and realizes there's no air coming through despite the vent being open. We figure there's plaster down the vent from the catastrophe, so we stick the shop-vac down the vent to suck it out..... only it's not plaster.... it's about 2 gallons of WATER! That's right, water has been sitting in the duct. We think we sucked it all out and left the fan to the AC running to dry it out. We're now praying there are no mold issues. It's amazing how something that sustains life can be so destructive. On to the next project..... scraping the peeling paint.