The experience of buying our first home (Cape Cod style)
For over three years our lives were wrapped up with fixing up our 1949 Cape Cod-style home. I will never forget the day we bought it. It was a week or so before our wedding day. The house was in MD, we were getting married in my hometown in WI, and we were off to Rome for 10 days on our honeymoon right after the wedding; we had to get this home-buying business over with before the wedding. We needed to close on the closing day we had set or we wouldn't have anywhere to live when we got back from our honeymoon.
The final walk-through was scheduled just before the closing appointment. We should not have closed with the house in the condition it was left. The previous owners had left the basement exterior door open. The walls of the basement were alive... with huge black crickets. I had never seen so many crickets before. The door was closed to the basement bathroom; when we opened the door, we were amost knocked over by the smell of mildew, as old wet rugs were rotting away in there.
Upstairs, the only trouble was standing water in the 2nd floor bathtub, which was clogged up, and the fact that the previous owners had exchanged a really pretty light-switch plate with one that had a clown and balloons on it. But the basement was really what made my heart sink.
At the closing, the husband and wife (he was a lot older than her, he was caucasian, she was Indian or something) were at war with each other. At one point we had to go into another room with our realtor while they worked something out with the lawyer. Finally we somehow got all the paperwork done, and --for better or worse-- we owned the house.
The first thing we did was buy a bunch of insect foggers and set them off in the house. My then-fiance dropped me off at my hotel and went back to his apartment, leaving me to meditate on the monstrosity we had bought.
The next day we came back and found that crickets don't seem to mind bug foggers very much. They were moving a little slower and I could kill some of them by stepping on them, swatting them, etc. I got brave and decided to look inside the washing machine. I found several crickets, and a huge black spider, poised for lunch! Ugh.
The floor refinishers arrived that day and pulled all the carpets out, then started sanding the floors upstairs. My fiance had to work that day. I was stuck in the basement, trying to clean up. I disinfected the bathroom to the best of my ability so at least I would feel safer using it. I scrubbed at the mildew on the shower tiles, emptying out bottles of Tilex. I started painting things, my first time painting really. It was my initiation into home improvement. I tried sponge-painting in the basement kitchen (it had been used as an apartment) which was to be my craft area. A huge spider crawled out from under the baseboard as I worked. I was painting things lavendar and purple. What was I thinking? None of that survived our ultimate remodeling of the house. But at least it helped me start to feel a little more at home in that house.
The next day I became intoxicated by fumes as they polyurethaned the floors upstairs. I just kept working in the basement, but that night my tongue was tingling from the poisons in my blood stream. Duh...
I also spent a day helping my fiance get packed up and cleaned his apartment. His lease was just about up, and he was supposed to stay in the house the night before he came out to Wisconsin. Well, he was there that night, though he didn't sleep at all... there was so much to do. I'll have to have him post his version of his experience with this, I know it was a fiasco dealing with cable men and security system installation, etc. I think I have blocked some of the memories.
Soon we all but forgot about our house concerns as we worried about getting married and going off to Rome, where we had the great honor of receiving a blessing from Pope John Paul II.
While we were there, terrorists crashed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania, and we were not able to fly home as planned. We were supposed to fly back from Rome through Newark, NJ back to Wisconsin, where we were driving my mini-van to MD. Instead we got a free flight from the airline to London, spent two days in the airport there til we found a flight to St. Louis, where we rented a car and drove to Wisconsin. At that point we just wanted to be back home, and were starting to look forward to getting back into our house.
It was still there when we finally got to it. We started having an exterminator visit regularly and in time there were no more crickets, and eventually he even got rid of the big black spiders that infested the whole place. The floors, which took a lot more sanding than our floor refinishers had bargained for, turned out beautiful in the end. Workers who came to the house complimented the solid construction of the place. Gradually we were able to settle in, and my parents came out to visit us frequently, helping us remodel, one huge marathon project at a time.
In my next few entries I'll post some before and after photos and share a little about the home remodeling projects we did.
