We just got a call from my in-laws who have been kind enough to keep our sidewalk shoveled and that porch on our lovely garage cleared of snow. They had wonderful news. Our house, that we move our stuff into tomorrow, now has a built in main floor fire extinguisher system. One of our pipes on the second floor froze and burst, flooding our main floor, showering our house with water. Fun.

On the bright side, looks like our now water logged furnance will be replaced. And since the water lines burst above the kitchen, it received the brunt of it. New cabinets. And since the kitchen is above the only finished room in our basement, a bathroom,  it received the next blast. New bathroom.

Hearing this, Casey went from near tears, to jumping for joy. She wasn’t a big fan of the kitchen, nor the bathroom downstairs.

Back to more phone calls from 5 hours away…

Does anything look wrong with this?

If you said that the garage looks to be leaning to the left, you win. I am going to guess a bit on the history of the garage. I’m thinking that it was built either at the same time as the house, or very soon after. The stalls are just big enough to get our two Pontiac Grand Ams into it, with about a foot of space all around them. It probably would have fit a car built around or before 1928 with no problem at all. However, to us, it is beyond usable. We are most likely going to tear it down.

I rather despise having to destroy or tear down original items to the property, but, as I said above, the garage is just too small. Not only that, but I’m sure that ten years from now, it will have fallen down itself. Back to guessing again, I’m pretty sure that when it was built, they only poured concrete footings around the walls, but left the main are dirt. At some point, it was filled with concrete to form the floor leaving a crack between the footings and the floor. Anyone who lives in an area that spends half the year below freezing would know that cracks in concrete are usually a bad idea. In our instance, the top of the footings have tilted away from the concrete floor. The side that happens to be the worst is the left side, which has 2-3″ of a gap. Hence the leaning.

While I’m pretty sure there is little we can do to utilize the existing structure, we are all ears. Either way, I’ll be saving as much of the wood that is in good condition for future uses. I need an excuse to purchase a planer anyways

Days until the Penske truck arrives at our new (old) house: 4. Days until I can start getting detailed pictures of what I am talking about to make it that much easier to understand: 4. Tick, tock, tick, tock…

We’ll be closing on our (first) home next week and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the back story.

Around 2002, my brother began attending the University of North Dakota and ended up in a campus apartment. Since I had committed to going to the same school, my parents decided to help us out by purchasing a home in the area for us to rent from them while attending school. They settled on a 1928 fix-r-upper in the older end of Grand Forks. I remember the first time we walked through the home. The exterior paint was falling off in chunks, the house was completely carpeted minus the kitchen if I remember correctly. Not only was it carpeted, but it came with the wonderful scent of dog/cat urine. Who needs Febreeze when you have animal urine stained carpets? Looking (erm, smelling) past the wonderful carpet, all of the original woodwork was painted, the kitchen was extremely small, the garage about to tip over, and the basement crawling in creepy-crawlers.

My parents initially passed on the house being it was in pretty rough shape. After looking at several other houses, they kept coming back to this one. Eventually they ended up purchasing it. When we came there for the first time after they purchased it, we couldn’t resist tearing out all the carpet on the main floor (while holding our noses, of course) exposing the original maple flooring, with urine stains included! From there, the floor received the drum sander treatment, and the trim in the living room was warming to us (with a heat gun) and being massaged (scraped) free of paint (probably containing an abundance of lead) on all the trim.

The main floor ended up being the living area for my brother and sister-in-law. The second floor was marked for me as I was single (at the moment). Not long after, I gave my life up improved my life by marrying Casey. All the while, committed to the maybe 300 square feet on the second floor of the home. We left the couple rooms upstairs carpeted and stripped the trim and window trim in one of the rooms. Two years later, we move out to some apartments across town, “forever” leaving the house.

A year later, we find ourselves in Eden Prairie, MN (a suburb of Minneapolis, MN). It didn’t take long for us to miss our families hours away, and long for owning our own home. Well, it just so happened that my parents were trying to sell that house we spent a couple years in, during the worst time in the housing market. We couldn’t resist, and ended up buying the place from my parents.

The one nice thing about buying a home you lived in for a couple years, is that you know the house. You know which windows leak like the Mississippi, and what truly lies under that urine stained carpet. The one bad thing about buying a home you lived in for a couple years, is that you know which windows leak like the Mississippi and what truly likes under that urine stained carpet (vinyl tiles, yay!).

And for now, a teaser of the inside. If anyone wants to take a gander at the house style, I’d appreciate it! I’m leaning towards Craftsman, but I have no idea to be honest

It has been a while. Something like, oh, two years maybe?

Things that have happened since the site was last around:

• We received a little guy into our lives, Brendan James
• I graduated from the University of North Dakota with a B.S. in Computer Science
• We moved from Grand Forks, ND to Eden Prairie, MN
• I took a job with Rosemount, Inc (Emerson Process Management)
• Casey took a job with ACR Homes
• We bought a house… in Grand Forks, ND

So back to North Dakota we go. This blog will end up being both a personal blog, and a house blog as we document the updates to our 1928 home.

For the house, here are the things we have in mind:

• Flipping the stairs 180 degrees back to where they were originally
• Ripping out the second floor kitchen
• Add a bedroom to the basement
• Add a recreation room to the basement (TV + foosball)
• Install a clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom
• Build a new garage (original is much too small, about a foot of room on each side of our Pontiac Grand Ams, not to mention the fact that the foundation is literally tilting to the left a couple inches)
• Kill the carpenter ants…

Hopefully Casey will chime in time to time too.

It’s going to be a blast