Yesterday we closed on the house and we wasted no time getting in there. The front door was beat up and in rough shape. I was not comfortable with the door that was on there. My mother works for a windows and door company so we were able to get a great new front door with really pretty stained glass.
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| This is the way the house looks now except the pillars have been painted. |
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| The new door in the front. |
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| The new door from the inside. |
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The new door was replaced this morning. It took the install guy almost all day to re-frame the door. Our house is really old so nothing is really level anymore and he had to re-build the frame according to the angles that the house has set at over the 120 or so year that its been around. After a days work, he finally was able to put it in and it looks awesome. The deadbolt lock is a finger scanner. The concept is totally awesome however I haven’t been able to get it to work properly yet. I ended up messing it up and the only way to reset what I had done was to pull the batteries out for 24 hours and then give it another try tomorrow. Hopefully I can get it! Then we will forever make Star Trek noises while scanning our thumbs to get in the house.
When I finished work today at 2:30pm, I walked down to do some more work in the yard. The back is pretty crazy and a complete mess. I did some cleanup until our contractor arrived. I thought that he was just dropping off his tools today, but within minutes we were tearing out that old kitchen. We first ripped down the drop ceiling and then tore out all of the built in cabinets that were probably original to the house. Each board that we yanked off was coated in 3 different wallpapers and covered in some sticky foreign substance. It was pretty gross.
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| First we tore out the drop ceiling. |
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| We then has to tackle the cabinet wall. |
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| Here is Al our contractor, about half way done with the wall. |
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| No mercy. |
After pulling down the drop ceiling and tearing this wall apart, we cleaned up and called it a day. There was so much dust I could barely see, I looked like a coal minor. Tomorrow we plan on tearing out the ceiling, and knocking out a portion of the wall to the left of the cabinet wall. This is going to open up the kitchen a lot more and really make it look awesome. The older houses are large, but most of the time, they are split up into smaller rooms. This kitchen needed something to make it bigger. More to come tomorrow!
Awkward moment of the day:
Our neighbor has a lawn service. Before we actually closed on the house, we would walk by it every day to see it and make sure nothing was going on with it. Nicole and I are a bit neurotic when it comes to these things. One day we happened to see the lawn service for our neighbor dump the bag full of grass from their mower into the back yard area. The backyard is shaped strangely and there is about a 3 foot section that belongs to our neighbor. They were dumping the grass on that section. I was about to explode. When you dump a pile of grass clippings and let them sit in the sun for days, the pile starts to rot and stink. I was not going to let this happen. This afternoon, while I was in the back cleaning up, I saw the neighbor and approached her to introduce myself. I then followed it up with, “Hey, do you always dump grass back here because it smells and rots. You can’t really do that.” She looked annoyed at me and proceeded to tell me that she didn’t know they were doing it. She then mentioned to me that its possible that they were using it to fill in the hole in the back yard on her section. I walked over to the pile of grass and stuck my foot in it to reveal the soggy, gross, hot, rotting mush of the old grass they had dumped last week. I immediately told her “Yeah but you can’t use grass it rots…” We exchanged a few weird words of pleasantry and that was it. 30 minutes later the landscapers came and tried doing it again! She didn’t even say anything! So I did. They no longer do it, but I am not off to a good start with at least one neighbor…
