New Year's Repairs

Instead of writing a list of New Year's Resolutions, I thought I'd make a list of repairs that I'm going to be working on this year.  I believe I started this blog after buying our house, well after we got settled in, in fact, so that most of the initial problems were solved long before I started writing about life.  And for quite awhile, we didn't have many problems crop up, just the usual cleaning and daily care.  But the house was in pretty bad shape when we first bought it since it was a bank owned property where the owners were obviously not happy to have left their home.

I think I might first tell you about the state of the house, at least briefly, because from what I've heard it was originally owned by a couple, and you can kind of tell that things were going well.  They'd painted the downstairs, installed various shelving units in the garage and basement, put up wallpaper borders in the kitchen (bleck - first thing to go!) and at least for awhile, I think they had a pretty good home.  Somewhere in there, according to a neighbor, they moved to another town, allowing one of their children's families move in with their two young children.  You can tell that one room had been 'loved' to death by the sheer amount of dirt and crayon drawings on the walls.  Then another room must have had a special painting day with the kids helping because it was painted fuchsia pink and there were tracks and fingerprints of it everywhere throughout the house.  I'm still finding spots on the stairways, outside on the back doors, you get the picture.  They must have thought that the bright paint was a good idea because part of it was also in the second bath, but they ran out of paint and used a bright orange to finish it up.  I figured this room was for a pre-teen because every square inch of the pink space was pin-holed with, what I assumed were posters of some sort.

There was also candle wax everywhere.  This was a rather new addition to the house before we got it because over time the spots I was unable to get out of the carpet have turned black with dirt buildup and then I have to spend time repairing these spots on the floors.  There were also nailpolish spots and smoke damage in the master bedroom where I suspected mom or dad smoked under the bathroom fan, staining the counter with nicotine as they put out their butts, burning the floor's linoleum multiple times.

Almost every light switch cover was damaged or removed, all of the light fixtures and fans were gone, nearly all of the appliances were gone and so too all the blinds and even one of the doors was removed from its hinges.

Mind you, this wasn't the worst house that we'd looked at during our house-hunt a year ago (goodness, it's almost been a year since we started looking!) but it took me a good week to get all of those repairs completed, and the bank had to fix a gas leak too.  We had other problems over time, like bad lightbulbs and beeping smoke detectors, a garage door that we had to get openers for, and a back porch that I had to pound into submission so it wouldn't fall apart on us the first year.

During the summer months we'd pretty much solved most of our problems, except perhaps for the leaking sub-pump, which was thankfully a very easy fix.  Leaky sinks that my father-in-law repaired.  But overall, this house has treated us pretty well.

And then...

There's a leak in the basement.  We've been working on fixing it for half a week now, but it's leaking from a t-joint under the washing machine, and no matter what we've tried, nothing has stopped the leak.  Tape, epoxy, rubber sealant...  So that's number one.

The calk that I thought I'd repaired in the bathrooms is now cracking, so obviously I did that wrong in the first place.

The soap dispenser in the kitchen stopped working so we need to get a stopper for the hole and just stop using that all together.

The pretty wood floors in the kitchen I thought had been there awhile?  I think they were actually put in to sell the house because they're starting to fade already.

Not to mention all of the nasty holes in the linoleum floor in the master bath which needs a new coating.

The subpump pipe next to the house needs a better repair than the duck tape we used at the beginning of the year...

Well, you get the picture I think.



And yet, you're probably wondering, why am I sitting here blogging instead of getting on some of these problems now?  Well, it's because I spent a few hours putting up all of the Christmas decorations, and that is enough work for me!