We’ve been planning and thinking and buying things for the past week in preparation of this day and it’s finally here. We are planning to spend the next four days in the house, cleaning things up and throwing away lots of junk and just getting things in order so we can start construction on the kitchen and attic as quickly as possible when things are finalized with the house.
What we’ll be armed with:
Wet/Dry Vac
Pressure washer
Gloves
Face masks (for the bird cages)
Cordless drill
Tool box with various screwdrivers & wrenches
Inflatable beds
Food
Beer
I spent the majority of the morning making sure we have everything we should need together such as dog food and towels so we don’t have to travel back home at night. The farmhouse is only about 30 minutes away but it’s not a trip we want to make unless we absolutely have to.
Once everything was packed up and I couldn’t really think of anything else we might possibly need, I decided to head on over to the house. I had originally planned to be there around 14:30 or 15:00 because that is when our trash container was supposed to be delivered but I ended up arriving at about 14:00 instead. I unpacked everything from my truck and decided to take a few more before pictures just so we would have plenty of shots for documentation later on. While I was walking around, Ayla was loose and she wound up taking a swim in her little doggie “pond.” Normally this would not be an issue but the water was green and didn’t smell all that pleasant so I was not exactly pleased. After that, it was obvious that she was going to have a very restricted weekend because there was just too much for her to get into and if no one is there to watch her every second, there is no telling what she’ll get into. That’s the thing with 6 month old puppies, and especially stubborn Newfoundlands.
I was done with photos after about 15 minutes and so I sat down on the front stairs and just looked around at the property. That is when the incredible amount of work we were taking on started to hit me. I felt really overwhelmed as I glanced at everything and I started to wonder if we were making a huge mistake…thankfully, all these thoughts left my head about an hour later when the trash container arrived. Once that was in place, there were no reasons not to just get started…but where to begin?
Since I was alone, I decided I would start in the 3 storage rooms and work my way through those first so we would have a place to store things we came across that didn’t need to go into the workshop and may otherwise get misplaced if they ended up in the attic (we have two attics by the way – one is the top floor of our main house which we’re building out, the other is absolutely massive and runs above where the new kitchen and office will be. The latter is full of furniture which is where we plan to store even more furniture from the house as we clean things out).
The first room was so full of cleaners and furniture refinishing products and other random bottles and cans that I decided I would come back to it later when I was better prepared to deal with sorting through them all. So I moved onto room number two. The previous owners seemed to be using this room to store boxes for mini-furniture he had built, more cleaning products and generally random things like a shoe box full of individually wrapped toothpicks. Quite a bit of what was in there was tossed out. One of the most interesting things in this room, though, is an ancient washing machine. It is a huge drum barrel machine where you feed coals in the bottom to heat the water. We’ll be leaving this in the room for a while because it’s simply too heavy to move around often and it’s a rather interesting “appliance” versus modern technology.
Just as I was getting started on room three, my husband arrived home from work so I took a short break. We had originally planned that he would take the day off so we could start the renovation together but unfortunately that didn’t work out. So he took off Monday and Tuesday instead of next week so we will have a nice long 4 day weekend to really make a dent in things.
After the break, we both started in on the storage room and I noticed that he seemed to be having the same overwhelmed feeling that I had already had a few hours ago. I assured him that once he started working, the feeling would start to fade, and about an hour into it, he did indeed start to feel more relaxed about it all. It is an amazing and absolutely overwhelming feeling to stand in the middle of the courtyard of this house and notice the large number of things that need to be taken care of. We are incredibly lucky because the previous owners clearly loved the house dearly and put a lot of work into over the last 30 years. But after being vacant for 9 months, certain things were starting to get a bit out of control and there are certainly things that are need of repairs. There are few things that truly need renovation and we could almost certainly move into the house just as it stands today. But we want to really make it a home so we feel that the improvements we’ll be doing will be absolutely worth it in the end.
We were able to trash the first cabinets of the day in storage room 3 and threw away almost everything which was in the room. Found about the 4th tray of rat poison in there and it started to cross my mind that a barnyard cat may be necessary if the amount of poison he has out really reflects the number of rodents around here. I guess only time will tell.
Once we were done with that room, we started cleaning up a bit around the courtyard. We found that we’d already thrown away enough stuff to cover the bottom of the trash container which was rather surprising since we’d only been working a few hours. We continued working on various projects until around 21:00 when we started to get rather hungry. We had brought along homemade meatloaf (a recipe from our favorite Harley Davidson cookbook) and mashed potatoes so the plan was to heat that up and devour it. Unfortunately, there is no microwave in the kitchen so we had to heat up the meatloaf (which I’d already cooked earlier in the day) the old fashioned way in the oven.
Apparently I never did end up with the right heat setting because it took about 2 hours for it finally to get barely warm and we actually ended up waiting for some friends who were on their way to help us. They were travelling from Munich and it was about a 4 hour drive for them so we were happy to hear they also hadn’t eaten anything. We all dug into the food as if we hadn’t eaten in days and by 1:00 I was more than ready to call it a night. Since we’d set up the air mattresses in the living room, we didn’t have far to go and the only obstacle then was getting the dog to settle down since she seems to always have a major spike in hyp
eractivity right before we go to sleep. I think I was out the second my head hit the pillow lol.
