Minimumwage Foreclosure

first and foremost, want to apologize for my absence. i’ve been ill due to the goblin bringing the plague into the house, and then steven having days off. i take days off when he has days off so we can do things together. sorry about that!

on with the show…

still skipping over the how we got to the house to what we have now. i know, i know. i skip around a lot. sorry, it’s part of my personality. i do lots of skipping around and then pull it all together. in the end, it’s the same result, just a different journey.

 

 

so, about that kitchen!  yes! the kitchen! well, the second weekend we were in the house, my good friends Cat and Tim came down and as a birthday present, were going to help me paint over the atrocious alpine green (again with the alpine green!), dusty rose (ugh) and yellow kitchen we had just acquired. i thought they were just coming down to spend a weekend painting and that was that. but noooo, my friends had devious plans of their own! silly rosalie!

they came down on friday and checked into a hotel (we don’t have a couch or anything really to sleep on here besides the beds we are in ourselves), and don’t guilt trip me, i told them to bring their inflatable bed, but they said they wanted some quiet time. well, saturday morning we get up and have breakfast and head to lowe’s hardware where i get the surprise of my life! their birthday present (my birthday was the monday of that week, march 2. i turned 30. it was traumatic.) to me was new handles and hinges for the kitchen, saying it would make the place a million times better looking! they had grabbed one of the handles from a cupboard door and we got to looking. 

turns out that whenever they updated the kitchen last, they used non-standard sized handles. this caused all kinds of problems and in the end we decided we’ll just get whatever we liked and drill new holes. everything was just 1/4 of an inch off. it made my eye twitch (that means i was getting nervous or upset, it’s a rosalie signal) but we worked it out. we also bought  crapload of primer (as mentioned in the bathroom priming entry). all together, it was almost 250$. i cringed and got really upset at the amount my friends were spending on me, but Cat shushed me and said we’re getting out of there cheaper than she expected. i insisted i put a gift card i got from Lou Diamond Philips on there, knocking it down 50$ (i spent the other 50$ he put on the card a few days earlier) and she had a coupon.

after getting our supplies we and eat lunch (we were in lowes for fricking hours!) to get our bodies ready to tackle the kitchen. so glad we did. the kitchen was a kitchen from hell…

again, my beef with the previous owners and their capacity of caring on craftsmanship knows no bounds. they painted over the hinges AND the handles AND the magnets on the doors. taking the doors off and the hinges off the doors literally took till late at night and there was three of us working in the kitchen. Tim was taking off hardware while Cat and i primed. as mentioned before, that green takes 3 coats of paint and there are a crapload of doors, so it was taking forever. one was so painted over and so stuck, it took Tim HOURS to get it out.

and then it happened…

see, the fridge we had was given to steven when he moved out of his parents house. it was actually the second fridge he had. the first one died for unknown reasons. he told his family who mentioned it to a friend and they had a fridge they were going to toss out, but gave it to him instead. this was an old beast of a fridge. not pretty and it leaked and got moist on the outside sometimes, and teh light inside didn’t work, but it kept food cold.

 

 

 

there is a spot where i wanted the fridge to go. it’s the empty area right next to the microwave. measurement wise, it should have fit. this house wise, it didn’t fit. nothing here is a right angle and some things go uphill, some go downhill, it’s like a funhouse. Tim took it as his mission to get the fridge in there. we almost did.

when looking at the cord for the fridge, we saw it had an adaptor on it. steven’s old place, everything had those on it. almost no three pronged outlets anywhere. we don’t need them here, so Tim and i took it off, with it came  the third prong and we got nervous. we shoved the adapter back on there and they wrapped it in electrical tape and crossed out fingers. poor Tim was a wreck and kept apologizing about ruining the cord. i said not to worry, it was like that anyways, we just made it apparent. then we plugged it up and went back to painting. a few moments later i went by the cord to do something (i don’t remember what) and the cord was hot to the touch. the fridge had a fever and we knew it would blow. this is where Cat and Tim got nervous and poor sweet Tim began to panic. he was worried we would be mad that our fridge broke and he thought he was to blame. obviously he is not to blame. the fridge was old, it was messed up, and working electricity (the power at the old place, as mentioned before did not work to full capacity).

of course i had to immediately call steven and let him know. seeing this was only our first week in the place and already this was the 6th thing to go wrong and cost us cash (we’ll get to the other things eventually. the toilet and the shower, as mentioned previously, were two of the things). he was angry, but of course not at  my friends, just the situation. he didn’t get off of work till 8 pm and everything in this area closes at that time. i started looking on craigslist to see if anything was being offered. somebody had a free one, but an hour away from us, and we had no way to transport it.

when he got home from work, we decided to call it a day as steven had to take a quick bath (the shower still wasn’t figured out at this point) and i did some research to see what places with fridges would be open that day. steven got mad at the guy offering a free fridge cause he didn’t want us to pick it up at a certain times, the times that steven was available to do so, so he said f*ck it and we ran off to best buy, getting there only 10 minutes before they close.

we figured steven could get a best buy card (we try to shy away from any kind of credit card) and maybe spend a little extra and get a cheap-o fridge. well, we were standing around waiting for somebody in that department to actually be in that department when steven saw it. it was marked half off because it had three teeny tiny dents and the logo was taken off. he applied for the card and got about a 600$ credit line, we paid another 400$ and got a fridge for half of what it should be.

the fridge: LG – 26.5 Cu. Ft. Side-by-Side Refrigerator with Thru-the-Door Ice and Water – Stainless-Steel

it’s pricetag said 999$. it was a steal and it was steel. it’s also 3 feet wide and wouldn’t fit in the space Tim tried so hard all day to try to make work for the fridge to go. we were also going to be broke as all hell for awhile, since that was the last of our cash saved up.

but this fridge should last us ages…

 

oh yeah, and we never got the kitchen finished painting. Cat and Tim left for their hotel when steven and i left for BestBuy. they felt so bad and were worried we were mad. we weren’t mad at them, just mad at the fridge and tired of spending cash we didn’t expect. for a week after they left, i kept painting the doors and what places i could reach in the kitchen. i’m still working on it, but that’s another entry for another time.

maybe tomorrow.