so consider this a 30% chance of update with thundershowers.

lots going on otherwise, so hopefully it’ll all be good news soon (despite the fact the microwave is now screaming when you turn it on and mosquitos are in the yard despite the fact there is no still water anywhere).

hope all is well on your end of things. keep the hope alive!

noir was waiting for the bedding to finish being washed, so she hugged onto one of my scarves until fresh linens were ready.

and how was the dryer fixed? with steven and his dad taking it apart and figuring it out. in all honesty though, the dryer was kind of falling apart when the previous owners left the house (oh… those previous owners make me so angry) so it was no loss to them, but then it seems like they never tried to repair anything or do regular maintenance.  the dryer was already missing one of it’s tumble bars, and another one was loose, and the third seemed okay. it turns out it was the third one that was the problem. a screw that holds it in place had snaked it’s way back  from it’s place and was knocking around on the outer rim of the drum, making that horrible noise and the force was making it rock. they had to totally take out the loose tumbler, but they fixed that one. we are now drying with just one tumbler.  seems to work okay yay for steven and his dad!

so while they were doing that, the goblin was nice enough to get an extension cord out and hook up electric the weed whacker i bought at a yard sale for 5$ and give some of the yard a go. steven then tried to give the lawnmower a go but it kept dying and when the goblin looked in the house, it seems the extension cord was drawing too much power and the breaker needed to be flipped. this happened twice before he gave up and steven cursed at the lawnmower (now working because he’s mowing the yard today on his day off).

at the end of the day, steven and i went to go take a nice refreshing shower together only to find the hot water was quickly becoming cold. the next day steven checks it all out with his father and it seems the hot water heater is working just fine. the goblin had no problems when he took a shower.

but last night, man oh man, it lost it’s scalding hotness again.

like Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say “it’s always something.” oddly enough, my hair looks like hers currently just not as poofy. he he he.

tomorrow will be about the laundry room cabinet i scored from steel rod’s grandmother and how the install went. have a good monday!

okay, so it doesn’t look as all bad as that picture, but last night there was an incident. let me set it up for you:

the guys left to go gaming at a buddies house and i’m munching on dinner and lazing about the house with the dogs when i get the gumption to do like … 5 things at once (which is normal for me. either on idle or full throttle). i get a load of work clothes and undies in the wash and i start making this horrible concoction called a kool aid pie. while doing this, i’m cleaning up here and there around the house and piddling with some commissioned artwork, and picking up a book every few minutes and reading 3 pages at a time (i told you, idle or full throttle). once the pie is in the fridge, the artwork frustrating, and counters wiped, and a chapter ending, i go to put the wash in the dryer.  once done so, i set the time and then hit the button.

the poor dryer moves like the load is unbalanced and is making some horrible noise so i open her up and re-arrange things and close it back and start it up again. i stand and watch with a finger tapping my bottom lip as it continues to make the horrible noise and move side to side. i open it up and can smell some faint burning rubber. i take out half the load and close the door and try again, maybe it was too large despite the fact i honestly didn’t think that. same thing. frustrated i put it all back in and turn it off.

i go to turn the satellite radio onto station 4 (40′s on 4. i love love love me some big band music) and try to think as i pace. eventually i get really sleepy and go lay on the bed reading my book. while reading said book about serial killers, i come to the conclusion it must be a busted belt of some sort. it would explain the faint burnt rubber smell, the horrible noise, AND the wobbling. yes, my mind clears more when it’s busy than when i’m pacing. i fall asleep face first at a diagonal on the bed, drooling on poor steven’s pillow while dogs walk all over me.

the boys come home and i wake up because the dogs love to cause a welcoming commotion. it is their way of saying “i love you! i missed you! oh i missed you! welcome home! love me back!” so i get half awake and inform steven of said dryer affairs. this is where it gets from frustrating to making me mad.

the goblin pipes up with “oh yeah, it’s been doing that. it still dries, you just  got to deal with the noise.” he is named goblin because of such things. this gets steven riled up and i would have been as well of i was more than half asleep.

now i have a dryer full of wet clothes i need for work and all my undies… despite the pair i am currently wearing. oh, the misery and the woe. if it’s not one thing, it’s another. maybe i should put up a laundry line just in case of incidents like this, but do i really want the countryside and rabbits in the feild next door to be able to see all my polka dotted unmentionables? i dare not think so.

while sitting on the scraped, abused, roughed up floor and being nearly strangled by audio cord spaghetti, i thought about some of the flooring steven and i spied at home depot, but not lowes. it was click in place wood flooring with a black tint to it, but reflective. seeing as the walls are going to be mostly black, i knew that reflective sheen would be just right for this space. looking at the home depot website, i don’t see such flooring, sadly. i did find the exact same thing on another site, let me show you:

this isn’t quite what we saw, but similar enough. so, while thinking of this, i began to think of other ways to store said radio and audio receiver in a nice manner that could possibly also store other things. at that moment (when swearing profusely at some ac adapter tangled in the mess that i couldn’t fathom what it was supposed to ever go to that we didn’t already have hooked up to something), i thought about a beautiful cabinet i saw at ikea once. it think it would fit beautifully in the feel of the room, so i  got up and pulled it up on the screen to show steven. he agreed it is beautiful and maybe one day we could afford it. i sighed deeply, really tired of day dreaming about one days, but know there is no other way. but man, it would be amazing in the room. take a look!

both steven and i love things that have room underneath them. for me, i like the sense of open space and openness it brings. let us not forget the fact, way easier to clean underneath things that are open below them.

so, that as a cabinet with the audio equipment and then get little shelves (eventually) for the speakers through out the house (currently only four, more will have to happen… eventually).

i get too excited about making things pretty and get frustrated when i don’t have the means to do it when i have the energy and excitement to do it RIGHT THEN. it’s such a flustering realization. it didn’t help matters more that my hand was literally stuck in a jumble of cords at the time and in my frustration i went to shake a mighty fist at the cruel turn of events in which money didn’t fall from the sky to make my humble shack into a beautiful and amazing home, which lead to me hitting myself in the face with the previously mentioned fistful of cords.

ah, life.

1. steven’s birthday is coming up in two weeks but his present came early! we installed step one of it into his car last night and step two will be done later today! satellite radio!
2. steps are being made to figure out how to make the arcade machine for the arcade room!
3. steven’s grandmother is getting her kitchen re-done, which means i got to pick through old kitchen cabinets!

satellite radio everywhere!

so, for steven’s 28th birthday (august 1st, ya’ll!) i got him a satellite radio receiver, a car kit and an at home kit! how does this fit into the grand scheme of things in the house? well, eventually we’re going to wire the whole house with speakers and plug it between satellite radio and a big mp3 player (i have a massive cd collection) instead of keeping the two 300 cd disc changers i have. when i get home tonight i plan on setting up my very very old stereo system (i got it in 10th grade. over 13 years ago. geeze!) and plugging the satellite receiver up to it so that when we’re not in the car, we can listen to commercial free radio through out the house! i’m very excited because i know steven got excited over it. i love the boy and i love making him happy, but please spare me hours of Hair Nation, please…

this set up will be in a room we call a good handful of different names since nothing has stuck yet: arcade room, heart of the house, the middle room. it is a room smack dab in the middle of the house that we’ll be putting an arcade machine in, housing our vast comic library, and the music center. we’re deciding what exactly we want to do in that room, but it seems like it’ll be mostly black washed walls and dark dark hardwood floors. i might be doing comic and gaming murals on the walls in there, which will be kind of cool (if i may say so myself). it currently houses our comic book collection which i will be bagging and boarding every comic and setting them vertical in a nice shelving unit with tabs for easy finding. currently the only thing on the walls in there now is a piece of artwork i bought years ago by Mark Mothersbaugh (lead singer of Devo). it’s a giant black and white print of a crying cyclops and a girl, fricking amazing and huge. also in the room is my giant cd collection. i have over 500 cds. music used to be my life. since being broke for years, i haven’t been able to afford much, sadly. i had a three cds a week habit for a good while there. oh, those were the days…

arcade machine how-to

steven will be building a home made arcade cabinet for our home and putting it in this room. using an old computer and having it run a MAME, we’ll build a cabinet like we used to see in arcades to play different games on at any given time. again, i’ll be doing artwork for this on the sides, hopefully as bad, cheesy, and wonderful of our 80s memories can give me. we’ve begun looking at new monitor prices (flat panels on the cheap? thank you newegg.com!) and lumber prices to build from scratch.

and for me, i would love to have a glass blown anatomical human heart light as the lighting source in that room. no idea where i could find one and if i could, if i could afford it. heck, i don’t think i’ve even sold steven on the idea yet but i think it’s fricking AWESOME.

off of the middle room/heart of the house is what was described as a 1/2 bath in the listing for the home when we were thinking of buying it. it’s also the laundry room. these two rooms combined don’t give me any problems,  but how ugly it is and how nonfunctional it is gives me PLENTY of problems:

• it was never finished.
• they dropped the ceiling about 7 inches in an already low ceiling room.
• it has 4 different kinds of flooring. none match or even look good.
• it doesn’t have ANY storage whatsoever
• there was water damage on the wall that they never fixed
• they painted over perfectly fine paneling and did a shitty job at painting
• they put a random wall up for no reason and did a bad job at that, not even finishing it
• wires are just hanging out an about, there are holes in the walls. some holes attempting to horribly be patched up
• there is a toilet and a sink in there making it a half bath… but they aren’t even hooked up to anything! just sitting in there!

in an attempt to  make some storage for all the cleaning supplies and hardware supplies and the such that people store in laundry and work rooms, i put up boards i found laying around the house up on the walls above the washer and dryer with brackets from various rooms as well (the previous owners seemed fond of horrible ugly shelving and brackets, or nice ones they painted over ghetto style). those small shelves can only hold so much and honestly aren’t appealing. steven’s grandmother (who lives only half a mile away) is getting her kitchen overhauled with new cabinets and the like. she let me pick through what was being taken out and i got to get a nifty old double cabinet dealy that maybe tonight i will be putting up above the washer and dryer for more storage and more APPEALING storage. i am not that fond of the ghetto “let it all hang out” look of stuff on crappy shelves screwed into horribly painted paneling.

this is just a tide over solution until we can afford to fix up that bathroom. the ideas we have for this room will be cheap to do in the majority, but time consuming. if only money fell from the sky and kept it’s value…

i’ll take some before and after pics of everything just to show you guys!

fencing, it turns out, is crazy expensive. we really wanted nice metal gates, but holy goodness… there is no way we could ever afford to drop that kind of cash. so we looked into loads of different options and man, the majority of those options are just ball sucking lame.

plastic fence? please!  that stuff cracks and breaks like geriatric hip on concrete. vinyl? can you say totally bogus? yeah it’s easy to clean and wipe off but not all that sturdy nor is it’s appearance anything noteworthy. chain link? pah-lease. i may be broke and living on the cheap, but i ain’t that ghetto. there is no way you can make chain link look pretty. anything you can do to pretty it up makes it look even more sad. picket fence? as american as a flat top hair do on a blond dude with a giant gun. we’re so there.

looking at styles, we rather like the look of the french gothic, nice point and shape and the spacing isn’t large enough for our tiny dogs to run out through.

knowing what we want,  we started to attempt to closely find and compare prices. home depot and lowes are the options for pre-made sections and their price difference is a buck, can’t you believe that? also, can you believe that NEITHER ONE has fricking gates? that makes NO sense to me! none! what-so-ever! who wants to fence in a yard and have no option of leaving besides a running jump like a hurdle in the olympics? seriously.

so, we picked the style, figured what is cheaper (lowes is a dollar cheaper and 20 minutes closer), narrowed down the stain options (guess what! it’s grey! fancy that. man, he’s so predictable at times) now how much of the yard do we want to fence off? oh that’s a tricky question there. we can’t afford the footage to fence in the whole she-bang, so we have to be kind of selective of where. seeing as we’re not exactly sure just yet, here is a proposed  sketch of our yard and what i’m thinking:

this is the Der Fraken Haus yard.

• red: estimated yard lines
• white: where the picket fence could possibly lie
• blue line: handmade fencing or wall on the back patio
• thicker lines: gates
• light blue box w/lines: my studio
• blue boxes with x’s: where i might build raised beds.

flower beds inside the yard will be with flowers and foliage. flowerbeds outside the picket fence will be food (so the dogs don’t get into them).

maybe when i get home today i will go out and measure how much we might possibly need and figure out how to  block off the treeline so the dogs don’t get stuck in it (loads of poison oak back there i must kill as well).

more tomorrow on what else we’ll be doing with our measly stimulus check and cross your fingers w can stretch the finds as far as we hope!

when we learned of this amazing awesomeness (thanks to a tip from my friend Cat who sent me  the news articles to prove to the account this in fact was true and going to happen), steel rod and i made it clear that that money was going right back into the house, that way we instantly increase the value of the house the first year we own it by at LEAST 10%.

so where did we want to spend the money on the house? oddly enough, we decided on the outside. we have two small dogs who want to go out and be outside more often, so we decided we wanted fencing… then we ran with it and decided to overhaul as much of the outside as possible.

steven is a bit of an odd fellow.  he’s really surprising when it comes to what he likes in manners of home decor as opposed to what he’s like in personality and personal appearance, not to mention hobbies and lifestyle. the fact the house is actually legally his and i just live with him (and am pretty much his life partner), i outright asked him what he wanted. he said he wanted a grey house. we had that as a start. being a creative person we just bounced ideas off each other until it grew and we had something to work with mentally in our mind.

the end result of our excited conversation about what to make the house look like outside? in steel rod’s words “the addams family country home“.

okay, it'll never look like it, but we can try to get the feel!

yes, my boyfriend loves gothic architecture and look and writing, but not the subculture lifestyle. i know this because the majority of my twenties was spent in and out of goth clubs and such. he likes the aesthetic appeal of the actual literature and time frame of that writing style, but from a point of view of somebody who does something besides sit in a corner, wear black, and whine. so i was floored when he came up with this suggestion. he’ s not a vampire, he’s a vampire hunter.

since we bought a piss yellow ranch house with shit brown trim (in varying shades of piss and shit, as they kept running out of colors and even going so far as to not completely finish the painting the job in the back) with vertical metal siding, there isn’t much we can afford to do but paint it until we can afford the siding we actually do want. steven wants to paint  the main body of the house a shade of light grey. have the trim in a darker grey. black accents all over the place. sadly the house has orange shingles and we wonder if it would be bad to paint those black.

what would be like if we could afford it? our house with horizontal clapboard like appearance. still in varying colors of grey from light to dark with black accents. stone accents on some walls. or maybe grey brick look?

so this weekend we went to Lowes and picked out some colors he likes. the boy is going pretty dark in his color scheme.

these are olmypic paint colors: dover grey, knight’s armor, black magic. i am trying to convince him he should paint the majority of the house dover grey, accent 1 being knight’s armor and accent two being black magic. he wants to totally skip over dover grey.  he’s going straight to the dark stuff. oh, my boyfriend. it’s his house, he can do whatever he wants.

now that paint colors have been picked out, we think we have a painter in mind. we just have to get an estimate and cross our fingers it’s something we can afford with all the other stuff we want to do. so little cash, so much we want done.

here’s to hoping!

so man tests to take tomorrow! agh! including boobsmashing and bloodwork and inside pinching… oh my orifices will be probed and new ones made. i want to just curl up in a ball and whimper.

time to put the big girl panties on. the ones with polka dots.

wish me luck!

credit to www.ravensvoyage.com

i’m not your normal girl. i’m pretty sure you’ve figured that out already. my boyfriend isn’t you normal kind of guy either (i mean come on, we call him steel rod!). it’s a pretty nice pairing. both of us live in our own little worlds and both of those worlds are actually quite fantastical.

last night we had to make a trip out to home depot for a super duper el cheapo window ac unit since it would be 110 degrees in our bedroom when it was only 90 outside. whenever we get to a home improvement store, we just wander around literally for a few hours and day dream and “oooo” and “ahhhh!” and so many “oh! we could…!” kind of things. when we do this, if anybody else is in the area they just kind of give us this look like “you want to do WHAT to your place?”

every room in the house, we have a dream theme for. the living room is to eventually look like a world traveling adventurer lived there. one that hunted vampires (steven hates vampires, i love vampire folklore. we have a casket in our living room with both elements in it). his game room is to look like an old west saloon (we’re even looking for the swinging doors!). our master bathroom we want to look like a roman era bath. our bedroom will eventually look like trees are bursting through the walls and birds are nesting in them with jeweled eggs. the half bath and laundry room will be a full bath and laundry room, but done in the style of a 1930s prairie farmhouse. the center room will be an arcade and music room, with murals of comic book characters and a hand built arcade machine.

but the kitchen? the kitchen i want to look like a hybrid of a colonial apothecary and my imagination. oh, how wicked it will be.

i am a pretty decent cook, i wouldn’t say i am amazing. that i claim only for baking. cooking to me is like some science where some of it doesn’t make sense, it’s experimental, and it should make you feel better in the long run. also, my odd fascination with my kitchen having mostly clear glass and metal but yet a still welcoming feel all adds up to “apothecary” in my head.

another view of above shop

i’ve already started picking through yard sales and flea markets and buying what i could afford (a dollar here, 75 cents there, 3 dollars over there) in really nice clear but ornamental shaped glass containers for the kitchen. i love the look of things being collected or on display. i want to be able to see everything and then make beautiful ornate metal tags for them all as if i was doing something witchy that nourished the health of my loved ones. cooking is spell making, seriously.

now, traditional apothecaries are open aired, i want that to an extent. i want cabinet doors, but glass ones. i feel it gives it a more of a finished look. i do want to keep it older looking, though. distressed or roughed up a teensy bit. i don’t like bright shiny and new, i don’t feel that is welcoming to me. i want the perfect combo of home cooked love science ina relaxing enchanting kind of feel.

the color i want the cabinets is Rookwood Sash Green from sherwin williams. it’s the middle ground between green, blue, and grey. i look at that color and i feel like i want to take a deep peaceful breath, roll up my sleeves and get busy with as mile on my face. here is an example of it on a house. it is a historic paint color for the colonies.

eventually i want the horrible pink and green linoleum ripped up from our floor and have a nice walnut hardwoods, or heck! some walnut wood looking flooring. i’m not all that picky and know we’re not rich and can make due with what i’ve given. i also want nickel/pewter pressed tin tiles as backsplash and walnut wood looking counter tops, walnut wood (or walnut stained wood) crown moulding. and if we ever get into the attic space and see it’s not needed and just empty, maybe open up the ceiling so you can see the beams and put some skylights it.

it’s very hard to explain how refined, mystical, delicate, strong, welcoming, scientific, and display like i want the whole thing. i want somebody to go into that kitchen and want to sit down and just look around in wonder but not feel displaced from it all, but like they walked into something awesome.

cause if i don’t feel that way, i doubt i’ll want to ever clean it, be in there to cook, or eat my cereal.

i’ll leave you with inspiration pics, each a link to it’s source.

ps. i noticed nobody ever leaves any comments. that makes me feel sheepish.

Black Walnut Butcher Block Top

Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary, Alexandria

i love wooden shipping pallets. like, i’m crazy about them. i think they are just amazing and they come in so many crazy shapes and sizes. when i see one, i see a million things i can do with them. it starts some tingling in places, some places it’s not polite to discuss in most company so we’ll leave it at that.

i was pursuing some home decorating site (currently i can’t find, remember, or remember where i found it) a idea of turning a pallet into a plate holder in the kitchen. my mind went crazy with “yes! OTHER PEOPLE are using pallets for things!” and my pallet love grew.

i decided then i wish i had my own set of legal wheels and i would go store to store to turn pallets into household objects (baring Steel Rod wouldn’t complain), but mostly yard objects!

i wanted to turn wooden pallets into a sort of patio wall around our side patio so that once we put a fence up around the yard for the dogs to run around in, then won’t go over the side of the patio and out of the fenced in area. i drew up ideas and was ready to go, but had to wheels to go obtain said little wooden gems… so i kept thinking of what else to turn pallets into; so many things came to mind and one of them was even the fencing! but that would be a lot of pallets as we have a fairly large yard and i don’t know just how readily available pallets are and just how many places would actually let me nab them for cheap.

found @backwoodshome.com/articles2/sawyer69.html

because we bought the house this year, the year our president decided to stimulate our economy in various ways, steven and i are supposed to get a stimulus incentive for purchasing a house in this horrible housing market. we know we need a fence, it is of the utmost importance to use and people with two small dogs and also people who want some semblance of privacy. not to mention, some fencing is just adorable! we were going to use our stimulus check to buy fencing but oh how much it costs is insane. if i can convince steven to have us make fencing out of pallets that are being tossed out and are still in good condition, then not only are we sparing the landfills, but being able to use the cash we will be getting in other much needed ares of the house.

above all, we agreed the money being given to us for buying the house is going right back towards the house.

but i got off on a tangent! back to pallets! i want to make a nice wall around the side patio and that will be so wonderfully easy and cheap and we can stain it to match whatever and then seal it to have it last even longer.

this bad boy says it's for composting but i have other plans!

i called my buddy Sarah Meloncon on saturday while i was attempting to paint the interior of my shed studio in 97 degree heat and failing miserably. telling her of my excitement about my ideas and being a horribly resourceful yet gifted artist with a wicked cool imagination, she reminded me of Instructables website. i gave up on painting in the humidity and heat, went inside and looked up the site to see if they did anything with pallets. i found amazing rosalie porn. pallet ideas at every angle!

this badboy [found at Instructables: here] is supposed to be for composting, i have other plans! i want to make it and make it into something more attractive than just our trash can outside, a nice place to put the trashcan in and sort of “hide” it and making it blend more into the rest of the outside pallet use! even if we don’t make a fence out of pallets, we are looking at wooden fencing anyways and staining it. we’ll just stain it all to match. i can even make one for the lawn mower. Instructables has many tutorials on pallet inspired things including planters i had an idea for before seeing them on the site, but now i can alter other people’s ideas using them as a basis. there are plans for different planters and some furniture there as well on that site.

this beautiful bench was made over Holy Scrap Hot Springs and got my hands itching to replicate it so i can sit under one of my many trees in my yard. i’m totally stealing this idea and putting it in my yard. so cheap to make and so lovely to see!

i can keep going on and on, but my lunch hour is almost up. oh, believe me… this won’t be the end of hearing about my pallet love. a co-worker of mine (hi, Nicole!) said she would love to help in me working on stuff for the house this week due to the fact her cute little daughter is spending time at grandma’s and mom wants to create. thank goodness for friends who want to get their hands dirty and make things beautiful!

so, now that the storage shed has moved and i have the majority of my art making/crafting/creative endeavor supplies stored in there, a LOT of work needs to be done.

granted, this isn’t my dream studio, but it was an unexpected bonus to the house i’m going to take advantage of. we can’t afford what i want (one of those little house looking dealies with the teeny front porch on them and window boxes for plants or maybe make it look like a church), so i best make due with what we got! being the creative sort, i usually don’t take something and leave it as it is. it’s just something creative people just can’t do.

for one thing, there is no windows in this sucker and boy howdy that makes me antsy. there is nothing i love more than natural light when creating. oh, it is ever so important to get your vitamin D and see things in actual light. plus i am very proud of my house, my yard, and the beautiful field next to us. i got some lovely old windows from a fellow home improver on freecycle. she gave me 4 windows from her 1940 built home on a lake. mine is a 1938 built home that was once a farm. i thought it cute and fitting, but how to fit those windows into the actual walls of the storage shed, i have no clue. i am not that handy and will likely need help. i would love some skylight as well. as i said, i am window crazy. if i had my way, half of it would be windows but that would be a bad idea on my materials inside, greenhouse effect and all.

the doors to the shed are going to get a revamp as well. i am going to cut out the middle of the doors and replace them with plexiglass and then hang curtains up so that when i am not inside i can cover them up, but if i am inside and the weather is not to my liking, i can still see what is going on in my yard.

the outside will also get a makeover! if i can get the windows put in, i might put some window boxes on them or some shelving underneath for gardening tools and the like. one day i would love a teeny porch just cause it’s cute. it’s most defiantly getting a new paint job. the cracked and peeling white has it’s charm, but the red slapped over some blue trim just looks tacky. it’ll more than likely be some muted blue color cause that is what i like best. muted tones, even if my art doesn’t reflect that.

also, my not-quite-my-father-in-law said he is going to dig and run a line to the shed for power so i can get a fan and lights going to paint at any time: day or night. being i get inspiration at the oddest of times, this is most wonderful he knows a good number of people and one guy is selling him/us equipment for cheap and maybe helping install. i am not privy to all the details at the moment, but i am VERY excited.

i will be painting the walls white as to not conflict with whatever i am painting. color and light bounce, so when i am painting, i find it best to have white around as to not add color into my vision that isn’t actually the paint i am using. this gives things a nice even keel and its actually quite calm and clean in appearance, but hard to KEEP clean in appearance.

for the flooring in there i was given two big boxes of very pale grey ceramic tile. being the person that i am, i can’t lay just plain tile in an studio i need constant inspiration from and i plan to collect broke tile from many sources and make the floor into a broken tile mosaic! oh how amazing and beautiful i think that can possibly be!

i already have a shelving unit in there; the now discontinued Enetri shelving unit from ikea. it’s on the back wall and hold so much stuff so nicely, neatly, and perfectly. eventually i would love to have everything so beautifully and magically organized. i would also love to run down to the ikea in charlotte and get stuff to organize with. they have wonderful selections of stuff in the kitchen area i could easily implement into easily accessible storage space.

there is just so much potential in that tiny space and i am excited about using it. this is all just wishful thinking at the moment but as it slowly become reality, i will take pictures and tell you about it.

being somebody who deeply believes in recycling and upcycling and sharing the wealth, if you are local and know of any thing i am wanting/needing for free (used or otherwise, i’m not picky and can fix things up) don’t hesitate to let me know! i do encourage people to look at their local craigslist and sign up to their local freecycle mailing lists if you are looking for, needing, or wanting to give things away rather than them end up in one of our many already overflowing landfills. links are the right!

they accept our bid, we felt so relieved! we (meaning i, since steven doesn’t dance) did a merry little jig. we asked “what do we do now?” and we were told all we had to do was finish paperwork with the bank and it would be about a month before the house will be officially ours.

head on down to bb&t and find out our interest is even lower than the 7%! go steven, with your on-time-always-paying-your-bills-even-with-your-minimum-wage self! yeah! more paper work and days go by. i keep asking what else we need to do. the bank tells me i’m fine and have nothing to worry about, so i keep packing up the place we were renting and making plans for my 30th birthday party (a mere 3 days after we get the house!).

we even ask my old buddy mike, who used to be a contractor, to give an unofficial inspection of the place to see if we’re not about to toss money into a pit and set it on fire. he is upfront and honest and says it does need a lot of work but is livable and not bad for the price we’re going to pay. but he wanted to emphasize this wasn’t an official inspection. he is no longer a contractor due to health reasons, and can’t give us anything official. we say it’s just for us to get some kind of idea of what work we would need to do to it. he smiles, knocks on the wood and says he thinks this is a good buy if you’re not afraid of hard work.

i border on annoying asking the bank what we need to do next and they tell us everything is going smoothly. that wasn’t enough for me, though. all the things i had read up on, mentioned things one needs to do, but i knew since we were buying a foreclosure it was a little different.

less than a week before we close, the bank asks us if we did all the stuff we needed to do with the group giving us down payment assistance. steven and i give this confused look to one another since i have been asking for the past 3 weeks what i needed to do and everybody told me to relax, and they pull this on us the last week? we set up the earliest appointment with the fellow, the monday before closing. he seemed very much aggravated with us and we try to explain to him we had no clue, we asked and nobody told us. apparently we were supposed to take some classes on buying a house and get an OFFICIAL inspection and a few other matters, but those were minute. i was enraged. why didn’t the bank even tell us we were supposed to meet with this fellow in the first place? i kept asking what i needed to do and i hate doing stuff last minute when i could of done it weeks ago.

and then there is the matter of getting an official inspector out to the house last minute and do it in less than 24 hours and pull the magical money out of our asses to pay the fellow for his work. a mere 4 days before closing. i spend the next 5 hours trying to find an inspector that could and WOULD do it in less than 24 hours. being a very anxiety ridden person as it is, this pushes me over the edge. i sit down, write a very polite and elegant email asking the fellow in charge of our down payment assistance if it was possible to accept the unofficial inspection if i gave a detailed list of what needed to be done to the house and it’s condition.

being that everything was last minute and he understood this last minute bullshit wasn’t out fault, he said he could accept it if it was was done professionally. i thank him so very much and spend the  next 3-4 hours typing up the inspection report like it was official. due to the fact that is unorthodox and i’m not supposed to tell anybody he did that, i save the organization’s name for they did me a great favor and saved us 700$ we didn’t have to spend anyways.

3 days before closing that debacle gets cleared up at the end of the business day and i got no packing done. did i forget to mention i was not only planning a move, arranging buying a house, packing, planning my 30th birthday party, but also trying to get things straight for when my family comes down into  town to help us all with this? to say the least, frantic hell is breaking loose.

i thought that was that. i could concentrate on packing till my family got here and we bought the house. how wrong i was.

the bank calls the next day and thanks me for getting all of that straightened out, but the appraiser just gave them the report and everything looks good except a piece of fascia board is hanging from a nail. i say “okay, and?” they tell me…  we have to hire somebody to fix it by the end of the day.

whoa. wait. what? what the fuck? no. whoa. wait… you want me to do WHAT!?!? 2 days before closing? you want me… to get somebody to go onto private property and fix something… i don’t even own? and you want it done by the end of today? what the fuck!?!? i hang up and call steven at work. he gets freaked out with how fucked up that is and i call the lawyer presiding over our closing. you know what she says to me? “well, why don’t you fix it?” my eye starts to twitch with how angry that response gets me “because it’s not mine. i don’t own it. isn’t it illegal to go onto private property and mess with it? how is this legal?” i can hear her dismiss me “well, if you want the bank loan, you oughtta do what the banks asks.” then you know what she asks me? “do you know when the bank is going to send over the paperwork for us to go over? we need to draw up the contracts.” TWO DAYS BEFORE SIGNING and the lawyer doesn’t have the paperwork.

so mad at this point. all this last minute unprofessional shit the bank is pulling on me is making me so angry and i deeply questioned the legality of some of these shenanigans.

i call up the bank once more and ask what exactly is needed to get this over and done with. i need a quote and receipts of the cost it would be to repair it and have it signed by the contractor. i said i was going to do it personally with the goblin, and they said i still needed to write it up like it was an official thing.

we go and fix the dang thing, in the misty rain, with a hammer and nails we had to unpack and a ladder we had to borrow. after it was done i take the above picture with my cellphone and tell them it’s fixed and we head back to give them xeroxed copies of the receipt (i no longer trust them with anything original). then i go home and i try to calm down, but it’s really hard to. i don’t get the last of packing done and my family shows up the next day.

the bank calls to tell me the paperwork looks good and they are going to send the appraiser back to take a picture of the fact it was fixed. i tell them i took a photo and they retort it has to be the appraiser and  that it won’t be of cost (they lied, cause when it’s all said and done, i looked over the paperwork and they charged us 50$ to go back and take ONE PICTURE that i am sure was with a digital camera). i ask them when the lawyer will get the paperwork since she mentioned that she needs it right away in order to get it done in time. the bank  tells me they can’t release it until they get the photo from the appraiser.

now the problem is this. the house is a foreclosure. we signed a million papers saying we will take the house AS IS since it is a foreclosure and not a person owning it who will make repairs at their cost in order to sell the house. these were papers drawn up by the bank selling and we signed and the bank giving us the loan knew this. and the one piece of fascia board isn’t the worst thing needing fixing. not in the least. we have two broken windows and the stairs in the back of the house have a broken top step. why that one piece of fascia board was more important or even that important, we still don’t get any answers about except “because the appraiser pointed it out“.

oh my anger was large.

the run down front in the march sun

while thinking about whether or not we wanted the house, we decided to see what kind of loan we could get IF we did want the house. i did some more research online about assistance in down payments and living in rural areas.with that info, we planned to go to his bank and see about a first time home buyer’s loan and the different assistance we can get in conjunction.

we went to his bank to get a loan. his bank is wonderful and totally amazing, except for one fellow there. as soon as we sat down to wait for a loan officer, we saw the guy and steven goes “oh please no…” and yep, that is who was taking our case. we’ll spare the fellow’s name but he wasn’t helpful in the least, didn’t really look up much of steven’s information and suggested we  go someplace else. this is the same response steven got the last time he had an interaction with the guy and it gets him really angry. when steven was last looking for a loan, it was to purchase a newer car. he got this fellow, left the office mad and  then came back later and talked to another guy who praised steven for his good credit and said his bank is more than happy to give a loan to a responsible and trustworthy fellow. seeing as we got the guy that ticks steven off, i had to calm down my sweety when we got in the car and discussed our options. we headed off to talk to a lady The Agent had suggested.

we head over to bb&t and the lady sees us to talk about his money matters from the past, present, and future. his standing at work, if we’re going to live there and a million more personal questions that are linked to money. she looks up his info, get a credit report and is blown away. she more than happy to offer him a loan with her bank. with only doing quick figuring she gives us a number around 7% interest. -we- are blown away. she tells us she’ll do more figuring and get back to us and also gave us some homework to do with his end of stuff.

it was only a few days of contemplating when we got a phone call from The Agent, Polly Leadbetter. she informed us that that morning 3 more people were shown the house and if we wanted to put a bid in, now is the time. that is also when we were informed that the cost of the house dropped 10k the week before and that is why there is suddenly so much interest in it now.

biting my lip i hung up the phone and told steven that if we wanted the house, we had to act now. we needed to pull AT LEAST 500$ out of the air as a good faith down payment along with a bid.

steven hates asking for money. ever. at all. he’s a very proud fellow who feels that he should be abl eto take care of himself and never ever need help from anybody and he usually doesn’t need any help, but he did just do his taxes and he does know how much he has coming to him soon. we borrowed the money from his grandmother with promise to pay it off ASAP and wrote up the bid on his counter at work.

our hands were shaking when The Agent left with both the bid and the check. our future was changing oh so fast.

did i mention that all of this is happening in less than a week’s time?

this building is being turned into my painting and art studio! (this was done before we finalized buying the house in february.)

because it was on the far corner of the property (on the side we actually have a neighbor) and facing away, we had it moved behind the house to another cement slab that was left behind and actually facing towards the house. this was done this past weekend by an amazing old friend i know from my theater days, Greg Carswell. because of many health problems, he wasn’t able to do it sooner but eventually said “you know, i don’t have to get off the tractor!” so he just drove his big old tractor from his farm over to our yard, and with the help of strapping young lad by the name of Alex, they moved my shed for me! not only that, but while he waited for me to make sure nothing inside the shed would break while he moved it, he mowed my lawn. bad.ass.

here is the view from the spot the building was moved to, you can see how far it had to travel. (this was done before we finalized buying the house in february.)

steel rod’s dad knows a good number of people, some of whom are electricians. being one who wants to help out and make the home a better place for his son to live, my not-quite-my-dad-in-law broke the news to me on sunday that he is going to come over and dig in the yard, bury me a line, connect my studio to power, put in some outlets, and even hang up some lighting! go, not-quite-my-dad-in-law! how awesome is that? i can be painting as early as the fourth of july!

i have to go in and paint the inside and a friend of mine gave me two giant boxes of tile she’s not going to use. at first i thought i would tile the floor with that, but now i’m thinking “if it’s going to be MY studio, why don’t i go whole hog?” so i am going to go on freecycle and ask for any and all tile, broken and not and maybe even mirror pieces and make my floor a tiles mosaic! no set pattern or picture, just loads of broken tile and maybe broken plates….. ooo i keep getting ideas. i think that could be beautiful since everything else will be primed white as to not interfere with me seeing paint colors for what they are when i’m working.

off of freecycle i got some windows and i want to put them into the side of the shed to get some natural lighting but am unsure of how to go about that and not mess up the shed. honestly, though… natural lighting just makes all that much more differance when painting and just feeling good about life. hrm. maybe i can find somebody to help me with that one. i did borrow a jigsaw from somebody!

i’m so excited. i may live in a shithole, but it’s our shithole and we’re very very very slowly but surely making it nonshitholey. and now i have my own painting and art studio! holy crap!

don’t EVER let anybody tell you that money gets in the way of things. if everybody pitches in and helps each other out, everything works out for everyone. i am so proud of the way my life has turned out and who it’s led me to.

and i got an art studio. HA HA HA.

pics of the haul!

i don’t think you know how angry and frustrated i was. but you have no clue why, so let me get to that.

i was in the bathroom when i saw a corner of the linoleum peeling up. i gave it a tug to see what was going on to find yet another layer of linoleum below. i rolled my eyes but my curiosity got the best of me, i wanted to see what was below that. oh man, it was beautiful hardwood floors! excited, i started pulling up both of those layers and thinking “refinishing hardwoods is easy but hard work. easy but hard and reasonably priced! and so beautiful in the end result!” that is what i was thinking, but i forgot we had bought the house the previous owners were real dicks about.

why was there TWO layers of linoleum? because there was water damage they wanted to hide. one layer would give way so you could feel the rotting wood beneath but two layers made it more sturdy and not so noticeable! oh these lazy bastards thought they were so smart…

so i peel up both layers and i see rotting wood, water damage and HIDDEN GIANT HOLES! yes! you read that right, big old holes. how did i not feel those? well, it’s between the sink and the tub and there isn’t any room there. they just laid a piece of plywood on it and i guess they thought that was that. the hole isn’t just on the floor, but as stated before is underneath the sink as well, where they ingeniously put a piece of carpet as if it would fix everything.

now why is the wood rotting? it seems they took out the wall behind the toilet and replaced it with a sheet of faux tiling. the ridiculously funny thing about this all is they left the edging of the wall that once was there behind this sheet of faux tile so you know a wall WAS there at some point. what is between the sheet of faux tile and the outside wall? a thin piece of plastic sheeting. yep. that’s it.

now, what is happening is every time somebody takes a shower, condensation collects on that piece of plastic, beads up, drips down and settles on the floor, rotting it slowly. HOW WAS THIS A GOOD IDEA!?!? DID THEY NOT THINK OF THIS???

oh the rage. the fiery red horrific rage. and the rotting around the toilet? well, that is just because they never sealed the toilet. so they slapped another layer on the linoleum they must of already had and called it a day instead of fixing the fact the floor WAS ROTTING.

stated in the video is the black on the floors is mold. it is not. as soon as i stopped filming i bent over and scraped up some of the substance. it’s actually adhesive from previous flooring. oh thank god.

but that is why i’ve been silent. i was so angry, i threw down any and all work i wanted to do because of frustration to the point of almost having an aneurysm and the lack of money to fix these problems.

but things have picked up as mentioned earlier. the ball is rolling and life is going on. one day i’ll get back to fixing that bathroom, but it’s not anytime soon.

from our back yard facing toward's Glenda's back yard

i know, i haven’t updated. it’s because of a horrible incident with the bathroom floor that made me throw down my tools and give up my want for home renovations or anything home improvement related for a good long while or else i would of hunted down the previous owners and shot them in the face in a blaze of questions closing sounding like “HOW COULD YOU!?!?” in a shrill voice with wild hair and in jogging pants covered in plaster and paint.

to top it off we have had so much problem with the bank, even after we’ve already signed everything and we thought “that was that! now we just make monthly payments!” but no…

let me just say, don’t ever get a mortgage with BB&T. i’ll just outright say that. do NOT. heck, just don’t bank with them. i did before we got the mortgage and got screwed over, but i though that maybe the bigger business side of them would be more reasonable, responsible and mature. nope, it’s worse.

so, instead i put the tools down and walked away from anything having to do home improvement for awhile. also, finally landing a job helped with that immensely! it’s amazing how much time a job takes away from swearing at previous owners of a run down home.

the previous owners… [shakes head] i swear.

steel rod and the goblin walk with Noir

since tossing down the tools INSIDE, i’ve been working on the outside. trying to get a garden together and wrangle the rose bushes they left behind. let me say… my anger for the previous owners goes from INSANE to OH MY GOD, HOW COULD YOU!?!? but seeing as i am outside doing work, when i kick things, they aren’t of a monetary value unless i break my foot.

things i’ve found in my yard (this is just a small list mind you, a long list would scare the ever living shit out of you):

• two lawnmower batteries buried right underneath the surface, so if you mowed the lawn right over them…
• boards with nails in them underneath layers of hay
• broken glass in the garden beds
• car speakers
• a screen door
• condoms
• 2 and a half foot long nail with chain
• shampoo bottles

the list goes on and on. remember, i don’t live in a ghetto. i live in a very quiet and very nice neighborhood. Glenda, my neighbor, said there was constant yelling and fighting at this house. so much anger in the walls and when they left, at the walls.

it’s been a lot of fixing up and cleaning. the pile from things i found in the yard is up to my hip and about 4 feet wide and i still have so much more to do! but since steven and i never have the same days off, i do it all by myself and it’s tough work in 90 degree weather but so rewarding.

tomorrow i will tell you about the horror of the bathroom floors. today, just enjoy the photos of the yard at sunset.

noir in the setting sun

the feild next to us

last rays of light

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.

my younger brother and his brother from another mother on closing day

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.

that empty spot all the way on the right is where the fridge was to go

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.

i know i promised pictures, but i thought a video would be easier and nicer. granted i might be repeating myself here (from video to type) but some points need to be made. three coats of Kilz, whew! that alpine green just won’t give up the ghost! i had the same problem with it in the kitchen (which we will discuss at a later time and date. that is a beast of it’s own).

the bathroom feels 3 times larger and looks so much brighter. not to mention, it also looks so much less run down and ghetto. all with a half of a gallon of primer. wooo doggie! cheap fix quick and fast! just look at how that horrible faux tiled wall sort of blends in now more than it sticks out. so crazy. it’s refreshing.

i took a bath in there and i didn’t want to wash and run. i even took my time brushing my teeth, it was a delight. that green just makes a room feel so much more clastrophobic, and not to mention it was painted badly. so much damage was done because of that paint and when i was priming, parts just kind of fell off of things, like the plastic toilet paper holder came off the wall. it seems before the alpine green was wallpaper they just painted over. once they decided to paint over it, they screwed cheap plastic things into the wall and attached cheap plastic things on the wall with some kind of adhesive. when the toilet paper roll came off, so did some wallpaper and some wood it was badly screwed into.

i swear, the previous owners just didn’t give a crap about the way things worked, looked, or functioned. hell, i found bugs SMEARED into the wall underneath the mirror, partly painted. so you know they saw it, smeared it, and then brushed it over. dear lord.

i promise you, not all poor people are classless or careless. some of us work very hard for what little we have and we appreciate it and take care of the best to our abilities. and then there is the previous owners.

back to the bathroom and it’s new whiteness. it’s new hotness. this obviously isn’t the direction we ultimately want to go in, but for now it’ll do since the paint is here, might as well use it. i’m gonna paint some accents the same colors found in the shower curtain.

again, a cheap easy fix. if i had a ladder it would of been done in one day (at least the white parts). i think a gallon of the primer was some where around 12$. this was a 6$ fix. how’s that for changing the feel of a bad room on a budget??

shiver at the horror of that horrible alpine green!

i’m going to take a break from writing about how we got this beast to what i’m currently trying to do to it, one room at a time. today we’ll talk about the master bath and the horrors it has brought us and how today i’m gonna whip some of it’s sad ass in shape.

the above photo is of the bathroom the morning we bought the house. oh the surprises it had lurking for us, waiting for us, hiding from us. ready to taunt us and laugh silently.

apparently the people who lived here before either didn’t care about how to do things right or…. didn’t care about anything. they slapped paint on, literally. it was slapped on. it wasn’t carefully applied and the whole purpose of painting something is to make it look better than what it was before. there are paint streaks in places that weren’t supposed to have paint on them, and they just painted over hardware and dead bugs. that is right, ladies and gentlemen, throughout the house, where ever they have painted, they just painted over what laid in front of it. dead bugs, clumps of dirt and dust, whatever was there.

don’t even get me started on how badly they painted the kitchen. grrr!

but the paint isn’t the only problem with the master bath. oh, no. far from! we’ll talk about function first!

this bathroom doesn’t really “function” in the ways normal bathrooms function. the sink actually pulls away from the wall. under the sink i found a piece of carpet that was rather gross, and when removing it, found it was actually covering a giant open hole to underneath the house where any critter could get in and things can fall out. the fan and exhaust are loud and noisy and don’t really vent anything. the shower head they left didn’t rain water down on you, it pounded you with a hot mist that made every surface in the bathroom wet for hours (since the fan didn’t work) including the outlets. it took us a week to figure out how to turn the shower on from the bath, because you actually have to pull on the bath spigot, which is made of cheap plastic, and the spigot isn’t attached to the wall of the bathstall, no, it juts out, easy to knock around. the bathstall itself is one of those horrible install-a-stall jobs done badly. they installed it over a useful window! not to mention the size of it is so tiny and cramped as it is. the cream of the crop of the non function bathroom is… the toilet didn’t work for two weeks.

that’s right folks, i had to poop in a bucket. oh, modern spoiled america!

we used three different types of plungers. two different kinds of plumbing snakes. that horrible acid smelling stuff you buy at the hardware store. even yogurt! all to no avail. what was it that was stopping up the toilet? well, the goblin found out when he unbolted the toilet and reached a gloved hand down there. the previous owners must of had lots of hate in them, because they flushed down a box of qtips, but with the plastic bars, instead of the fibery cotton. all the cotton had been eaten away by our acid stuff, but the plastic bars were crisscrossed in such a manner, nothing solid would go through, but did give leeway to the snakes poking down and about then would later reconvene like a baptist church on wednesday night to make troubles again with our pipes.

i hope never to poop in a bucket again in this house. in the woods, in a third world country, in the doctor’s office lest i get the bowel cancer, but never in my house again!

it also wouldn’t have been a problem if the half bathroom in the description of the house meant more than just somebody sitting a newly purchased toilet and sink in a room, but never connecting them to anything.

so these are the horrors of the master bath linked to functionality. onto the cosmetic!

that horrible alpine green. dear lord, it makes me gag. not to mention once more, the fact hardware is painted over, which makes life a little harder when you’re trying to correct alpine green mistakes. let us not forget the odd one vinyl sided wall made to look like bad tiling. it doesn’t even match the alpine green or the weird pink and green linoleum flooring. the put the shelf above the toilet way too high, and then have a random wooden shelf near the ceiling. wtf!?!?

the toilet is practically up against one wall and far from where they painted over the plastic toilet paper dispenser. they also painted over some plastic hooks to put towels on. on top of it all, they used some pale yellow for all the trim. again, painting over dust and dirt they didn’t bother to wash off before painting. not to mention the fact that the medicine cabinet that is built into the wall isn’t even centered with the sink. it’s man little things like that that make the whole room feel uneasy. noboday wants to stay or relax in that room. ever. it’s an in and out kind of thing.

if there was money falling from the sky into our laps, steel rod and i have decided we would re do this bathroom in an ancient roman style. tile and mosaics, clay colors, brass and/or copper fixtures, bigger tub, move the sink and toilet. maybe even get a fountain in there and make some storage. sounds simple enough, but kinda pricey. well, we don’t have that kind of cash (pft, we don’t really have any cash to spare currently) so i’m just gonna prime the bathroom today with some white Kilz i have left over from when some friends came down to help me prime the kitchen. i got a nice shower curtain i picked out from the place we lived before, and a matching bath rug i’ve had for ages. it should look tons better when i’m done with it today than it has in ages.

hell, eventually i want to go outside, open up that window, and cut that window out of that horrible install-a-stall and open up the bathroom even more.

so, less yakking from me, more painting. i can’t take that much ugly anymore! i’ll show you pictures tomorrow. promise.

i know the video is sideways. i was taking photos and decided to just switch to video mode on my camera and totally forgot i should re-orient the camera. i am a moron, but i was excited at the time and it does honestly look better in a vertical format. OBEY MY WHIMS!

so steven was bringing home the HOMES magazines and i would look through them in a wistful way a homeless person would look at a discarded french restaurant menu. all dreamy and wondering what it would be like. i came across some pages of homes that had stamped across them FORECLOSURE and would instantly feel bad about whomever it was who might of lost their home due to a series of unfortunate events. then i would look at the prices and twitch. i started browsing realtor sites for the area and sighing heavily. 

eventually i noticed how the cheaper houses were kind of run down or way more rural than we currently were living. we didn’t mind either. a little hard work and lots of quiet sounded quite nice to me. eventually i came to a page in a magazine that literally shocked me  to the point i had to get up, go to the computer and look on the realtor site to see if it’s true and the site was far from well designed. i click link after link, no longer knowing who’s site i’m actually on anymore because there is contrasting email addresses. i read up on the house and get excited and send an email to one of the provided links. i wait till steven comes home and i show him what i’ve found. he strokes his chin scruff and says that maybe i should email and ask about it. i just look up at him with a big grin on my face “i already did!”

i get so anxious the next day i call up the office number on the site and they tell me the address. christopher and i go and look around the outside while steven is at work. it’s not in the best of shape, but it’s not a total dump. it just looks like a lot of hope to  me, where people see problems, i see excitement over fixing them and making it look a million times better. i always feel guilty changing things that already look really nice, so i had nothing but hope and excitement. 

we stop by and tell steven what we saw and what we thought. he told me to arrange for a viewing. i get nervous, so i go and do some research on buying a house and what to expect and what to do (i’m usually research a whore. i love to research stuff, but i HATE writing papers. one major reason i’m not all that worried about ever going back to college). i call up one of my friends from high school that is a realtor, but due to the economy and the housing situation, she had to give it up and go into banking. i ask her to be my buyer’s agent,  that way i have somebody i can trust representing me, and somebody i know will get some cash out of me getting a house. 

if you don’t know the difference between a buyer’s agent and a seller’s agent, let me try to make it simple: a buyer’s agent works FOR YOU and has YOUR interests at heart. a seller’s agent works for the HOME OWNER and has THEIR interest at heart. obviously a buyer’s agent will do more than just show you one house, they will actually help you look for other houses that meet your criteria, get permission from the seller’s agent and show you the homes, get all the info you want, and gives helpful advice on getting loans. it’s a pretty sweet deal. i don’t understand why more people know about them than seller’s agents. the sad part is they don’t get the whole commission if the house sells, they get part of it, the other part goes to the seller’s agent. well, sometimes that is. for more info, start by looking [here] and then be on your merry way to research.

so i talked to my friend and she says she will not be able to show us the house because it is during her regular work hours and what to not say since it would be the seller agent showing us the place and anything you say AT ALL can be told to the seller by law. we kept our mouths clamped but when we showed up, to our surprise it was another buyer’s agent. very cute girl with the kind of perkiness that doesn’t annoy the crap out of me. she showed us around and asked how i got her email address. again, that site was so confuzzled. it said to contact the selling agent, but had a link to this buyer’s agent and… so confusing. this nice girl’s name is Polly Leadbetter, but we have dubbed her The Agent to be all slick and spylike. she runs Lake James Real Estate. before even meeting us she printed out tons of other listings in this price range just to be nice. and it was nice. but i wanted THAT house. 

steven and i talked it over and i talked to my friend cassie and she actually encouraged us to use polly as our buyer’s agent since she was swamped at her day job and home life (little league mom and a football mom. and a regular mom. whew! that’s a lot of momming!). steven said he wanted a few days of thinking about it before he acted. because of the price, i found some mortgage calculators to get a rough idea on what we would have to pay as a mortgage on a first time home buyer’s loan at some banks.

steven did want the house. he, like i, saw and knew it needed a lot of fixing up. also like i, he also saw all the potential of making it into his OWN his in a price he could possibly afford. but it is such a big commitment and so much money involved. 

this is where we began freaking out.

this is the kind of beauty the foothills hold

disgusted with the school i was going to and their administrations inability to do their job, coupled with not getting the education i was paying for, i decided to drop out at the beginning of the new fall quarter. my boyfriend and our dogs moved back to the foothills of north carolina to wait for me while i worked on a student film that lasted until about the end of the first week of october. once i moved back in with my sweety, i tried to relax and unpack and make that house as homey for us as we could. we didn’t delude ourselves, we knew we couldn’t stay their long. it wasn’t big enough and it wasn’t in what anybody would call great shape.

it was in novemeber i started looking at new places to rent, even though we couldn’t afford to move again so quickly. i just wanted to keep my eyes out and see how the market for such a thing was. the sad news is that every week more and more places were opening up for rent because people were abandoning the area due to rapid job loss. factory after factory in this area was closing it’s doors. even worse is the small family owned businesses couldn’t make ends meet with people losing jobs and they too were closing down. me finding a job because harder and harder to do. even going to the employment security commission didn’t help. no job openings that i was qualified for in the area and what ones were open, literally hundreds of people were applying for, even part time positions and crappy retail

this is the point where i started daydreaming of “what if” if scenarios and the haunting words of steven filled my mind as he packed up the moving truck in savannah “it would be nice if the next time we moved, it was into a place we owned.” i started looking and we made mention of it to a few people. not that that is exactly what we were looking for, but a “wouldn’t it be nice…” kind of way. somebody got wind of it! a co-worker from christopher’s job. they knew they were about to be laid off (as was christopher) and knew they couldn’t pay the mortgage on their trailer they rented. they asked us to come and look it one morning, because the bank was about to foreclose.

it wasn’t pretty. granted so many people already have preconceptions about the word “trailer” as it is, but i have been in many of them that didn’t fit said preconceptions and were just downright amazing, sturdy, and nicely done. this was not one of those. worse off, it was in a trailer park. steven and i are pretty private people (yes, i know, a public blog contradicts that, but you’re not within shouting distance and a nice emotional distance is built between internet writer and reader. it’s kind of comforting.) and not very keen on neighbors that close, least of all the reputation noisy trailer parks have and oh the gossip. and if we’re paying for our own home, we don’t really want to listen to somebody else’s rules on how we should live and how many people we can have over and all that jazz that trailer park land owners enforce. all  that just fuels the never ending drama in such parks in this area. we politely looked the place over and declined, respectfully, to buy the trailer. the cost of trailer itself (not the land) was around 50k. it was going to be monthly payments of about 400$ plus land rental. not our style.

i continued looking after that. our spirits feeling kinda squashed, so the boys weren’t so excited after that let down, but i was rekindled. i kept looking and searching. i even called a few places and drove by a couple of places, but this was for rentals. even though we couldn’t even afford to think of moving at this point, the house we were in was falling apart even worse than before.  the electric didn’t work half the time due to how old it was, there was no heat and nights were getting below 35 degrees. the bathroom was like ice all the time due to not being done correctly.it was crowded for the 3 of us and two dogs. i suspected our neighbors of selling recreational but illegal things (didn’t we move away from that when we were in savannah? city and rural illness i guess).  we didn’t even have all of our possesions there. we had to rent a storage unit for a good chunk of my furniture and studio supplies. i even had to leave some stuff behind at a friends house in savannah. needless to say, we had to leave that place, but we had no cash. ever hopeful, i eventually eased back and looked for the RENT TO OWN.

by the time new years rolled around, steven was picking up those little HOMES magazines for buying cause i would just look at houses way out of our price range and we would go off into dream land and talk about what it would be like to live in such places. little did we know that one of those magazines will have an ad to the house we currently live in and i would question the price as some kind of typo.

our fix may not be classy, but the view is

my name is sohma g. dawling. i live with my boyfriend, steel rod, in a very  very small town at the base of the mountains in north carolina. it’s the tiniest of towns, only 2 square miles. we have two dogs: cutlery & noir. we also live with his younger brother, the goblin.no, these aren’t the real names. well, it is for the dogs. Steven, Rosalie, & Christopher are the legal nomenclature for the three of us.

i am an unemployed visual artist and art school drop out. my sweety works in the auto parts industry in retail, his brother was recently laid off but took the oppurtunity to go back to school.

obviously by the sound of it we are far from making mad cash, but the story starts with my boyfriend making a single statement as we packed up our things and left the city of savannah, thumbing our noses: “it would be nice if the next time we moved, it was into a place we owned.” he said it in his most surly and deepest and aggravated of voices (his voice is usually surly and deep, not usually all that aggravated). 

thus, the journey began.

once settling back into the  mounatins of nc and back into the house steven left to be with me, it was obvious there wasn’t room for the three of us. not to mention it was the place he lived in for 5 years and was run down when he moved in. the place was falling apart and often the power went out due to an ancient fuse box the landlord refused to replace. there was no heat. no matter what precautions we took, there were always mice. the place was drafty. the bathroom was in shambles. i could go on and on. i started to look for places. seeing that this area is seriously depressed, i wondered and pondered. would buying be better than renting? if so, could we afford it? we weren’t even making ends meet as it was. months later, we’re now home owners.

because my sweety has worked at the same company for about 6 years and has paid all of his bills on time everytime, his credit is in great shape even if he makes just above minimum wage.

i know is sounds like one of those horrible fake websites, but i’m not promising that you’ll wake up tomorrow morning younger and skinnier and with a libidio to kill a bull elephant or anything like that. hell, i can’t even promise that reading this will be able to get you a house for cheaper than you thought. all i can say is what happened to us, how it happened to us, and what we did with it all.

this is the story of how we bought a house with almost no money saved up, how we’re fixing it up without any knowledge of how to fix things, and how to make it prettier than anybody could even imagine with a non existent budget.

we have dubbed the home Der Fraken Haus, and this blog Minimumwage Foreclosure, because that pretty much sums it all up.