Water Heater Wonders

Today I'm taking a break from the house narrative to muse upon the wondrous workings of the water heater. There it sits, quietly plugging away, keeping you and your family warm and comfortable, with nary a thank you. You never really think about it much, until you have to, and then it gets your full attention in a hurry.
In my case, I have been aware that the water heater has been approaching the end of it's life span for quite some time now. The handwritten date on the outside says "installed in 1994". Typically water heaters start heading south for the winter when they are about ten years old, so you might say I've been expecting a problem.
When it came, it was sort of an anticlimax. I was envisioning gallons and gallons of gushing hot water pouring out of the bottom. (well, that's how it happened for my father in 1977). Instead the water got super hot and burned my hands a couple of times. I just thought that was kind of strange, but let it go by with only a comment or two. Then the water just went cold. Of course we were in the very beginning of a three day holiday weekend, wouldn't you know. I didn't have any money for a plumber (especially on a holiday weekend) and I had five loads of laundry to wash and a load of dishes in the dishwasher. I panicked. Then I called my step dad and he reassured me that it didn't have to be the whole water heater, it could just be the thermostat. My tears dried up instantly. "It could?" I asked with just a little tremor in my voice and suddenly a lot of hope.
I hung up and went upstairs and typed in "Electric water heater failure symptoms".
I clicked on the first one and up popped a whole bunch of electrical diagrams and instructions on how to read something called Ohms. Ohh.
Hit the go back button. If there is one thing I know it's that I don't know anything about electricity. I will happily leave that to the pros.
Clicked the next site.
Then the angels began to sing as light began to emanate from the computer...
well, maybe not, but I did find out how to fix the problem. The only hitch? It would probably be temporary.
The problem was that the thermostat was not working (could be due to many things, even rusted on the inside and broken off) and the water was getting too hot, causing the reset button to trip.
I ran downstairs and grabbed my trusty screwdriver and proceeded to unscrew the only panel I could see on the entire thing. Problem, I didn't see anything but insulation, and I didn't want to mess with that. So I put the panel back on and went back for another read.
Ahhh. I was supposed to move the insulation out of the way and supposedly the innards would be revealed.
I ran down and unscrewed the whole thing again, this time dropping the metal panel on my toe like a little guillotine. I didn't have time to stop though, 'cause I was on to something. Removed the insulation and there it was. The magic button. I tentatively reached in and pressed it. Nothing happened, at least that I could see or hear. Only time would tell. I waited a few minutes and went over to the sink, and then the angels really did begin to sing and golden light...okay, well, we did get hot water.
Of course as soon as it gets too hot it will again shut off. But it's okay, cause I'm calling the plumber in the morning.

Some interesting things I learned:

Did you know??: That you are supposed to use a garden hose to drain five gallons of water out of the water heater every six months to remove the sediment build up on the bottom of the water heater and increase the longevity of your appliance? (That ticking noise you hear when water starts heating up is the sediment in the bottom.)
That the water heater is the second biggest user of energy in your home right behind your air conditioner? (Hmm, that would explain my 652 dollar electric bill last month.)
That if a bird or anything else blocks the flue of your gas water heater that it can blow up?
That it is (supposedly) easy to change out the heating element by yourself? (Said with skepticism.)
Of course as with any appliance, before doing anything to it, you should cut off the power at the fuse box. That was nothing new to me, but I was in too much of a hurry to read that part. Of course I wasn't doing anything but pushing the button, but that leads me to the most important thing. If you don't know what you're doing, call a professional. Amen to that. I've got him on my speed dial.

A Dirty Little Secret

WARNING: This is a really GROSS story. If you have a weak stomach don't read this.


We were enjoying having our own place at last. We were doing some work on the house, mostly painting and cleaning up from the fire. The kids were settling in, more or less, with a few bumps in the road. I was pleased that my oldest daughter, then eleven years old had made a new friend. The friend was over for a visit one day, and we were visiting with her mother. Tee had to go outside for a minute, and when he came back in, he gave me a really funny look. I waited until after the friend and her mother left, and then we consulted. "Come outside", he said, "I want you to see something." "Okay", I said, kind of uncertainly. I followed him outside to the sewer clean out behind our house. I leaned over and looked. There appeared to be something all around on the ground. It took me a minute to realize it was macaroni. As in Mac and Cheese without the cheese. Also there was all this white stuff on the ground. It took another second to sink in that this was TOILET PAPER. We were alarmed, but assumed that the "stuff" had just come up because the cap to the clean out was unscrewed. We screwed it back in and cleaned up the mess, very carefully, and went on our merry way.
About a month later, while downstairs in the kitchen, I heard a funny noise coming from powder room adjacent to the mud room, which was adjacent to the kitchen. I went to investigate.
It was water. Brown water. Coming out of the toilet. Nasty water. Stinky water. Sewer water. I didn't know what to do or who to call. Totally stressed out and yelling at the top of my voice, I sent Tee out to take the cap off that sewer thingee outside. As soon as he did, all the water stopped and went away, leaving us with one horrible mess to clean up. This we did, with a lot of towels, (which we threw away), lots of bleach, and gloves and masks. Of course the wallpaper and the vinyl flooring were completely ruined and would have to be torn out.
We both heaved a sigh of relief as we finished that clean up job. Clearly this house had a dirty little secret that no one had disclosed to us when we bought it. The mystery of why the sewer cap had been left off when we bought the house had now been made crystal clear.
I called the city sewer people and told them what happened. I told them that I had a dilemma: put the cap on the sewer clean out to keep stuff from coming up in my yard, or risk city sewage coming up in my house. What was I supposed to do? I certainly didn't want "stuff" coming up in my house, but I sure didn't want it in my yard either. His advice to me was less than steller. "Well" he said to me in his best Texan accent, "Iffen I was you, I'd leave that cap off outside, cause iffen I had to choose, I'd rather have the stuff come up in my yard than in my house." And that was the best he could do.
So we left it off. And the "stuff" came up in the yard on a regular basis. Not just macaroni, either. Every couple of months like clockwork, usually after a good rain. I had a number to call, and they would come out anytime, day or night and clear the line, but it all started to get a little old. I told my step mom about it, and she decided to call the state and have it investigated for me. They wrote me a letter saying they were investigating, came out and talked to the city people, were satisfied with the explanation that it would be taken care of (eventually) and then promptly closed the investigation. Meanwhile I ripped out the entire bathroom, except toilet and sink. Took out the drywall, ripped off the wallpaper, tore up the vinyl flooring, which was rotted anyway, all around the toilet. And for two years the water didn't come in the house again.
I started to believe that the problem had resolved itself, but there was still just a niggle of doubt which kept the plans for rebuilding on hold.
Fast forward two more years. (I still had not replaced the walls or floor, for fear it would happen again.)(And we are lucky enough to have three bathrooms, so losing this one for a while wasn't a big deal.)
I was in the kitchen, and again I heard a sound in the bathroom. Again I go in, and again, the same old story. Again I freaked out and again, we cleaned it up. (by now I am running seriously low on towels) I went outside and sure enough, the city clean out was backed up and running down the yard. When I went back inside to call the number, I accidentally tracked the "stuff" all over my kitchen. I must have gotten a little too close and stepped in it. This finally put me over the edge. I got really, really angry. I called the number, as usual, but this time I went a step farther and emailed the city manager. I told him I had had enough. That I couldn't live like this, and shouldn't have to. That is was dangerous for me and my family, and we were thinking of selling and moving away. I told him I needed some answers, not just advice on how to live with the problem. (On that particular day, when the city showed up to unstop the line, the guy recommended that I "drill a hole in the sewer cap to relieve the pressure.")
To my surprise he was very sympathetic and promised me they would take care of this. I hadn't expected that. (It's a shame when you live in a world where kindness is unexpected.)
A couple of weeks went by. Nothing happened. I took out the toilet and put a rubber stopper on the hole. Thank God (and I mean that) I did, because less than a month later it happened again.
This time I awoke to hear the toilet running in the upstairs bathroom. This didn't surprise me because the chain was too long and I hadn't gotten around to fixing it yet. It kept hanging up and making the toilet run. I jiggled the handle and went downstairs.
But I was concerned when I got downstairs and saw that the kitchen sink was stopped up. It hadn't been stopped up when I went to bed. I fooled around with the garbage disposal, and then put that problem off for a few minutes to get the kids ready for school.
My now fifteen year old hopped in the shower. Then I heard it. That old familiar sound. This time, though, there was a difference. It was NOT coming out of the toilet, because there was no toilet, and because there was no toilet, it wasn't brown. (gross, huh, shoulda been there.) AND IT WAS COMING OUT OF EVERY FAUCET IN THE HOUSE DOWNSTAIRS! The kitchen sink was overflowing, the bathroom sink, the drain pipe on the washing machine, all running over. For about twenty minutes it ran and ran and ran. There was water everywhere. Again I sent Tee to take the cap off of the clean out, but when he got out there, the cap was already off, and the pipe was sitting in about a foot of standing water. There was nothing we could do. I called the number but no one returned my call. And the water just kept on running. By this time, Tee and I began taking out our frustration out on each other. We were screaming at each other over the sound of the running water and scaring the kids. Then we stopped yelling and just stood and looked at each other, with sweat and tears pouring down our faces, while the water continued to run.
Finally, realizing that my daughter was still in the shower and going to be late for school, I yelled up the stairs for her to get out. To my consternation, when she turned off the shower all the water downstairs stopped running as well. Then we realized what the problem was. The stopped up city pipe outside our house was keeping all our waste water from leaving our house. All our daughter's shower water was coming out of every faucet in the house. That explained why the sink was stopped up in the kitchen when I got up. The water running from the tank in the upstairs toilet was going straight into the kitchen sink.
I called the city manager again, and this time I'm not ashamed to say I used my womanly wiles. I cried. I didn't fake it, it was genuine, but I didn't hold back. I cried buckets.
Later that day he sent out the "Head of Something" (water works? parks and recreation? I don't remember.) to look at my house. This guy tried to tell me that something was wrong with my "stack". I immediately called Rotor Rooter and had a consult, (at a cost of 175 dollars, I might add) and it became clear that the problem was not my "stack". They put a scope down the city line and discovered that it was completely overgrown with weeds and tree roots.

I'm happy to say that the next owner of my old house will not have to deal with that dirty little secret. The problem is solved. The city manager had the sewer people dig all the way down from two blocks away, through four backyards to bring all of us a new sewer line. They tore up my yard, but I did not care. I was just so happy, and so were the neighbors. After it was all done, my immediate neighbor came up to me and thanked me profusely for getting us all a new line. Turns out he had been having the same problem since the early seventies. Turns out all the neighbors on my side of the street had been having sewage backup in their houses and yards for years. (HOW did they cope with that for so long?) He chuckled as he told me that his bathtub had drained fast for the first time in thirty years. They had been promising to fix it as long as he has lived here, so he had been kind of skeptical that they ever would. He's still talking about it. Hee Hee. Womanly wiles. Never underestimate 'em.

A Badly Needed Laugh...

In the end, I decided not to paint the newel post and stair rail white again. It had been so much trouble to get 75 years worth of paint off, and the stain really didn't look too bad, after another couple of coats. It took another two months before we had REfinished refinishing the hallway floor, and my son's bedroom floor.
One day, while while cleaning my closet in my bedroom, my attention was drawn to a show on TV. It was a home and garden show, and a lady was getting ready to sand her daughter's bedroom floor. Of course this peaked my interest. What really grabbed me, though, was when I heard her say she was going to use a belt sander on the floor. I found myself talking to the TV. "Oh, no, not a belt sander, it won't work. You'll have marks all over the floor." Sure enough, two minutes later, "Wow, look at those marks on the floor. This isn't working, it's taking off too much. Get out the mouse sander." By this time I was laughing hysterically. I had had this exact conversation with Tee a few months before.
So they got out the mouse sander. I started talking to the TV. again. "No, no, that will take much too long. You don't want to go there." Of course the woman never heeded my advice to just break down and go to Home Depot, and rent a floor sander. I watched with a strange feeling of De ja vous, as she discarded the mouse sander and went back to the belt sander. I just shook my head and went back to work on my closet.
The next minute though, I popped my head out of the closet, and my attention was snapped back to the TV. A new show was on, and a man was telling the story of his house renovation. It all started, he said, with a pair of pliers, and removing a thousand staples out of the ceiling...

The Slippery Slope

I MUST BE OUT OF MY MIND... I thought as another drip of stripper fell on my foot. What could I possibly be getting out of this? I’m dirty, I smell, I’m tired. I should quit for a while. Just let me finish this one little piece... two hours later I was still standing in the hall, scraping, scraping, scraping. The only sound in the entire house was the scrape of my blade on the wrought iron rails, as I scraped off what felt like one millimeter of paint per millennium. Everybody else was asleep, but I kept my lonely vigil with the stair rail, intent on bringing it back to it's original glory.
It took two whole months, but I finally got all of the white paint off of the wrought iron rails, and started sanding the newel post. This led to removing the carpet off the top step to get all the way to the bottom of the newel post. this led to taking all of the carpet off of the stairs late one September night. when I saw the horror that lay beneath, I put the carpet back on even faster than I took it off. The p.o.'s (previous owners) had used the steps as a paint brush rest. There was so much paint I could barely see the wood. And of course, as always, there were five thousand more staples. So I spent the next month sitting on the stairs removing staples, and nails, and paint, and lots of dirt. Worst of all were those wooden carpet tack strips. I cursed the previous owners on a regular basis. finally I had all the paint removed. Sometimes, though, I would stand at the top of the stairs and doubt my sanity. Was it all going to be worth it? A couple of the treads were cracked, and there were marks that sanding all the way to, well..., you know where..., would not remove. Staining became a test of endurance, because I had to leave myself a way to get upstairs, and this meant avoiding every other step for up to several hours each day. every day I would leave a note at the bottom telling the kids which steps they couldn't use for the day.
I would stain every odd step one day, and every even one the next, and then do it again, the following two days, and then do the same again when I used the polyurethane. Finally one day I stood at the top and looked down at the finished steps, and all the doubts about my sanity vanished. It HAD all been worth it. Of course, while waiting for all the stain, etc, to dry, I had begun attempting to stain the newel post and rail to match the stairs. The problem was, that whatever the wood is, it just will not take a stain evenly, despite using a good wood conditioner on it. I have tried everything, including about four different stain colors, and as a last resort, I even used a tube of oil paint, thinking that would help even out the color. Now the irony of the situation is that after all that work to remove the paint, I'm thinking of painting it white again.
And then there's the story of the upstairs hallway. I was almost finished with the entire stair project, and looking forward to finally being finished with the whole blasted thing, when my husband came home with a new belt sander. I had just finished staining the upstairs hallway the day before, and was getting ready to put the first coat of polyurethane on it, when I heard the belt sander, and felt a cold chill run down my spine. You guessed it, he decided to start with my upstairs hallway. Of course he had never used a belt sander before, and the end result is that I am going to have to re sand the entire upstairs floor in the hall. (I have since realized that it is my destiny to repeat everything I do at least once, if not twice before it is finally finished the RIGHT way.)
One day, while taking a break from the "Hallway to hell" (sorry, parody of an old A/C D/C song) I decided to remove the carpet from my son's room, which adjoins the hallway. This was a really nasty job and revealed, underneath, as always, MORE STAPLES! I'm beginning to think my whole house is held together with staples. Not just any kind of staples, though, they are the kind that break off when you pull them out leaving just enough sticking out to poke your foot on, but not enough to pull out with a pair of pliers, leaving you no choice but to hammer them down into the floor. So after the carpet was all gone, and I stood looking around at his now empty room, I saw, to my dismay that his room was unlevel on one side. Immediately, I saw the correlation between all these months of work, with one thing that led to another, and another, and then another, and the slope on one side of his room. I'm keeping a good attitude about it, though, I just think about how much fun he will have rolling his cars and marbles down the hill in his room.
(Fast forward again, about two years; we had the foundation experts out to estimate how much to fix our sinking house, and ((gulp!)) fourteen THOUSAND dollars, which we don't have at the moment.)

Burnin' Down the House

Things were going along pretty good. I had painted the kitchen a sky blue to match the existing tile. We actually had money in savings for the first time ever. Not much, but something. I was starting to feel pretty psyched. I decided one afternoon to use my new found energy to clean out the garage. I thought it would be kind of nice too, if the garage floor was painted. I started taking all of the stuff out of the garage. There was a lot of it. We had been married about twelve years and had three kids, and I had never been a big believer in throwing things away, so you can imagine...I had everything all over the back yard and was just finishing up the garage floor when I heard this bloodcurdling scream. I looked up into the window of the kitchen and saw FLAMES! I dropped my paintbrush and came running in at full speed. My husband Tee was standing at the stove with a pan of fire, and there were flames licking up the wall and inside the microwave. There was smoke everywhere. I immediately dialed 911. I was screaming at the operator. HELP, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE! Tee ran over to the door and threw the pan outside in the grass and we started throwing water at the flames. By this time the wall was scorched and the light fixtures on the ceiling were melted and hanging in ribbons. We got the flames out, and about that time we heard the sirens. We got the cat and ran outside, in hysterics of course.
The firemen came with their trucks and their hoses and were just about to flood our house with water when I stopped one of them and told them the fire was out. They still had to come in and air out the place and make sure the fire was not going to start up again. That was something I will never forget. Standing out on the sidewalk with the cat in my arms and my children all clustered around me and every single person on the block staring out of their curtains. It was surreal. Just about the time the hysterics went away, I remembered all that STUFF on the lawn in the backyard, and hysterics gave way to acute embarrassment. Everybody in the neighborhood is staring and all these firemen are in my house, and my backyard is LITTERED with junk. I felt like we should have had a guest spot on SANFORD AND SON. (For those too young to remember the series you can catch it on TV land sometimes, then you'll understand what I mean.)
What had happened was that Tee had been cooking French fries for the kids, and had gone upstairs for a minute on an errand. It only took a second for the pan to catch on fire, and spread to the microwave above. Tee came running back downstairs when he heard the alarms, and the girls yelling, and was trying to figure out how to get the fire out, when I came running in.
We sent the kids to their grandparents house for the weekend, and started the long cleanup process. All in all there was about six thousand dollars worth of damage to the kitchen. We decided to do all the work ourselves and use what insurance money was left to replace the vintage 1982 dishwasher that was shorting out the fuse box on a regular basis. Unfortunately, because we couldn't cook in the kitchen, we ended up using all our hard earned savings eating out. That really stank, but looking at the big picture I'm not complaining. I'm grateful to God that my kids were OK, and that the house didn't burn down. It could have been so much worse.
On a side note, during the clean up it was necessary to remove the ceiling tiles (ceiling tiles? in the kitchen?) that had melted to ribbons. Holding up all these tiles was...you guessed it, 5000 more staples, just waiting for my expertise to come along and yank them out.

Crown Moulding Muddle

At this point my husband and I had been married for about eleven years. We thought we knew everything there was to know about each other. What we didn't know was that this house was about to teach us a lesson in marital politics. We started filling in the lines in the paneling with the joint compound. I was in favor of putting on several light coats and building to the right depth. He was in favor of really loading it on but only sanding once. After watching him do this a few times I felt compelled to say something about it. I didn't want lumps in my walls, nor did I want to sand each spot for an hour to smooth it out. Clearly MY way was the best way. (I was the oldest of three girls, my way was ALWAYS best, just ask my sisters.) Clearly he thought his way was the best. I ended up giving in and letting him do what he wanted to. I did my part my way, but it ended up taking forEVER to finish all the sanding. By the time we got to the ceiling tiles, the honeymoon was over with him. In the middle of pulling out the five thousand staples, he went upstairs and didn't come down again for three years. I didn't mind too much. I like to do things my way, and I'm sure I made him feel like he was getting in the way. Oh, yeah, and he had to work. Almost forgot about that.
The ceiling was a puzzle for me. Underneath the old white tiles was green bead board.
The paint was flaking and looked really old. I was pretty sure it had to have lead in it. I knew it would have to be encapsulated. I went to the hardware store and bought some Sheet Rock. That lasted about two minutes. That would be the two minutes it took me to haul it in the house. I didn't realize how heavy it was. I knew there was no way we were going to get it up on the ceiling by ourselves. We were broke and couldn't afford a drywall lift. Actually at that time I didn't even know there WAS such a thing. So back to the old tried and true. We bought new ceiling tiles. I consoled myself as I took them out of the box that at least these new ones had style. I dragged out the staple gun and put five thousand new staples in the ceiling.
Then onto crown moulding. The problem was that the room was angled. About halfway across, the ceiling began a downward slant. This made for a lot of time standing in the middle of the room just staring up. Could I do it this way?...No, that won't work...how 'bout this way...No, maybe if I turn it around...upside down maybe? I finally tried one piece. Then I was lost and never finished that project. To this day there is still just one lone piece of crown moulding in her room.
Most days I do a pretty good job of pretending it's not there, but every once in a while I just shake my head and vow that tomorrow, TOMORROW, I WILL get after it and figure out how to do that.
Two years later I was to learn that her room would have to be completely redone. All that I had done would have to be undone and then redone from the studs up, not because I had done anything wrong, but because we found out what was behind that paneling, and it wasn't good. But more on that later.

Oh, and while shopping at Lowe's yesterday, I ran across something called an "angle finder". This would really have come in handy like, oh, FOUR YEARS ago.
Oh, well.

Trial and Error

The first thing we decided to do once we moved in was to paint. I had never painted anything before but my confidence was high as we picked out our colors with excitement at the store. We came home with more equipment than our car could hold and broke out the brushes. Now anybody who knows anything about painting will tell you that the paint job is only as good as the prep work. We must have missed that episode of THIS OLD HOUSE. We didn't bother to remove any of the nails from the walls, or fill any holes with Spackle, and we weren't too great about keeping the plastic down on the hardwood floor either (something we are still living with, four years later). Plus, the color we picked out, called cool melon, which looked really good at the store looked sickly in our dining room. No matter: we boldly went where no man should have ever gone, at least without some kind of instruction.
The result was pretty ghastly. The in-laws made no bones about how much they hated it. We would get comments like WOW! It's so...bright.
Not to be put off by the negative comments, we moved right on into our daughter's soon to be bedroom. It had originally been part of a long garage attached to the left side of the house. The garage had been divided into two bedrooms and the walls were now paneled with beat up white paneling. The ceiling was covered in really old beat up white ceiling tiles with little spaceship stickers all over them.
We weren't sure what we were going to do with the walls, at first, either take them down and put up Sheetrock, or paint them, or what. But wait! We were just about to discover JOINT COMPOUND! We decided to smooth in the lines of the paneling with the joint compound. And then paint.
So it began. Weeks and weeks of filling and scraping and sanding and filling and scraping and sanding. I thought it would never end. I dreamed that I was sanding in my sleep. Then came the ceiling tiles. They were easy to take down. I would pull on one and three would come down. Underneath was about twenty years of yucky nasty dirt waiting to fall on my hair and get in my clothes. After we took out the five hundred bags of tiles to the curb it was time to tackle the staples left in the bead board ceiling. Again I dreamed of staples in my sleep. There must have been five thousand of them. (Hey, there's nothing left to prove there weren't five thousand, there coulda been) Finally we began to paint. This time we picked out a mint green and paired it with a shocking pink and a bright yellow. Stripes. Like CANDY LAND on steroids. My five year old would have been in the loony bin in a month if she had to live in that room, so I quit in the middle and started over on the paint. This time I picked a more sedate pink and wallpapered teacups and cupcakes around the room.
Along the way, I learned to use a miter box for trim, how crown moulding works, (How it works for other people, I could never get it to work for me.) How to PROPERLY prep and paint a room. How to use a power screw driver (don't laugh, I had never used one before I bought this house) How to use a drill, and last week I used a Skill saw by myself for the first time, to build a gate for my fence.
But those are all later stories. Suffice it to say that eventually we picked a different color for the dining room, a pretty yellow, and this time we did the prep work first and the end result was SO much better. I don't just live with it now, I love it.

The Saga Begins...

The front entry when we first moved in. Some things you just don't know about a house until you move in and live there a while. One of the things that has given me the most pleasure is the light that comes through the front door in the morning (faces the east) and shines on the opposite wall above the stairs. I love the old wavy glass.



It wasn't what I'd had in mind. I had planned on moving to a bigger city, much farther away. In fact I had actually put down earnest money the week before on another house, and then changed my mind. I weighed the pros and cons in my mind as we swung around the block for another look. Pros: The house looked very nice from the outside. It was an old house, which was what I wanted. We could afford it, because it had a nice price tag. The one I looked at last week was about thirty thousand more dollars than this one.
Cons: This was a small town. A very small town. We had come from San Diego just three years before and had had trouble adjusting to the size of the town we were currently living in, which was approximately four times BIGGER than this town.
Also, this was far away from the airport. We were blessed enough to be able to live anywhere we wanted job wise, because my husband, the breadwinner of the family traveled for a living, but it would be convenient to be near the airport. This was about two hours away on a good day.
As we passed the house again I decided to at least look at it. We called the realtor (from the far away town we had planned on living in) and had him come out and take us around.
I can't say I fell in love right away. My husband was the one who persuaded me. For one thing, two of the bedrooms weren't really bedrooms, they were an old garage alongside the house that had been converted into bedrooms.
The walls in both of those rooms were covered with shabby white paneling and really old square tiles on the ceilings with little outer space stickers all over them.
The kitchen had been remodeled in the fifties and had pine cabinets with particle board shelves. Also there were fluorescent lights everywhere. I hate fluorescents.
But there was a beautiful crystal chandelier in the foyer, and I loved the front door. And there were a lot of windows. I mean a lot. (Later I would count them...there were 44, all with the old wavy glass) The living room was huge. The master bedroom was enormous at about 25x19. It had a really cute breakfast nook and a large backyard. It had three bathrooms, although I wasn't sure whether this was pro or con, because two of the bathrooms were really tiny, and one had a window about six inches away from the toilet.
When we looked at it, the dining room had a pool table in it instead of a dining room table and the owners had built a custom recessed cabinet into the wall for the pool equipment with a lovely painting on the doors that said "Snooker played here". This was completed with a lovely rendition of a rack of balls and two crossed cues.
But the living and dining room were spacious and open. The house had potential. We decided to go for it. It didn't look like it needed too much work, just a little painting and some cleaning. And maybe some new carpet and new cabinets. And that wallpaper in the downstairs toilet...circa 1982...were there wood floors under the carpet...hmmm...maybe we could refinish those...