house update

I know. I say that we bought our house and we’re going to renovate and it’s all exciting yadda yadda yadda, and then I go silent for 2 weeks. We’ve been working on getting the house ready for demolition, but there’s been quite a bit of prep work to get to that point. Allow me to give you an update so you can see what we’ve been up to these past couple weeks:

We tore out the fence

We are planning on doing a lot of the demo ourselves, but before we could start making a huge mess in the house we had to have some way of cleaning it all up. Dumpster time! The little side yard outside the front door was prime dumpster location the only problem was that little rotting fence blocking our way in. We intended to get rid of that fence anyway because it’s looking pretty awful, and I have no desire to EVER paint it. I mean, would you want to paint that? With all those little nooks and crannies to paint around? No Sir-ee, that fence was going away and a dumpster was coming in.

It took about 2 minutes to take the fence down, and then we were left with this monstrosity. The ground was still too frozen this day, but fortunately the snow melted the next day and soon it had thawed out enough to be able to pry the pole out. I didn’t get a photo of the pole out of the ground, but let me just say you only see half of that thing right now.

We started packing

We are basically moving out of the house temporarily while the major work is going to happen. For a few weeks there won’t be a working bathroom, and although there’s a lot we can live without for a few weeks, getting ready for work every morning in the contractor’s port-a-john is crossing the line. But actually we’re both excited to get everything out of the house and have a fresh start.

Our original plan was to have the dumpster along with a portable storage unit all in the backyard. That way our stuff would be easy to get to and everything would be somewhat “protected” behind our tall privacy fence. The only issue was we were going to have to tear down part of our backyard fence to make the clearances. On top of that, those portable storage units, although convenient, are ridiculously expensive. We opted for an offsite storage unit and even considering we’ll have to get a truck to move it all there and move it all back, it’s still about a third of the cost. And our fence gets to stay in tact.

We sold a lot of stuff

I’ve been selling things for the past month on Craigslist and various Facebook sale groups (more on all that later), but it was getting exhausting selling everything piece by piece. We wanted to be able to sell everything in fell swoop, however, it’s been too cold and rainy for an outdoor yard sale, especially considering we have no garage or shelter outside to protect everything. So we decided to have an indoor sale in our living room. We brought everything we wanted to sell into the room and hosted an pop-up sale last weekend to sell off as much as we could in one day. It started out pretty slow, but ended up being really successful. Everything that didn’t sell we donated to the National Children’s Cancer Society. They have a partnership with a local thrift store that comes to your house and picks up all unwanted items, including super heavy sofa beds. That’s a win-win if you ask me.

So now we’ve sold/donated/packed everything and our house is looking like this:

We’re moving everything we’re keeping into the storage unit this weekend and then the demo starts!

Happy Friday!