Well everything is falling into place. The guys will start installing the carpet Tuesday. I am having them build a 4x8 section of hard wood flooring as you walk into the front door. It can be a place people put their shoes so they don't get the carpet of the Shargi La dirty. Plus chicks LOVE hard wood flooring!!!!! I just made that up I really don't know if all woman like it. Wonder if there is a scientific study on it? I'll have to Google it when I am done here. I'll let you know what I find. Back to the house. The rooms are all painted and trimmed. I spent this weekend doing some cleaning up outside. Saturday I borrowed a chipper/shredder, THANKS Mr. And Mrs Boike yes that is their real last name, and went to town on all the limbs I cut down from all the trees in the front and back. This is what they looked like before I did some pruning.



This is the pile I had after I used the chain saw on them like the guy in Texas Chain Saw Massacre.



That chipper/shedder went through that pile like a hot knife through butter!!!

The inside is almost ready for the carpet. I just need to trim up some of the rooms and we should be good to go. Being that the carpet guys are not coming out to measure until Friday, I decided to start work outside. The front porch was in dyer need of some love. The paint on the railing was piss poor to say the lease and the floor of the porch needed to be pressure washed. So I busted it out and started cleaning. Side bar, if you are a homeowner it is in your best interest to get a pressure washer. I have a little electric 1600 psi one and it cleans anything I need. Dare I say the best $180 I ever spent!! Look what it did to the porch.




It's like night and day! I let the wood dry and then sprayed it with Thompson's water seal.



The wood was in such bad shape that I had to spray two coats on it. The wood just soaked it all up on the first coat. I let it dry for a few days and then we started priming and painting the railing. My dad was happier then a pig in slop because he was able to play with his new toy the Wagner Power Painter.... Here are the results.



The final results.

I've been notified by everyone who has seen this site that I have no pictures of the outside of the house. WHOOPS!!!!!!!!!!!!! Here you go........

In the last two weeks we have painted every room except for one which I worked on tonight. It needs to be trimmed up and it's ready to ROCK!!!! Here are a few pictures of the rooms. A little before and after pics...

Alrighty! July 15th came and I closed on the house in the morning. My parents were going to meet me down at the house so we could start drawing up a game plan. We decided that the interior was going to be our first project. Our thought was to get the inside livable. Everything else can wait. First thing I did was rip out the carpet and padding.
 

From the pictures you can see how messy and dusty it was. The carpet had, as my mother would call it, pet stains. I just called it animal CRAP! It soaked through to the padding. YUMMY!!!!!
Next we had to wash all the walls before painting them. Unfortunately I missed that part, my two newly retired parents did that while I was at work. HE HE HE HE!!!!!
Here's a good one...... As you will see through out this process, my mom is the official interior decorator for this project. She knows damn well that if it was up to me I would have all rooms painted with the cheapest white I could find, probably stuff I found at Big Lots. THAT PLACE RULES!!!! Anyway, I am not one who cares about interior design and finding colors that match the pillow case on the freakin' bed. OK OK OK!!!!! Let's get back on track. Mom & dad cleaned all the walls and were ready for paint. Mom suggested a few colors to me for the main room. The people before me painted it an off white that even I cringed at. She was thinking a sunset yellow or something. This was my first mistake. My mom did not go to Home Depot with my dad and I. We were in the paint department looking through the colors. Here was my second mistake. Dad said to me "Well Andy, what color do you want to get?" I picked one out and asked him what he thought of it. "Looks good to me" he said. "You need to get 5 gallons of it." Right at that moment I said. "Big Ron are you sure you want to get this without mom's approval?" "Yeah why not? She'll like it" So we get all 5 gallons of it. Sure enough the next day when I called my parents to see how the painting was going dad said that she didn't like the color. JUDAS PRIEST ON A BICYCLE!!!!!!!! I had $130 in paint that was not dark enough for her liking..... DOW!!!!!!!!!!!! Not all was lost, dad played around with it and darken it up enough. We painted the main room with it.

I placed a bid on it the next day. The bank holding the house rejected it. They stated that they had another offer and it was close to being finalized. I was bummed but not devastated. I thought that if it was meant to be then....... You know the rest. A month went by and we were not having any luck at all finding a house I liked. Kudos to John cause he checked on the Lancaster house every morning when he got to the office. He noticed that the house was still showing as pending. Out of curiosity he called the realtor who listed the house. She told him that the other offer was falling apart. Apparently the people's credit was not what they stated it was. The bank was getting anxious to get it off their hands. They lowered the price and cleaned the place up. We went back to look at it again.




The place looked a lot better but the carpet was trashed and the rooms looked like they were painted by a 3 year old. Speaking of 3 year olds, all the walls had crayon and marker all over them. The kids used every wall to draw to their little heart's content. Despite all of that, we starting seeing the possibility the place had. Sure it would take some work but it wasn't like sending man to the moon. The house was in great shape and needed someone to give a damn about it and clean it up. I immediately told John to bid again. This time I bid a $1000 higher then they were asking. With in a day John called me and told me that they accepted my bid. HEE HAW!!!!! The closing would be July 15th.
That day came and I signed what seemed to be 500 documents. The place was mine!!!! Now the fun begins!!!!!

WOO HOO!!!! I finally bought a house! I set up this site to show everyone the progress of getting the house up to "living in" condition.

A little background, my realtor, John Sepesy (704) 661-4897, told me about this place. It was a foreclosed property and he thought I should go out there and check it out. He explained that it had everything I was looking for, 1 acre of land, 2 car garage, workshop and in a small town. So I took mom & dad out there and this is what we saw:



As you can see the place was trashed. From the looks of it the creditors must have been right around the corner and the people took anything that they could fit in their car and got the hell out of there. There was food still in the kitchen, wet clothes in the shower and bath tub, closets full of stuff, unopened toys. HECK! I was thinking I could have my down payment for the house by selling all the toys on Ebay. There was no major damage. The place needed some TLC. I knew when I first walked in that this was the house I wanted even though my mother kept on saying "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS MESS" when walking into every room.