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scarlettohairdye · 3 days

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Home Ownership Was a Mistake

This is for @trickybonmot, who may or may not use some of these stories in a fic.

Okay. So.

In the year of our lord 2010, my wife and I were lucky enough to be gifted $20k by my parents, which in those days (given it was a historically low point for real estate prices in Seattle) was enough for a down payment on a house. It was an astounding confluence of luck and privilege that led to us being homeowners, because if they gave us the same money now it would go precisely nowhere.

Anyway, it was not enough money for a large house, or a fancy house. We looked at a lot of places, only some of which were move-in ready (and one of which was absolutely just a tear-down) and eventually settled on our current place, which is a 1910 bungalow with a detached garage that was finished and turned into a studio.

Was it the most aesthetically pleasing house when we bought it? No. The walls were white, the carpet was light beige, and the paint had seen better days. That said, it was move-in ready and the owner was pretty desperate to sell, so we took it!

The inspector let us know that some of the wiring was still the old knob-and-tube, so we'd want that updated sooner rather than later, but it looked pretty good. About half the outlets were grounded, so it didn't stop us from plugging in three-prong appliances. We just had to use more extension cords than maybe we'd prefer.

The Electrical

The first big house thing we paid for was to have the entire place rewired. Our circuit breaker was a mystery, we didn't have enough outlets, and we were tired of being stuck with specific layouts of our stuff due to the lack of grounded outlets. We were expecting about half the wiring to be up to code, and the rest would need an update.

Spoiler alert: HAHAHAHAHAHA.

The rewiring took about a week, and every morning the electrician sat down with us and told us what new fire trap he'd uncovered.

"Yeah, so the knob and tube wiring going to the lights in the ceiling? Knob and tube gets hot when it's running, and yours is under three layers of insulation."

"You know how you thought your outlets were grounded? They weren't, actually, the ground wire just went elsewhere into the house and wasn't connected to anything."

"So there's wiring in your crawlspace? Whoever put that in nailed some sheets of wood paneling over it, so we had to rip the wood paneling out to access it."

I think the job was about $15k when it was done, we had many many more outlets, and our house was no longer one bad day from lighting itself on fire. Victory, I guess?

The Studio Window

This was leaking a bit, and we knew it was leaking when we moved in. (South facing walls get all the weather in our region.) We were not handy enough to replace it ourselves at the time and we also didn't have money because I got laid off shortly after we bought the house and was making my living doing costume commissions. Solution: Trade costuming work to an acquaintance who did carpentry.

The window, we discovered, was not so much a finished window as it was a single sheet of glass sandwiched between some boards.

Badly.

The carpenter was not entirely she that she was qualified for the job, but she did manage to remove the single sheet of glass and replace it with a window that was insulated and actually capable of opening. She used caulk around it. It was way better than we had before. Maybe someday we'll have both studio windows replaced by a contractor who actually does windows, but this is not that day!

The Siding

The cedar shingles were no longer cutting it at a certain point, so we had the house resided. (Houses are money pits, in case you didn't know.) This was a $30k job (MONEY PIT!) and had several layers of badness.

Bad: Our house had no insulation. It was cedar shingles over the original siding, with nothing in between that original siding and our INTERIOR WALLS. There was occasionally a newspaper. Our PM asked if we wanted insulation? And we said yes, please!!! We did not have a lot of time to think about insulation or research the best type, so it's just sheets of the pink fiberglass stuff in there, but it exists and we have it now!

Worse: Underneath our laundry room was a horrorshow. The laundry room is an addition that was added to our house probably sometime in the 50s? And, uh...

Well, the siding guys pulled off the siding, took a look at what was under it, and immediately called the project manager. The project manager came out, took a look, and then called us. He said that the siding guys thought it really needed to be reinforced and stabilized before they re-sided it, which is very fair, because I think the people who built it originally were drunk when they did it. It was a fucking Wild West cowboy construction situation under there.

Yes, you heard that right: A LOAD-BEARING SHINGLE.

Our project manager also informed us that the siding guys couldn't do the reinforcement, because they're just siding guys. They don't do structural. This is very fair.

It also needed to be done by Monday so we could stay on schedule for the siding work.

We learned this on Friday.

I immediately called my general contractor dad and got his voicemail, because (I remembered belatedly) he was in Mexico getting dental surgery. There was absolutely no way we could get another contractor out to do the work over a single weekend.

It was up to us.

My wife and I (mostly my wife) went HAM on it. We rented big jacks from the tool library to prop the laundry room up while we replaced one of the entirely rotten support poles. One of the big telephone poles was so wrecked with dry rot we could kick it out of place. (It didn't even touch the BIG ROCK that was supposed to be its foundation!!! It was floating!!!) Several of the joists were also fucked, so we ran new joists alongside them and married them together. My wife dug holes while crouched in a 4' high space, filled the holes with gravel, compacted it by putting a piece of wood on top of it and hitting it with a mallet, and then installed an entire additional support system from 4x4s and deck blocks. She actually attached the support system TO THE FUCKING HOUSE, which was a big improvement from the way it was originally held on by vibes and paint.

Here's a tasty little before and after:

(Yeah, see how that visible joist at the front just... stops at the far left? There's a new joist right behind it now.)

This was completed with resounding cries of, "Good enough!" and "It's better than it was before!" The siding guys thought it was fine and sided over it. Someday hopefully we will be able to afford to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it with a properly poured foundation, but in the meantime the spin cycle on the washing machine no longer shakes the whole house. Victory?!

Ridiculous: The purple paint saga. My wife and I are lesbians who tend toward maximalism in our decoration style. Construction companies find this baffling. We paid extra to our siding company to get the extended color choices (if you order the siding with the color baked in it lasts longer, but you're limited to a particular range of colors) and spoiler alert: 90% of them are boring as fuck. We basically paid extra to have access to 400 shades of white and 400 more shades of beige. There were like three saturated colors in the whole book. Pathetic.

Anyway, we chose the one nice teal that was available and decided we'd paint the door purple, since all the purple colors were gray at best. The project manager then forgot to put in our order, and when he remembered he'd forgotten, ordering our siding through his company would have pushed back the start time by six weeks. We could still make the original start time if we ordered through a different company doing the same thing, though!

Me, immediately: And we wouldn't be restricted to your color palette, right? Him: Yeah, they can do custom colors. Me, slapping down a color card called "Fully Purple": MAKE IT PURPLE.

Bless this man, he went to the siding company and asked for Fully Purple. They told him they couldn't do that color, and also is he sure anyone wants this color? He called them on the phone and informed them yes, we did want that color, and also that he'd worked for them and he knew damn well they could do that color, they'd just have to custom mix it, so they needed to do their fucking jobs. Suitably chastened, they finally sent us a sample of the siding, and it was... okay. It was purple for sure, but a little de-saturated. Not the purple of our hearts.

I asked if they'd actually started manufacturing our siding yet or just sent the color sample. The project manager confirmed they hadn't, and if we ordered this imperfectly-purple siding now, it would be several weeks before we could get started.

"We're gonna paint," I decided, and our project manager put in the orders.

The paint store called him and said, "Hey, are you sure you want this color?" Yes, he assured them, that's the right color.

The guys doing the painting opened up the can and then called him and said, "Are you sure this color?" and he told them yes! They want that color!

At this point I told him he should just start responding with, "They're lesbians!!! Yes! They want the purple! They're lesbians!!!"

Eventually we cleared every hurdle god and the construction industry put in front of us, and now our house is Fully Purple.

It also has insulation, wiring that won't kill us, and a laundry room that hopefully won't collapse anytime soon. We got a heat pump installed that took shockingly little time and worked immediately, and our next project will be having the roof redone. Check back in to find out what fresh horror awaits us then! I think it'll be a second roof under our existing roof made of lead and asbestos tiles, probably!

#home improvement #it's a nightmare #choices were made #they were bad

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