The Property a Year Later

It is hard to believe a year has passed since we purchased the property, but the date on video of the first day indicates that this in fact correct. I would say it has been a long year, but in reality it has flown by. We have been busy almost every weekend trying to get the place into shape. It feels like we haven’t done anything, but this is my look back to document what we have accomplished.

Ironically, we didn’t get into the house when we expected as we got we had to push it back a couple days due to a virus. Yeah, not that one. A lovely Noro virus. It ripped through the extended family leaving a trail of…well, I won’t go into that. When we met our agent and opened the door to our new place we all were met with a mostly empty space. But it was a few minutes into looking around that we began to notice the house was dirty. Like they had not cleaned in months dirty. Like rats living under the fridge (and the range and laundry draw and all the garage shelves) dirty. Like mud and manure on the toilet in the main bath dirty. Our agent helped me tear out the carpet out of the two rooms that had it that night (thanks Aaron!), but we left wondering what exactly we had gotten ourselves into. We delayed our move into the house for a couple of weeks while we scrubbed everything down from ceiling to floor. The in-laws were awesome in watching our dogs and helping where they could, but eventually it got to be too much to work, drive to the property to clean, and then head back to the in-laws to sleep, work, and then do it again. So we started pulling stuff from storage and started the process of making this place home.

Outside was not much better. There was a patch of grass in the front yard, but every other place on the property was mud and horse manure. From the drive way “tip toe walk” through to the back pasture “don’t even think about it without calf length muck boots”, the house was an island in a sea of mud and horse manure. Even the portion that was woods was just oozing earth and water. Through January and February we felt trapped in the house as we literally had to suit up to go anywhere outside. That included the pole building I was looking to turn into a shop. It made us truly wonder if there was a practical purpose to the boat shell (we think it was a lifeboat) in the back yard. It ended up not being necessary, but it wasn’t until late April that we could set foot in the yard without the muck boots.

There were a couple of projects that we knew about going into this move like whole house water filtration and the chimney cap fix that we had pros come in a do immediately. But once we had gotten the surface cleaning out of the way we started into our list of projects. Priority is certainly an ongoing discussion, but with the winter weather we started with the inside. First up was getting the master bedroom painted and the engineered hardwood flooring installed. We had installed the same stuff in our last house so it was easy to get into a rhythm and that first night we were able to spend in there was the first time the house felt like home. Over the next few weeks we got flooring in the remaining two rooms (just in time for our youngest daughter to move back in) and down the hallway. It was very nice to get a level floor for all those spaces as for some reason one room was lower than the others by an inch or so. Closet systems and new door knobs throughout the house finished off that project.

As we got our stuff piled into the garage and any blank floor space we could find, it started to get cold. In the past that had meant putting on a coat. But as the reality of having a well dawned us, that meant freezing could jeopardize the new filter system we had put in. Since I would open the door and find inches of water and mud (and horse manure, did I mention the manure?). Because of that much moisture and the rodents, the ceiling insulation and a few places on the wall was gone. So a weekend was spent pulling out the bad insulation and putting in rigid foam insulation. Conveniently, there was a sump pump in the pump house so I used that to clear the water and after a couple of battles of the water coming back, grabbed some cinder blocks to keep back the mud and dug a small trench to route the water away from the door. There were a couple of sections where the insulation was good enough and I waited until summer to finish that as well as use a pressure washer to clean up the caked on mud on the floor.

As we got into March the rain let up just a bit and we hired out a front yard transformation. An excavator was brought in tear out the previous landscaping foliage (way overgrown junipers, ivy, and alder saplings). They also brought in a ton of soil and regraded the front so that there wasn’t so much water heading toward the house. A few beds for plants and a lawn area finished it out. Combined with taking down the 6 foot privacy fence slats, it really opened up the front of the house to more light. The excavator operator had a little time to level out the recycled asphalt we had spread by hand to try to keep down the mud, so that helped a lot as well.

Besides the front yard, probably the most noticeable thing did was to replace all the windows/sliding doors and paint the outside of the house. The siding really needs to just be replaced, but with caulking and painting, we’re hoping that gives us some breathing room to do that. Painting the house really made it feel like it was our house. We ran out of time for the trim, but as the weather cooperates in the spring we’ll tackle that.

As it stayed lighter it became very clear that the 20x60 stable in the middle of the backyard was going to need to go. Besides being an eyesore in the middle of the view out to the property from the house, the roof was starting to fall in because it wasn’t sealed properly. We pulled off the roof shingles and then attacked the main structure with and impact driver and occasionally a sledge hammer. While the roof was a disaster, there was a ton of lumber in the structure and we’ll be using that for a bunch of other projects. As the pieces came down it allowed so much more light to come to the house and our view from the office and sunroom improved so much that it brought smiles to our faces. There was a second smaller stable off to the side so we pulled that one down too.

One of the first projects we used the lumber from stables was to create raised garden beds. We did 2 4x12 beds out in the back pasture and 4 3x4 beds next to the house. Stacy joined in driving in screws to build them out and we had them together in about a day. We got soil and used our new tractor to quickly fill the beds. That machine helped tame much of the cleared acreage even though the grasses held their own in a couple of places. The soil was quickly followed by vegetable and herb starts being planted. Overall, we didn’t do too badly. Tomatoes were the one glaring failure. They got 7 feet tall and then just as the tomatoes started to ripen, blight hit and we ended up with maybe 6 tomatoes. The cucumbers, beans, peas, and zucchini did great and the herbs filled in and we actually used all home grown herbs for thanksgiving. We also did lettuce, which did well, and spinach, which bolted almost immediately. I would give us maybe a solid B minus as we didn’t have a plan for all the cucumber and zucchini we ended up harvesting, but we learned a ton and are looking forward to the next growing season.

One of the things that drew me personally to the property was the 60x24 pole barn. It mostly is literally a barn barn right now, but 24x24 of it was a shop of sorts and at least has a concrete pad. It housed some tools and some hay, but I was able to clear out most of the built in fixtures, change out the lighting, and repurposed some of the cabinets to get the space looking more like a shop and less like a set for a horror movie.

It still feels like we have a ton to do (and we do), but as I write this I’m remembering those first few weeks and there is a realization that we have come a long way. Our vision for what we want to do is becoming clearer and we are looking forward to making this property into what we saw that first time we walked it. I think people will be shocked when we show them those pictures that are our “before”. We feel the progress we made last year really sets us up for this next year. So while this past year was very pretty exhausting, we are excited to continue building out the infrastructure for our new lives this next year!