Our First Week at the House

Week one was just like moving into any other house.  Except this time I wanted to move extra fast on the projects and we had more limited funds for the house than we normally put there.  So I started the process of doing lots of real DIY projects, more than we ever have with any other house.  And by "we", I mean "I"...because Nathan is working an insane amount of hours right now.

Day one in the house was a LONG day of me pulling up the carpet and padding.  From the first time we saw the house, we knew it had an overpowering animal urine smell so I knew I'd have to do this before I could get anything else done.

It was hard, hot and sweaty work and it was filthy, disgusting work.  But so worth it to have the source of that smell gone from the house.  Here is a sample of that process and you can see the layer of dirt that was UNDER the padding.  You can imagine how dirty the carpet was for there to be that much dirt under that and padding.

While I was in the middle of that project, more neighbors came to meet us.  This time it was a family that just moved here a month ago themselves.  Very nice people too!  As I made my way out to the RV for something, he was talking to our other neighbor and so I went and met her also.  She was great too.  I don't know that we've ever had better neighbors anywhere else before so we are thrilled with how wonderful they all seem.

Nathan got the water going in the house, which was a huge plus.  HUD is holding an escrow for that repair so we are now able to get that money back from them and use it towards fencing for the horses!

Rapid Systems came to hook up internet for us, but had problems so they have to come back on the 25th to try again.  That night Austin, Ryan and Nathan picked up some furniture and a fridge that we bought on Craigslist and Brittany helped me sweep up the mess on the floor.  We were glad to go to bed even though we were still hot and sweaty.

Wednesday I headed back over to the house bright and early.  I worked on pulling up staples on the floor for hours until I had too many blisters on my hands (need work gloves!) and then started cleaning the kitchen.  Those two things had me busy until that night when the guys headed out to get living room furniture.  The poor guys worked full days and then did this at night.  Very long days for all of us!  The kitchen was very dirty at the beginning of the day, but nice and scrubbed clean at the end.

The next day began the big project, so I'm going to write a separate blog post for that one!