Upstairs Bedroom

When we first moved in, we knew that in a few short months we would begin renovations.  One of the main goals of that renovation was to move our bedroom upstairs.  Initially, this bedroom was a stinky mothball room with weird stains on the walls and far too much laminate on the floors.

One of the features we really liked in this room were these cute white painted paneled closet doors -- very country cute.  However, the one thing we needed to accept was that all the beautiful trim was painted white.  Maybe one day we will replace all of the trim, but considering our timeline we decided to keep it as-is.

Obviously the first part was ripping up and out all the laminate floors to prep them for refinishing.

For months and months before we got this house, I watched far too many episodes of Rehab Addict and watched Nicole Curtis obsess over hardwood floors.  We were pretty certain we had hardwood floors throughout the entire house, so it's all I dreamed about for sixmonths it took us to close.

Even though there isn't any furniture in this picture, it's by far my favorite because of the floor/wall contrast. (*swoon*)  Also, I would recommend installing the air conditioner before you begin painting -- I did a lot of renovation work upstairs in my bra and shorts.  At least there's no dress code for this kind of work!

The day we got to "move in" to the upstairs was a special day because it meant that upstairs renovations were done and we could move down to the rest of the house.

Refinishing Tongue & Groove Subflooring

From watching too many episodes of "Rehab Addict," I was quite excited about finishing some hardwood floors.  The day after school ended, we started demo on the second floor.  We thought that taking up the tile and subflooring was going to take a long time, but honestly we had it all pulled up in about a day and a half.  (Thank goodness my brother came to help!)

Here I'm still in my pajamas and slippers.

Underneath the tile was wide plank tongue and groove attic decking.  It was never really "meant" to be sanded and finished as a hardwood floor, but the great thing about owning a home and doing your own renovations is that you call the shots.  This flooring was beautiful and rustic and exactly the character that we like to surrounded ourselves with.

Since the floor was never "meant" to be finished, all the boards were nailed in place using top nails.  And to run a sander over the floor meant that every single nail needed to be driven below the surface of the board.  With the help of some coffee and a good weighted hammer from the wood shop, we worked for about three hours just driving nails.

Because there was no previous stain or poly on these boards, we didn't need a heavy duty sander.  So we went to Home Depot and rented the buffer sander with some rather rough paper.  That combination did the trick of smoothing out the boards without being too harsh.  After a rough sand paper pass with the sander, I moved up to a finer sand paper to finish off the sanding job.

The first sander I had the pleasure of renting.

There's a clear difference, even with a light sanding.

The next step was staining, which I did by hand, with a rag.  After a day or so of letting that dry, I put on two coats of polyurethane (non glossy finish).  And, voila! the first refurbished hardwood floors in our new place! 

The Dream Garden (Planning, Construction, & Planting)

Even when we temporarily moved to the condo weren't sure if the sale was going to "go through," I started seeds anyway.  I know now that wherever I am, I need to have a garden.  It gives me such pleasure, I couldn't live without it.

Seed starting operation.

Dark & stormys on snow days are perfect for garden planning

I had an idea of where I wanted to garden to go and about how big we should make it.  To put things into perspective, when Mike and I first moved in together in Hippie Village we had two small raised beds and mostly did container gardening.  Then in Lambertville, it was a similar set up with some slightly larger raised beds and lots of container gardening.  So with this place, the space is endless and we wanted something fantastic.

Playing around with garden bed layout.

There's no better feeling than seeing these little seeds pop up.

Building the boxes and securing them into the ground was certainly harder than it would seem.  What helped enormously is getting a pallet of lumber delivered from Home Depot so that we always had wood on hand to build new boxes.  Leveling the boxes was kind of a nightmare, because this part of our property has a slight slope.

The arbor in the garden was made by my brother-in-law and we got married underneath it.

When it was time to get soil we ordered a dump truck full and had it delivered to the house.  Unfortunately, we had it delivered to the other side of the property, so we took dozens and dozens of trips with the wheel barrow to move the soil.

This is the view from our bedroom upstairs.

And finally we were able to put in some plants and seeds into the beds.  I did my best to make an optimal companion planting plan so each plant would do as best as it could!  For the most part, that was true.  However, we did run into some soil deficiencies, such as calcium, and we did have some crops that just didn't take very well (like lavender!).

These zucchini plants produced an insane amount of fruit.

Here you can see a few weeks into our season, the garden was filling out.  Also, we got a super late start on the season because of septic work, etc.  It should be a nice treat to garden right after the last frost this year!

The Search for a Property (Part III)

When we arrived at our closing, after it being postponed three times, we were bursting with happiness.  We got there early because we stopped over at the property to quickly do a walk through and leave one of our cars there -- our timeline was so incredibly tight that we had to start moving in immediately!

We finally properly met the sellers after dealing with them through lawyers for months.  They are an older couple in their seventies.  The husband grew up in the house and the couple still lives next door.  So, essentially we met the sellers and our new neighbors in one fell swoop.

The closing went smoothly -- the closer arrived, gave us a mound of paperwork to sign, our lawyer (a family friend) made sure everything was good, and we walked out of there with a collection of keys and a garage door opener.

Over the next 24 hours we made dozens of trips between the homestead and the condo (where we were temporarily living).  It was also raining.  We rented a big uHaul truck and packed it to the hilt, after clearing out the condo and also getting a lot of stuff from my mom's house.

It was a day to remember.  I'm pretty sure Mike hit a couple of things with the huge uHaul truck.  We moved all of our belongings by ourselves in the rain on a weekday (having to work the day before and the day after moving), and we nearly got into a fistfight over getting the couch in the front door.  It's the only new piece of furniture we own, and it's awful to move.

Four days after moving, we celebrated our first wedding anniversary in our new home.  Cheers to us!

First Night in Our New Home

Yes, after closing we moved everything in 24 hours.  In the middle of the week.  By ourselves.  In the rain.

We had to take the front door off the hinges to get our couch in -- funny enough, it's the only piece of new furniture we own and every time we move, it's the one item that drives us to the brink of a fistfight.

We literally drove to the real estate closing with one car and one borrowed minivan packed full of belongings, and then rented the big uHaul the following morning.

After unpacking a few key items, we laid down to go to sleep around midnight (this is very late for us on a school night).  Then we heard a pack of coyotes (or coywolves) yelping and howling in the distance.  It was eery and comforting all at the same time.

We were home at last.

The Search for a Property (Part II)

Truth be told, my father-in-law first showed us the property listing at least six months before we went to see it.  I vividly remember saying something to him like "what do you think we're rich?  We can't afford that!"  But the price of the property dropped dramatically in that six month time period.  So, one chilly Sunday morning we found ourselves looking at two houses on five acres with a huge garage and partially collapsed tractor shed.  The place wasn't exactly a complete mess (in our opinion), but it certainly needed TLC.  One saving grace of the situation is that both houses had been rented to tenants for a few years -- that kept all the systems running in the houses and people inside to notice when something was leaking/broken.  After looking at a lot of vacant and foreclosed houses in our property search, we learned that an occupied house is the safest house.  That Sunday morning, we fell in love with the place in all its fixer-upper glory and endless possibilities for the land.

After talking over the property with our parents and crunching some numbers, we drove out to the realtor's office after work the following week, put in an offer, and within thirty minutes we settled on a price with the seller.  Wow, that's was easy! we thought.

Then the real work started.

First off, we scheduled the home inspection.  For reasons mentioned in my previous post, we love our home inspector because he really protected us from buying a damaged house.  Also, he's a fun guy and knows that we are a little nutty.  There was nothing that turned up in the home inspection that was extremely detrimental, but there was a list of repairs we would need to take care of, including the septic system.

The next step was getting a whole bunch of paperwork in order to obtain a mortgage for the property.  This entire process took us five months.  Seriously.  I had bought a condo back in 2007 and because of the housing and mortgage market crash, buying a property had become much more difficult.  The mortgage company wanted everything they could get aside from a DNA test.  And we had a mortgage broker who was a complete idiot, lost paperwork we sent him, and pushed our closing date three or four times.

It was also a particularly a tough deal because we did a 203k FHA building loan rolled into our mortgage to account for some necessary repairs, like a new septic system.  Not only did the building loan make the mortgage process more complicated, it also raised our closing costs considerably.  The other really nerve-wracking aspect of doing a 203k FHA loan is that the property had to appraise for both our purchase price and the building loan.  It was a nail-biting, phone screaming, micromanaging kind of situation.  I spent countless hours on the phone with the mortgage broker, the bank, our lawyer, and the realtor.  And then I had to spend a lot more hours on the phone with family members to talk us off the ledge.

Let me quickly break down why this deal was so tricky:

1.) Some things took a long time because the sellers are in their 70s, have no cell phone, don't "do" email, and take long trips.  A lot of times it was difficult for the realtor or their lawyer to reach them.

2.) There was a partially collapsed tractor shed on the property.  You can't have partially collapsed structures around with an FHA loan, but we expressed that we wished there was a repaired tractor shed.  So, we were able to negotiate that the sellers (with some of our labor) demolish the tractor shed and then give us the insurance claim check at closing.

3.) The cost of a new septic system for this size property was so exorbitant that we wouldn't progress with the deal unless there was an agreement met for the sellers to contribute money to the new system.  The lawyers handled it and made it work and now I know more about septic systems than I ever thought was possible.

But as I said before, five and a half months after settling on a price, we got to show up to the closing.

The Search for a Property (Part I)

Although we have become novice gardeners, my husband I really didn't set out to become homesteaders this soon.  It was a dream, yes, but it wasn't the original plan.  I knew it was the long-term goal because we both had visions of drinking morning coffee and looking out at a field, and we decided together that that was our vision.

Our search really began to get a place of our own to invest, live without paying rent to a landlord, and be able to practice and refine our homesteading skills.  We began our search in June of 2014 and first looked at this place.   It was super cheap and had character.  We are both obsessed with character in homes.  The house also used to be the general store for the rural area and it was a post and beam structure.  However, we decided the property needed too much work and we were a bit scared about we would find when we opened the walls.  We didn't bid.

We then spent the better part of our summer looking at houses near and around the Jersey-side of the Delaware River.  We looked at this one, this one, this one, and this one (among many others).  For one reason or another, none of these were our house.  Then, we found this one.  We were in love (and mind you, the price was about $50k higher than it is right now).  We negotiated a deal, settled on a price, mentally moved in our furniture, began dreaming about our perfect garden, and scheduled our inspections.  Little did we know that a home inspection can make or break a real estate deal.  The septic passed inspection (aside from a now-illegal dry well for the laundry gray water) and the well water failed, but could be easily remedied with a water treatment system.  However, our home inspector, who is amazing and incredibly thorough, revealed numerous serious structural issues.  Between a house that was nearly sliding off of the foundation because of water damage to a roof that was not built to code (beams too far apart and roofing wood too heavy), our dreams of owning this house was OVER.  Not to mention that the sellers' furnished us with a letter disclosing that the house would be "close to" construction for the new Penn East Pipeline project.  Our hearts were a bit broke (lesson learned) and we took ourselves out for summer afternoon cocktails to soften the blow.

Within 24 hours we were back searching for more properties, but the summer was coming to an end and our time was about to become limited.  (I'm a teacher, we only have one car, and my husband was applying to teaching jobs.)

Then, by some magical turn of events, my husband got a teaching job (on the first day of school, no less) and we were able to reevaluate what we could afford.  We asked ourselves: Should we look for the "forever" home?  Then we stumbled upon an incredible place (and what would turn out to be an incredibly challenging real estate deal) outside of Frenchtown.  We resolved that everything happens for a reason, and that although this property probably wasn't for everybody, it was perfect for us.

If you want to read the story about how we found and negotiated our current house, stay tuned.