Homeowner Thread

OK, so we made another offer about 25K below our contract offer to take the house as is. We'll see what they say. In the meantime, we looked at another house today, which is smaller, but in good shape. And there still is our second choice from before which was larger, but more expensive, and further from the activity center. So if they decide that's too low an offer, we'll probably put an offer on one of those.

And we've finally set a deadline for tomorrow at 5pm for them to decide.

I have the rarest of rare occurrences coming up Labor Day weekend: stag weekend! 3 days and 2 nights to myself.

The family is going to Albuquerque to attend the 1st birthday party of yet more family, and I don't want to go, so I made the counter-offer of my staying back in order to make the first big push in getting the house in order for my son. Projects to include:

• Cleaning out the junk room i.e. finding space for the considerable piles of junk
• Unload and move Baby Snape's furniture into the newly cleaned room, which will include dismantling and re-mantling the crib-bed, while also converting it back into a crib
• Assemble Baby Snape's all new furniture, a 5-piece set including full bed with bottom storage, and a vanity

We ruined our garbage disposal a few months ago (I suspect rinsing off a paintbrush blocked it up/jammed the motor) and I've been stubbornly washing everything in the other sink and just avoiding paying the money to fix it.

Our dishwasher is less than a year old at least, so it works fairly well.

If you have an Insikerator, which is a fairly ubiquitous brand, you can buy a de-jamming tool at the hardware store for a few bucks. It's just a large hex wrench that inserts into the bottom of the garburator that you use to manually turn back and forth to grind out anything stuck.

Painting is surely killing me. I got the master bedroom patched, sanded and primed (2 coats of primer over my "bordello burgundy" walls but eh, whatevs, the previous owners left a ton of primer behind). I got the trim sanded and painted as well as the ceiling done this week. The door was so peely and crack-y that it needed stripped so it's halfway done on sawhorses in the garage but at least it's out of the way. I picked up color last night so I'm finally gonna knock the damn thing in the head over the weekend so I can actually move my bed in and stop sleeping on the damn couch.

Solo home ownership is fucking exhausting.

I have refinished the wood floors and painted about 4 rooms. The new carpet goes in upstairs next week. I think we are pretty close to being ready to list. Unfortunately we have not found new house yet. I really don't want to list until we have something lined up. Luckily we should still be able to qualify for a decent loan without selling the current house. But the down payment is an issue. I am thinking we might need a new realtor, he keeps sending us house in newer subdivisions. I thought we were pretty clear that we would either like an old house with character (victorian, craftsman, tudor, etc) or a house on a heavily wooded lot. No a tiny peach tree in the front yard and a subdivision retention pond in the back does not count. To be fair, I am having a hard time finding much in the area that fits either. I think we have seen 4 in the past month and they all sold within a day or two.

Did the entire showerhead come off? If so I would worry about the state of the threads on the pipe. But with enough plumbers tape that might be able to be overcome at least temporarily. Be sure to wrap the tape in a clockwise direction. Showerheads are generally pretty easy to replace. The hardest part I have found is judging how tight it should be. Too loose and it will leak, too tight and you could crack the pipe. I have done both.

You could get a plumber's wrench, but for this kind of thing a decent channel lock should suffice and be more widely useful for other tasks.

I just spent the past 5 hours cleaning out my garage and it was exhilarating! You can see where everything is now! I have so much more space to work! Now I am all set for the changing of the seasons, which is a big deal here in Chicago. Just a few last summer projects (spray paint a small table, mount a window box, and add new backing to a rug) before I settle in and start on my kitchen crafts and indoor diy.

Tomorrow we're getting a dumpster delivered, and then will make the centerpiece activity of next week's staycation the cleaning-out of the basement.  I AM SO EXCITED.    Around this time last year we discovered the joys of picking up an entire storage room and upending it into a dumpster when we chucked a decade's worth of accrued garbage from the garage (a necessary task in advance of the construction on that space).  It's our traditional fall clean-out!

Stately Dick n Hisses Manor has some "spare room" usage issues, because of how slapdash our move-in was.  Hugs and I found the place on a "let's go for a Sunday drive!" looky-loo open house drop-in, and we called Boomer, who was still living in Arizona, to ask if she wanted to move back here with us.  Six weeks later Boomer had her place packed by professionals -- read: "there was no culling done -- every single item in the house was put into a box".  Hugs and I were moving from a 2000 square foot house, and Boomer was moving from a 3500 square foot house.  Stately Dick n Hisses Manor is 2800 square feet (not including the detached garage).  It was ugly.  None of us is an especially fastidious organizer, and we're all bad at editing our belongings.  So the garage spent 10 years being stuffed to the gills with still-packed moving boxes from Boomer, as well as the regular garage-y detritus a person will accumulate when they don't park their cars in the garage.  And our basement?  Oy.  We've got a big, semi-finished utility room down there, aside from the enormous furnace room, and it's now piled to the point of near uselessness with books, stitching supplies, our out-of-season framed stuff for the walls, bulk paper supplies, and my canned-good output.  And just knowing that mess is down there, seeming to grow on its own every day, depresses me.  I can't wait to have a leisurely 10 days (!!!) to get to sort through all that junk, to mercilessly cull, to have the luxury of an entire dumpster into which to toss things willy-nilly!  It's going to be such a life-improver to make that into a functional room for the first time since we moved in back in 2005!

This past winter, when the construction on the gym was finished, we gained our garage.  It was unspeakably awesome to be able to use that space for the first time.  Can it be possible that we'll gain our basement in the same calendar year?  Here's hoping!

When I first moved into my house and started diy, my flagrant disregard for OSHA regulations could have easily landed me in the hospital. I was lucky to have only fallen off the kitchen counter twice.

Has anyone had any experience with leather repair kits for couches? the spot where my pup often sits and chews on a sharp bone now has a small tear.

I didn't end up tacking on any extra chores, because by the end my back was wretched and my screwdriver hand was a withered claw. But, I got'er done. Most productive weekend in I can't remember how long.

Have the 4th b-day party coming up by month's end, so I need to get the patio done by then.

Man, that's such a common boulevard tree thing, too. "Plant all the same tree at the same time, what could go wrong?" *50 years later* "hmmm, looks like everything is dying at the same time, I can't believe these things all had roughly the same lifespan." I used to work with a guy who referred to those parking lot island planters as "tree coffins" because anything growing in a confined space like that (or between, say, a sidewalk and a street) was basically in a death struggle from the moment it was planted*.

*I've gone around and around with city managers and campus landscape manager types about how the benefits of a boulevard trees totally outweigh the shortened lifespan and "not as vigorous as it could be" growth.