The Broken House is Now the Beautiful House!

We now refer to "the Broken House" as the "Beautiful House" on the strong recommendation of Timmy's teacher. So, from now on, it's beautiful! It's been 3 1/2 months since my last blog update, and I figured it was about time to show you all that we are still at work. January, February, and March were crazy busy months work-wise for Rita, and the house renovation stuff all fell on Tim. But, in that amount of time, we've had the outside of the house painted, the pool deck painted, gutters installed, screens repaired, and grass installed. We even planted some flowers 1) in honor of today being the first official day of spring, and 2) blue and orange in honor of Syracuse University... hopefully they make it to the Sweet 16 tonight! Here are some pictures to share of how we're doing.

Here's a closer look at the front door. We painted the house the same color as our other house here in Florida (which we rented by the way, to a really nice couple, and the woman works for Lockheed Martin also!). The color is called "Fenlandia Green" and we liked it very much at the other house, and thought why not for this house.

 A closer look at my SU garden! I am hopeful that the blue flowers will bring in some butterflies, because I've read that butterflies are attracted to blue. Whatever the orange flowers are, I love them because they smell beautiful. Most of all, I am hopeful that they might bring some luck to the Orangemen in the NCAA tournament. They'll need it because they're in the toughest bracket. Yeah, you heard me right Duke fans.



 We've had a pretty good amount of company so far in the now-Beautiful House.  Most recently, my brother John came to stay while he was en route to a medical conference down in Naples. The kids "silly stringed" him because he deserved it. Those of you who know him, you don't even need to know the story, you just know that my brother deserved it. Actually, he was a good sport and he planned the whole silly-stringing event. Norah got a little overzealous, and Timmy wanted additional cans and asked if he could practice so that next time he could really put a beat-down on John.

Here's one of the "Gutter Guys," who knew we'd be so excited for a significant downpour
to come? Oh how our lives have changed that we are eager to try out our new gutters!

Another "Gutter Guy"





 This poor gutter guy had the misfortune of working over the screened-in pool area. Those of you that live in Florida know that these screens have a limited shelf life due to the extreme temperatures and overbearing sun. The screens become very brittle and fragile and the slightest pressure will break them. Bummer for him, but happy for us... his caulk gun tore through our pool screen. Remember, the name of this blog is "Foreclosure Paradise," and these screens were pretty old and in bad shape anyway. Well, he had to replace the screen for us. And in the process of replacing the screen.... he broke another one. So we got two new screen sections.



 So onto Florida's newest Citrus Baron. Tim is pretty excited that we have an exceptionally productive grapefruit tree! He has jokingly started calling us "The Boston Citrus Company," and Tim spends A LOT of time on his citrus trees. I don't even really like grapefruit, but I can honestly say that our grapefruit tree produces really sweet and juicy grapefruits. We are actually taking care of them now, fertilizing and watering - which is more than these trees have gotten in the past probably 3-5 years. We have high hopes that the winter of 2012 will bring on a bumper crop!

We have about an acre of land with our house, and in addition to the grapefruit tree, we also have an orange tree. Here's a shot of next year's fruit (blossoms for now), so we're also hoping that with some care, this will become a productive orange tree. This year we had about 4 pitiful looking fruits, but these blossoms seem pretty promising. We also want to buy about 3-4 other orange trees and maybe a nice lemon tree while we're at it. We have to get our sprinkler zones modified though, to support all the water that citrus demands.

The Boston Citrus Company: Tim became a little obsessive about
picking as many grapefruits as possible

A closeup of The Boston Citrus Company production! Tim
brought these grapefruits to the kids' schools and left them there
for teachers/staff/parents that wanted them. They were gone in 1/2  a day!

So as I mentioned in my introduction, we had the house painted.  Before the painters could paint the house, it had to be power washed, and the cracks in the stucco had to be filled. As you can see from the picture, we may have had one or two cracks..... one or two hundred, that is. Cracks in stucco are VERY COMMON here in Florida, again due to the temperature extremes, and even new houses have them. They get filled with silicone and painted over, and that's just a fact of life here. You can't even really see the cracks till you get right up and look for them. But in fairness, this IS a lot of cracks. We think this is the first time the Beautiful House had ever been painted since it was built! 

More cracks, on our bedroom side

Front yard raked and prepped, ready for sod!

 So after having the house painted, we had to work on the grass. Or the weeds. Whatever was in the front of our yard that was occasionally green. The house had been unoccupied for about 2 years before we purchased it, and very minimal lawn care had taken place during that time. In addition, I'm pretty sure that even before the previous owners moved out, lawn care was NOT their forte. We found a landscape company that gave us a really fair price on clearing out the dead weeds/grass and installation of nice, new St. Augustine sod. For those of you that have never walked on  Florida grass, it's kind of a new experience for us Northerners. It's just weird. Springy, spongy, weird grass. But that's how we roll here in the Sunshine State.

The sod truck arrived with about 10 pallets of St. Augustine Sod. Super classy tidbit to share, Tim parked our lawn chairs on the front yard because he didn't want the truck or forklift to roll over our septic leach field and ruin it (costing about $5k to fix), so the yard chairs stopped 'em in their tracks. 

The pallets of sod looked like alien invaders on the front yard

The kids were pretty excited about having grass again.

The sod starting to go down, it looks like a carpet!



The inside of the pool area is different than the rest of the house. I wanted to paint it a "fun" color, so that when you're out there, you feel like you're someplace else, maybe on vacation. So I painted it a terra cotta color. The pool deck is painted a beigy-color and picks up the beigy-color of the pool tiles. We need to get some nice pool deck furniture, but will probably wait till fall for that. I want to get some wicker/wood with maroon cushions out there, and put in some indoor-outdoor fabric curtains on the lanai.

Another view of our lanai. This is where I'd put the indoor/outdoor maroon curtains and the nice pool furniture. I want to wait till I find what I really want, and it'll probably be fall before I'll really have some time (or money) to shop for what I want. One thing I have learned in this whole renovation process, I am willing to wait for what I really want!

Pool View, with the Beigy-Deck painted. Tim just bought a pool
thermometer today, and it's 71 degrees Fahrenheit. The kids have
been swimming for over a month during this swimming season (2011)...
it HAD to have been in the 60's when they started. I swear, my kids must have
nerve damage because they swim in this ice-cold water like nobody's business!

So we do have some other projects to complete, but we believe that the house is about 95-99% complete! This has been an amazing project, and we are so happy with how it turned out. Believe it or not, we think we are within about $1000 of our original budget estimate, made before we even had our home inspection (and really knew just how bad this house might be!). We really didn't have even a single argument with each other during this whole process about anything related to the house or renovation. The kids were AWESOME helpers to us. All in all, we would DEFINITELY do this again. Now we just have to find another Broken House in need of us! We're looking for one!

A New House for a New Year, Happy 2011!

Dining Room Table Set for Christmas Dinner

Happy 2011, today is January 1st and it's been about 2 1/2 months since my last blog update. We moved into the house in mid-October and spent the next month moving boxes around and trying to down-size. Our garage is still pretty chaotic but things are coming  together inside the house. Here are some pictures of what the house is looking like now:

The kids really settled in well in the new house. No one had to switch schools, so that part was made easy for us. Timmy wanted to spend Christmas Day completely in pajamas, so here's our guy living his dream....

We had a garage sale before we left the old house, and another one here in the new house. We sold so much stuff, and we have given away even more stuff. The new house is about 700 square feet smaller than our old house, and it seems that most of that space was in closets! It's good to purge once in a while, and we are really trying to be mindful about what we keep and what we don't need anymore. Of course, Timmy in his PJ's on Christmas, you see all the disarray and stuff around him.... Guess we probably should have thought that through a little more regarding our space problem.....

This is my chandelier from the old house, moved into the new house

Norah with her pool pals (Oatmeal the Snowman, and Peggy the Penguin)
This was taken Christmas Day, I think it was low 70's that day. Tim jumped into the pool
for a "Polar Bear" dip.... and he said it was so cold, the water burned his skin.

View from the kitchen looking into the family room, this is no
magazine shot, this is a working kitchen that gets used several times a day,
so please forgive the mess!

The plantation shutters got installed this week. I am crazy about them.

Our bedroom, no pictures hung yet. The plantation shutters are in there too.

Another view of our bedroom

Master bathroom, my side, Tim has a duplicate of this on his side. The
white door is the "potty closet" and we are having a claw foot tub installed
in front of the window toward the shower area,
pictures coming soon

Another angle of our bedroom from the master bathroom.

This is the formal living room, the first room you come to when you open the front door.
The slider behind the chair leads out to the pool.



This picture taken from the formal living room, looking toward
the dining room.



The dining room, from the formal living room.

The guest bathroom

Looking down the hallway from the guest bedroom toward
the formal living room and dining room. Our bedroom door is
open beyond the formal living room.

The dining room again, with the new shutters.

 So in the upcoming months, our projects are oriented more toward finishing stuff up. We still have a couple holes in the wall where electrical line had to be run, we have to replace a couple exterior doors, and we have to paint the entire exterior of the house. I think this house has the original paint from when the house was first built in 1998.... it's pretty thin and in rough shape.

We need to powerwash the house, caulk the stucco, and paint. I have almost settled on a dark gray color, and new front doors eventually.... maybe painted bright shiny red. The pool deck also needs to be painted, and that'll probably be a charcoal gray to pick up the charcoal/black tiles in the pool.

Lastly, we need to re-sod the entire front yard. These two projects need to wait till probably March however, since we  can't paint unless the weather is in the mid-70's for at least a week. We have a lot of ups and downs temperature-wise here in Central Florida at this time of year... so we'll be more certain in March that the weather will be consistently warm enough for exterior painting and sod. No need to put sod down if there's any risk of frost. So for the meantime, we wait, and we continue to be a little bit of an eyesore to our neighbors. They've been really patient and easy-going though, so no complaints from them for us.

Last picture, many of you know that my mom was born and raised in Germany. Here's a Bavarian custom for New Year's Day. You write the year around the initials C+M+B on the front door,or whatever the main entrance and exit into the house is using chalk. It's a blessing,wish for good fortune, and a good luck for the house and its inhabitants for the New Year, the initials represent the 3 Wise Men (Caspiar, Melchior, and Balthazar). Gotta bless the new house! We had a great 2010, hope you all have an even better 2011!!!!

As the U-Haul Slogan says "U Can Do It," We are MOVING!

We are moving! What a week this has been. We are putting the finishing touches on what we now call the "Beautiful House," and it's all coming together, but it's been a stressful week because now, the details of the house require more fine-tuning, and we are exhausted. It's hard to fine-tune when your muscles are shaking, your fingers are scraped, and your back is killing you. But, this is not a woe-to-us story. This has been a great month renovating this house and we are so happy we took on this project. Both Tim and I feel that we would DEFINITELY renovate another house. I just need about 6 months off for rest, and count me back in.

So onto the pictures!

 Here's an action photo of Mike, our electrician. Mike has been with us so much the past week, I almost feel like we need to offer him one of the bedrooms and let him move in with us.

The poor guy has crawled through every spooky/creepy part of both the current house we live in (to uninstall my favorite chandelier) as well as the new Beautiful House.





This light fixture is the new fixture that Mike the Electrician installed in our kitchen:

Tim Flaherty picked out this one: the new light fixture over the front door. One night, I'd had it. Tired, sore, crabby...I brought the kids home and got everyone ready for bed. We had to have the front door light fixture for Mike the Electrician to hang the next day.

Tim went to Home Depot and picked this one out all by himself, I think he did a good job.

This light fixture is the aforementioned "favorite" chandelier. I bought this chandelier before we left Syracuse with the proceeds from our moving/garage sale. So I feel that this light fixture is somehow tied to my time in Syracuse.

Anyway, it's been hanging in our current house for the past 4 1/2 years, and it's coming with us to the Beautiful House. It'll hang over our dining room table. They're not on in this picture, but we have little lamp shades that hide the light bulbs.



Here was this week's major bump in the road! The stove finally came in on Tuesday. Guess what? It's 3 inches shorter than the old cooktop/wall oven configuration we had. Not to worry though. Although I did in fact, worry considerably about this snafu..... This type of stove is called a "drop in," which means the top of it actually rests on the granite surrounding it. It is in the correct position at the top, but at the bottom, as you'll see in the 2nd picture, there is a gap of about 2-3" that we need to cover with a replacement drawer panel. Or something. Creative thoughts needed at this moment....

Right now, I can see black space. But I'm not going to think about that. The only thought I can focus on at this moment is to just get into this house!

There's the dead space underneath my "drop in" stove. We need to get a
panel / replacement drawer face to put there. I called the cabinet company
to see what they can do... fingers crossed.

Back to the move.... Here are our two professional movers, ready to get to work!

Timmy in the driver's seat, Norah the Navigator:

Showing Mary Reizun (our niece and kids' cousin) the newly Beautiful House:

The kids actually had a fight about who got to drive in the cab of the Uhaul with me. Norah got to ride there on the way TO the house, Timmy got the front seat on the way back. Why couldn't they both ride with me? Um.... this Uhaul had 3 seat belts..... but only 2 seat belt plugs....... Thanks Uhaul.

Last picture for this post. Tim and I went on a date night last night since our niece agreed to babysit the kids. Only in Orlando, we're driving around and we see Rocket Man in the car below. To the Moon, Alice!!!!!

Running on empty, but we are almost there!

As the title would suggest, we are pretty tired. Lots of sore muscles, bruises, scrapes, and general fatigue. This picture of Timmy sleeping it off in his Cheetah sheets pretty much speaks for us all at this point. But on the bright side, we are finally getting there, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Yesterday was an incredibly busy day at the Broken House as the following pictures will attest. At one point we had no less than 10 contractors working in the house, and we needed mirrors around corners basically to prevent traffic jams. Appliance delivery men, 5 guys finishing the tile and installing the carpet, 2 granite guys, and 2 electricians. For what it's worth, the granite guys showed up about 9:30AM and were there till after 10:00PM. I guess that's a lotta granite. They didn't get paid by the hour, and it was a flat rate for the job, so I give them credit for sticking with it and doing an outstanding job even though I know they were getting tired.

First picture, beginning of the day, granite arrives and we are so happy! 



In this picture, Rita is resolving the details of under-cabinet lighting and outlet placement with our electrician. What a nice guy... He was soaked in sweat and still has to come back on Monday. But he told me he had fun working on our job.

That's us, the party house!



So as I mentioned above, things got a little busy at times in the Broken House today.

Here's a snapshot of the kitchen area with just 4 people in there trying to work. This shows 1 granite guy (there were 2), the appliance delivery man (there were 2), Tim, and one of two electricians.

It was a fun atmosphere though. We had the radio on, lots of people talking and laughing, and a good group of workers. Everyone got their job done and I'm so happy with the sub-contractors we hired.

Here comes our new refrigerator. The blue stuff is a film to protect the stainless steel from scratches until after all the construction and moving is finished. We also got a new stainless dishwasher, stove/convection oven, and microwave.

The stove/oven comes next week, so as of now, we are still only about 3/4 complete on appliances.

An action photo of the two granite guys demo-ing the old laminate countertops. You can also see the new stainless microwave has been installed by this time, and we still have the old stove in as a place holder untl the new one gets delivered next week.

The electrician's ladder is visible in this picture. He is installing "above the bumpout" lighting (above the cabinet bumpout). That'll give the kitchen a nice glow in the evenings with the above cabinet lights and below cabinet lights as well.

From Rita's perspective, most of the day was spent painting over the creamsicle orange paint in the kids' bathroom. I had exactly two votes of confidence on the creamsicle orange from my blog readers, but the rest were silent. I guess if you don't have anything nice to say, people decided to say nothing at all. Tim was a little more vocal in his thoughts on the creamsicle orange. The decicing factor for me came when one of the flooring guys (who is also a painter) came by and said that with the proximity of the kids bedrooms to the kids bathroom, that "this end of the house looks like a box of crayons!" I think he meant it in a nice way, but I took the hint. So, the creamsicle paint was a little harder to paint over than one might have guessed!!!! I bought another paint in a pale yellowish/beige off of the $5.00 Lowe's bargain bin, so for those who are wondering, this bathroom has now cost me $10.00 in paint! It took a couple of coats of paint, especially on the cut-ins but I think the yellow is a little more subdued and normal. I also CLEANED the bathroom (much needed) and added a new light fixture over the sink. This is the 2nd light fixture I installed there. The first one was broken out of the box from Lowe's, and I didn't figure that out until it was mounted on the wall.

 

Next, here are Norah's and Tim's rooms with their carpeting installed. It's just a beigy-tan carpet in a berber style.

 Here is the clearer, better shot of the guest bedroom as promised. The carpet in here is the same as our Master Bedroom, and it's called "Stone" sort of a grayish/brownish/beige, a little darker than the kids' bedrooms.

 

Another shot of the granite guys in progress. Now you can see my faucet is installed, but still no dishwasher. We had to wait until after the sink, drains, garbage disposal, etc were all hooked up to install the dishwasher.

 Here's the refrigerator installed. Clearance of fractions of an inch on either side. Tim asked me as it was being delivered "Did you measure it? Is this thing going to fit?" My answer was "Yes, it'll fit" but mentally I was thinking "Oh crap, I should have measured."

Luckily it fit.

You can also see the granite on the little bar area next to the fridge, and the backsplash granite. I think it looks really pretty, and it'll look even better once the lighting stuff is all resolved.

So at this point in the day, the only ones left are Tim, the kids, me, and the 2 granite guys. Everyone else has been paid and left to start the weekend with their families. I think the granite guys wanted to hang out with us this weekend.... Just kidding. They were very hard working and they stayed until the job was done and they did an excellent job. One minor problem, the electrician had to leave and will fit the electric receptacles back into the granite on Monday. That means we didn't have any kitchen lighting and the granite guys had no way of seeing once it got dark!

Luckily, we grabbed one of the contractors before they left. They need to leave their trailer at our place over the weekend. We borrowed their portable spot light and used that in the kitchen so that the granite guys could see what they were doing.  That helped tremendously.

That's it for the Broken House on this edition. It's not so broken anymore. Today we are having new faucets installed in the kids' and guest bathrooms. We are cleaning the cabinets inside and out, and it's just the four Flaherty's in the house. We will begin moving in this week, having a garage sale at the old house next Saturday, and big stuff being moved next Monday. From soup to nuts, we have had the keys to this house for 23 days as of this morning. I can't believe it. On the one hand, it's been a blur, and on the other hand I can't believe how much has happened in 23 days. Tim keeps saying "This is like Ranger School all over again." For the rest of us who didn't go to Ranger School, it's just a put-your-head-down-and-do-it month!