When your house is 200yrs old, there’s been ample time for dubious “improvements.”
The people we bought the Great White Money Pit off of were long on ambition and short on know-how. And money. And motivation. And patience. They were only there for three years, and they started a whole bunch of things and left them unfinished for us to enjoy.
Let’s see. . . working my way from the bottom going up. . .
When *they * bought the place, the last owner didn’t heat it or shut off the water during the winter. The pipes burst, flooding the finished half of the basement and the full bath down there. So that’s gutted. From the remnants, I can see that it was no great loss. Cheap panelling, linoleum glued directly to the concrete floor, nasty bathroom fixtures.
In one end of the basement, you can see daylight through what’s left of a header beam (I believe that’s what it’s called).
The header had, at one point, been holding up a deck that was added some time in the 80’s from the looks of it. The deck wasn’t attached to the header properly - it was nailed instead of bolted. So the deck fell off. It’s hanging lopsidedly from the remaining support posts. We can’t take it off because it wraps around the corner and is our access to the kitchen door.
Mmmm. . . the kitchen. It has no ceiling. The last owners removed an ugly dropped ceiling and never got around to putting up a new one. They also incompletely stripped wallpaper and painted over it with bright schoolbus yellow paint. They stripped off what looked like a layer of sheet vinyl flooring that was on top of real linoleum that was on top of the original pine floor (this is the “new” part of the house, added in 1920). The pine floor is cracked and torn and in some spots you can see through to the basement. I’ve got **Anne Neville ** beat - I’ve only got one outlet in my kitchen.
They did the incomplete wall paper strip on pretty much every room of the house. The wall paper was very ugly, I am told, and I believe it because they didn’t strip behind the radiators. The plaster is a wreck. When they got tired of stripping wallpaper (but not always before all traces of it were gone) they painted over it with a large variety of “oops” paint, which they kindly left behind for us in the basement. I think there’s about 10 gallons left. The paint cans are rusted and leaking.
After a long hard day of wallpaper stripping and painting, they appeared to relax by the fire. We’ve got six fireplaces, only four of them lead to chimneys (the third chimney fell off when the roof was replaced in the 80’s). They never had the chimney they used inspected. The fireplaces are missing their firebox floors. I learned this when I cleared out the ashes they left us and found a collection of garden bricks stacked on top of a piece of singed paneling directly on top of the floor joists. Sitting directly under that in the basement was a wicker etagere that would have made great kindling had the fire made it all the way through.
They removed great quantities of carpeting, but did not do anything with the hardwood underneeth, nor did they replace the quarter round where necessary.
They stripped the paint off a large portion of the woodwork in the original front entry. It would be beautiful had they
a) finished stripping all the paint off
b) not slapped on massive, dripping quantities of dark brown PolyShades.
The uncarpeted the stairs. The treads are a wreck. Many of the spindles in the railing were missing. There’s a bucket of replacement spindles in the garage, salvaged from another old house. So the ones that are installed are randomly unpainted, or painted in great gobs of flat white paint. In fact most of the trim that was not refinished was painted in great gobs of flat white paint.
Except the den downstairs. Its pocket door is a cheap luann door painted the same terracotta red as the hallway. One of the walls is actually a piece of plywood painted to match. There’s a gaping 4’x4’ hole in the ceiling in the den beneeth the gutted bathroom (more on that later). Under the hole is the beginings of a poorly roughed in half bath that never got finished. The rest of the den has been painted pink and green and “antiqued” which makes it look filthy no matter how much you scrub. The mantle in the den, like the two in the great room, is slathered in red PolyShades.
Upstairs the fun continues. One of the two bathrooms is a gutted shell. From the looks of it, this was not necessarily a bad thing, except that I have no place to bathe my children other than the clawfoot tub that’s jerry-rigged in the basement. My youngest fell through the hole in the floor in this bathroom and was saved from falling 10’ into the den when her jumpsuit caught on the plumbing.
One of the children’s rooms was painted purple, but not all the same purple. And the trim was turquoise and pink, but not done with any sort of straight edge, and the ceiling was turquoise. All though the house, nail holes and cracks in the plaster were spackled, but no spackle was sanded. There are lumps and clods under the paint everywhere. The radiator was inexplicably missing in this room. Combined with the original 1810 windows made for a cold room until we got it replaced.
The other children’s room is dark blue, but we’re not using this room right now. There are holes in the walls, and the last owners uncovered the old fireplace that had been plastered over, but they never did anything to finish it. It’s just a wall with most of its plaster missing and a bricked over fireplace in the middle. The gutted bathroom was carved out of this bedroom in the 1920’s. (the children of the house signed and dated the wall board)
The remaining bathroom is disgusting. It had shreds of urine soak flooring and plywood when we moved in. There are holes in the walls. You can see through the floor down into the kitchen in spots (remember - no ceiling in the kitchen). The wood around the shower stall was completely rotted, and there was a good rotted spot going under the toilet when we moved in. The only electric outlet does not work.
There was once a water leak outside the bathroom. The roof has been fixed, but the ceiling is a mess, as is the hardwood floor in that area. The walls are wrecked from the shower installation.
There is a fourth bedroom that is empty right now. It will someday be a nice, big, new bathroom. It has half of a dropped ceiling remaining. The half that remains covers a 6’x4’ hole in the ceiling.
The master bedroom, as the bathroom, was texture plastered by the previous occupants. Then it was painted dark, glossy eggplant purple, almost black. Then red, blue, and gold swirls were painted free-hand all around the top. The back of the door is bright red, with swirls. The door is disintegrating. The trim was beige and gold. There is no door on one closet. They uncovered the fireplace without finishing it here, too.
Up in the attic we were told there was insulation, but we were lied to. It’s only over our bedroom. The wiring in the house is a wreck, courtesy of the DIY ambitions of two occupants ago. There are no working overhead fixtures upstairs, and only about 1 in 5 outlets works.
The gutters are rotted and falling apart. We got an estimate on tearing them down and replacing with aluminum (the least expensive option) that would buy me a really nice new car. The roof will need to be replaced in less than 10 yrs. I’m hoping we’ll make it at least 5.
There is a gorgeous, huge, deep wrap-around porch. The entire beadboard ceiling is rotting. The whole exterior needs to be repainted. The yard is a wasteland.
I love a challenge, but I question my sanity weekly.
