This is the second house we have owned - we’re still sleeping in the first one, having arranged to own both for a week to make moving and fixing easier. But it’s my first REAL house. This house is a townhouse with no real yard; our new house is a real, detached house, with a back yard. An attached garage.
The place has a smell to it that bothers me but I suspect it was because the previous owners always had about 17 Glade Air Fresheners around. That will likely go away as we’re painting the whole damned thing over the next two days.
We have a five-year fixup plan. Step 1, to be accomplished over the next two weeks, is
A repaint of the top two floors; they are presently painted glossy white. It’s like living inside an iPod.
Carpeting of the bedrooms, which for some reason are currently floored with linoleum. God knows why.
Destruction of the 30-foot pine tree in the front yard which covbers the whole front of the house and presents a significant danger to the home’s foundation.
Step 2 will be assemblage of better window coverings and light fixtures, to be accomplished over the next month.
Step 3, scheduled for Spring 2009, is a relandscaping of the backyard.
Step 5, Summer 2009, is the tiling of the kitchen and hallway.
Step 5, Fall 2009, is the subdivision of the lower basement level, which is presently a “Rec room” 26 feet long, into a guest room and a hobby/exercise room.
There’s a long term plan too, but I figure a year’s worth of plans is plenty for now.
I hope your plans for the house go better than mine did. I had bought a house in Chicago in 1986 and had big plans for fixing and remodeling various parts of it. Nearly twenty years later, when I sold it, about the only things that had gotten done was getting rid of the orange shag carpeting that covered most of the ground floor, replacing most of the windows, and redoing the kitchen - and that didn’t go quite the way I’d hoped.
It was sold to a rehabber who gutted and rebuilt it, then sold it a year later.
Congratulations! We’re coming up on our five year anniversary on our fixer-upper that we bought with a five-year plan, too - we are almost on target for all of our repairs (this winter ought to see them finished). One thing I would do differently (and will in our next house) - plan out the entire landscape, front and back, before doing much of anything to the yard. Course, I’m a landscape designer, so that’s a given for me.
(Our bedrooms are all linoleum. We’re going to keep it that way because we have cats and lino is more hair-friendly, and we figure the lino is like a blank slate for anyone moving in - they can keep it carpet-less if they have pets and allergic kids, or they can carpet it fairly easily if they want to go that way.)
As someone thinking of buying a house (well, a 2-4 plex most likely) sometime in the next couple of years, I can’t help but feel that linoleum flooring in the bedroom would be a turn-off… I think hardwood, or even “floating” floors (is that what they are called in English?) would be better. Also cat-friendly, but much warmer, both in appearance and on the toes in the morning, IMHO! Though we are big fans of wood floors… we have no carpets anywhere in our apartment, and we are incredibly unlikely to ever want some, either!
Congratulations! Have you met your neighbors? The neighbor threads here are my favorites. Entertaining as those threads are though, I hope your neighbors are nice.
I wish I’d waited to do some stuff before moving into this house. Five years later, the kitchen and adjoining utility room floors are still covered with yucky carpeting. I’d move the kitchen tile up a bit higher on your list.
We met the ones to the left. They seem quite nice.
Today, we painted the entire upper floor. Take it from me; those electric paint rollers are WORTH IT. Worth every penny. You need to have to paint a lot of square feet in the same color, but if you do, for Christ’s sake buy one.
I wonder if the linoleum in the bedrooms was due to allergies - a lot of allergy docs recommend impermeable floors, of which lino is the cheapest option. That would at least explain the choice even if it’s a tacky one. If you can swing it, I’d vote for hardwood vs. carpet though :). Lasts longer, adds more value to the house, easier to keep clean (disclaimer: we’re about halfway through turning carpet into hardwood here, and the most recent rooms were indeed due to allergies; therefore my brain is locked into “carpet bad, hardwood good” mode).
