An Introduction

Welcome.

Let me catch you up on the past couple of months. In March, we closed on a home that had been boarded up for several years. Let's just say that it needs a lot of work. Actually, that is an understatement. On the day of our closing, our realtor said, "Congrats. You now own a moldy, uninhabitable shell!"

Yes, yes we do.

Introducing our moldy, uninhabitable shell, also known as Mold Palace.

 

We began by knocking down the wall between the kitchen and dining room and enclosing a leaking flat patio on the second floor by adding a dormer.

 

The kitchen had a lot of tile and it took a lot of work to get it down.

 

 

Here's the kitchen after the wall was opened up and the rest down to studs:

 

 

The bonus was that the original maple floors were intact under the kitchen linoleum!

 

We also used 4-5 dumpsters to clean out the basement. One of the biggest problems with the home is that a pipe burst a couple years ago and the whole basement became a moldy mess.

Then the roof project began. And stopped. And looked like this:

 

Yes, that's red biohazard tape around my home.  Isn't it lovely? The roof is original asbestos-slate tile and the specialists had to come in a remove it.  The red tape stayed up for a week and a half.  Yikes.

But now, we are moving ahead and the roof is almost done.  We have to move from our current home in three weeks and our new home is far from done, so this will be very interesting.