The 1st Month

We’ve now been in the 49th Street House for a bit under 1 month.  After losing a week in the beginning (40 years is a long time to accumulate stuff, and Crystal had a lot of it!)  We’ve made up for lost time with giant strides of progress.  Here’s the list:

1. Basement cleaned (we now have a shop, garden closet, storage & toilet room)

2. Shelves installed in basement in both shop area & storage

3. Toilet room in basement both gutted and re-installed

4. Yard waste cleaned out, bushes cut down

5. Wallpaper stripped from 2nd floor kitchen, and partially from 2nd (Sophia’s) bedroom

6. 2nd floor bathroom gutted

The electrical work has been plotted out by Trent, to be worked on in the next few months, as well as the insulation. 

Thanks to family & friends for keeping Sophia busy this month.  The coming months will be messy and busy as we work out the electrical logistics, re-build the 2nd floor bathroom and insulate.  What am I forgetting…?

Stripped the wall paper

Gutted the 2nd fl bath

The First Weekend INside -November 5, 2011

After hovering outside for a week while the former owner packed 40 years of stuff into a 20 ft van, we finally moved inside this weekend.

Friday, November 4th we set our sights on a garage full of refuse, and Saturday we lugged out 5 contractor bags full of clothes hangers. Well, there were other things too, but mostly clothes and weird newspaper articles on how long you can keep food in your freezer. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was a weekend spent doing mostly what I would expect any house seller to do, throw their own stuff away.

Sunday we arrived early, sent Sophia to a friends down the block (she has the luxury of walking herself to her friends house -no traffic, no crazy people, just a bunch of friendly kids) and went to work cleaning. The basement is now in good shape, some book and art supplies are moved in.
We did OK for the 1st 2 days. phew. need a bath.

After the garbage is gone, we can see what we’re working with.

More walk-through photos

Before Closing

Images taken during our initial (quick) walk-through.

Hello! Welcome! October 2011

Don’t bother wiping your shoes, we’re ripping out that carpet pretty soon anyway.

So, the purpose of this blog is to track the Muller Family’s progress on renovating a house that (we think) dates back to 1917. We’ll get back to that later.

The house has been in the Nessler Family for the last 40 years and it took about that much time for them to pack and move after we closed on the loan. We’ve now owned the house for a whole week, but just got into it yesterday for the first time. It wasn’t too bad, some clothes here and there, abandoned plants (we will find you guys homes, I promise!) and moth balls. We have a lot of work to do, so stay tuned. I hope to add photos of our progress, along with fun anticdotes about how we avoid lopping off any fingers. Should be fun, right?