Our first stay in the house.

First order of business - water

Although we placed an offer on the house in January, it took us until August to finally close on it due to probate issues. When we finally closed, we spent a week in the house before returning to Michigan for a birthday party, a weekend in the UP (that’s upper peninsula for you non-Michiganders), a “last weekend of summer” camping trip, and a wedding.

To live in the house, which is our plan while we work on it, we needed to be sure we had the bare essentials: water and electricity. We knew we had electricity even though the wiring clearly needs to be updated. What we didn’t know was the condition of the piping. The city assured us, when we stopped by to put the utilities in our name, that the water was turned on. We arrived at the house late on a Saturday afternoon and tried the water first thing. Mike turned the main water valve on and……nothing. We were gonna have to wait until Monday to contact the city. In the meantime, we could still use the toilets as long as we could….oh wait, we can’t use buckets of water if there IS no water.

We considered sneaking into the neighbors yard and collecting water from their hose, but decided that was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves to our neighbors. By that time it was late at night, so we decided to go to a hotel and tackle the problem in the morning.

On the way back to the house, I noticed a water faucet on the front of a commercial building, which happened to be a construction site, just across the street from the house. It was Sunday sooooooo, Mike scuttled over armed with buckets and filled 6 of them so we could at least flush the toilets. Hand sanitizer would have to do for hand washing.

The first problem we found - the main drainage pipe had a huge crack in it. And it happened to be sitting over what looked like a toxic waste dump.

The crack:

The temporary fix:

Toxic waste dump under the main drainage pipe:

Buckets of water for toilet flushing:

When we were finally able to turn on the water inside the house, we were pleasantly surprised by no major issues. There were a few leaks here and there but mostly easy fixes.

The house clearly hadn’t been updated since the ‘70’s which was a time when, let’s face it, we all had questionable fashion styles, not only in clothing but also in home decor. For those of you who lived in the ‘70’s I’m sure you’ll remember the puke green or dingy yellow kitchen appliances, paneling, carpet, and wallpaper - so much wall paper. The first thing I wanted to do was remove all the throw rugs - they were so old there were disintegrating - as well as the carpeting on the stairs (although given our advancing years I wondered, for a split second, if it might be prudent to leave the carpeting on the stairs; it only takes one small misstep to go tumbling down).

Some before and after pics of the stairs:

As you can see, there’s some water damage on the upper landing, but that’s for another story.

A few more pics after rugs were removed. Beautiful wood floors throughout the house. We discovered that it’s a hardy pine which is very durable and not so common anymore.