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3 weeks ago I bought a house. While I knew that I was getting into a mighty big project, I am still standing here absolutely astounded by how many problems a seemingly sweet, innocent house can hold. This isn’t even my first rodeo. I bought my first house in 2016, a 60’s brick ranch with short squat walls and even smaller windows. That house came with a fair share of surprises as well, but we muddled through, made a home, and learned the basics of property maintenance there. Despite my relative familiarity of this undertaking, our 1830s Vermont farmhouse is an entirely different rodeo on an entirely unfamiliar planet. My face feels like it is stuck in a perpetual pout as the bad news continues to roll in, but at the end of the day when I drive away from the little old house (goodness no – I am not currently living there!), I kind of beam a bit inside imagining what beauty she has hidden under her crumbling facade.
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To purchase this home, we needed to get a special loan to build in rehabilitation costs. The house has no working heat (the pathetic, in-need-of-an-entire-disassembly-and-deep-clean pellet stove does not count!), well water in desperate need of treatment, exterior rot, an entire unfinished room (bare down to the studs), a dilapidated barn that has collapsed, and no hot water… and those are just the problems the bank wanted fixed to lend us money.
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The previous owner was a deep steward to the animals, she loved them so much she welcomed them into her home on a cold winters night for a snuggle. That being so, the wood floors, wood trim, and many of the wood doors are severely dirty, scuffed, or scratched by tusks, claws, and otherwise. Some furniture was left behind and upon moving it we found several turkey feathers lodged in the carpet. We found animal poop in the upstairs hallway and in the ducts for the defunct furnace. Then, we found a mountain of mouse droppings in the kitchen drawers along with rat poop too for good measure. Apparently the existing cat door was more of a skunk door – the wild skunks used the door to come looking for their dinner if the previous owner was late to feed them (yes she fed the skunks kitty kibble)! Other than the bat in the wood stove, the home was vacant for over a year when we went under contract, the sole occupant a relative living in the attached accessory dwelling unit.
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The electric work has been chewed through by the mice in various places, someone removed all of the overhead light fixtures, and where there are can-light inserts, only newspaper remains stuffed into the cavities. The two wood stoves we were hoping would heat the house until the furnace is replaced, well, after consulting several chimney professionals, we finally take (broken) heart that they don’t work – we are currently heating the house with 24/7 anti-tip electric heaters and the aforementioned pathetic pellet stove. You don’t want to fathom our first electric bill. The pellet stove vents to one room on the first floor and we have had to set up box fans in effort to direct the “heat” throughout the house so the pipes don’t freeze. You might ask why we didn’t winterize, and the answer is because the relative living in the ADU was planning on continuing to stay as our tenant. When he told us he found other housing, we had already started the process of getting the water treated and the hot water heater replaced. That hasn’t been going well because the drain for the water filter can’t be connected into the abysmal plumbing at the moment, so while we do have water it smells like actual shit and they shocked the well with chlorine so now it smells like someone shit in the pool.
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We were slated to end our apartment lease in Burlington on 2/28 so we have arranged our apartment to be taken over by new tenants – it turned out to be good luck that the relative living in the ADU of our new home found housing because now we are moving into the ADU on 2/28 instead of the main house. The ADU needs deep, deep, incredibly deep cleaning. The carpet is a nest of filth, there are layers of cobwebs, and I’m truly frightened of whatever is going on in the shower/tub combo.
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Last week we had a pretty intense snow storm. If you didn’t know, Vermont is cold and snowy. Our home is buddied up along the mountain range so we get a hardy bit of snow along our valley. We arrived at the house to work on all of our projects earlier this week and found a sopping wet window. Ice dam. I went to ice dam school this week. An ice dam is when the home releases warm air – enough to melt the snow on the central part of the roof – but the exterior air temperature is still cold enough that ice has formed on the colder eaves so the melted snow/water has nowhere to escape but down your nooks and crannies and into your home. To get a closer look at what was going on we took off the window trim and were rained down upon by a vast cloud of mouse poop and insulation.
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Feeling defeated, I was glad to be tasked with ripping up the filthy carpet, tack strip, and endless staples in the floor, so I got to work taking my anger out on some wood, metal, and whatever carpet is even made out of (plastic?). We even bought a fancy tool to leverage the staples and it makes the removal smooth as butter, like soooo good. After busting up the floors it was a huge bitch to get all of the remaining screws and nails (but not the staples!) out of the DIY floor job, but to our great victory THE ORIGINAL WIDE PLANK FLOORS are tucked under there and they are in really decent condition. We are having a flooring guy come out to quote us on a little sandy-stain combo. We looked into DIY’ing the floors, however, we aren’t totally sure of the health/condition of the floors, or if they even can be sanded. Our wins ended abruptly as one of the rooms revealed lead-painted planks under the carpet. At least, my dinky lead test kit seems to think so. I’m not worried about it for now. We have looked into stripping it with an infrared heat gun (lead-safe) or encapsulating it and painting over it – to be determined as I don’t have the mental bandwidth at the moment and can’t risk my remaining cognitive function succumbing to lead poisoning.
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Meanwhile, with the trim gone and the mouse poop removed, Sam got to work figuring out how to keep the moisture in the window frame at bay. He basically packed the open framing like a wound, filling the cavity with paper towels and taping them into place. He then removed the packing and replaced it, leaving it open to air with a box fan blowing on it for a few hours daily. It actually worked and kept things relatively un-soggy.
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The rest of the week was spent waiting an entire day for propane delivery (they literally pulled into our driveway the exact second that we had given up and started backing out to leave for the night), waiting an entire day for the internet people to install the internet, and then another entire day when they had to come back to fix the first guy’s fuck up, and finally waiting for the tenant to finish moving out of the ADU so we could get in there to clean and prepare for our take over.
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Overall the first few weeks have been disheartening and dis-hardening to say the least. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been challenged with so many physical and mental mountains to climb. I’ve really had to flex my flexibility, patience, and openness. But I asked for this and sought it out specifically because I sensed I needed it to grow. A core goal in my life is to cede resistance and control and cultivate fluidity and levity. I can feel the weight of my house and all of its problems weighing on me, but instead of closing off to them and resisting, I am trying to let them just consume me and roll with it.
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For now, my safety goggles are tinted rose-colored.
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