The Joys of Home Ownership (Part 2)

Since we don't yet have cable/internet/phone, work closures due to weather have put me very behind on posts - however, not much has happened to the house, since the snow stormS (ugh, yes, plural) stopped virtually all travel and thereby halted any progress. Here's what's been going on in the interim:

Most importantly: Our new furnace was installed on 2/4. We now have heat and a warranty, but it cost about $2800. Since we didn't allocate any magic mortgage money towards this purchase, we have officially dipped into our "contingency funds" - the 10% that all 203k lenders (wisely) build into rehab projects. This extra pot allows for the repair of the unforeseen problems that will inevitably come up during construction. (For those of you playing at home, that means we have a grand total of $200 left for mistakes. Eek.)

Upper left: New thermostat - no more old school dial!
Center: A message to our less-than-considerate construction workers.

I've had to leave a few other similar notes around the house - such as this one in the basement, which I wrote when they had begun to re-drywall the partition that was slated for demo.

In less important, but slightly more exciting news: We got our fridge! It's a Whirlpool french door refrigerator with bottom freezer. As you can see, it is a bit too big for our kitchen (we'll need to tear out the top and side cabinets as well as remove some of the counter in order to hook it up to the water supply)... but this was our dream fridge, so we decided it was well-worth designing around.

We also had our amazing new oven delivered - a Maytag Gemini. It got horrible reviews because the height of the bottom oven apparently makes it very hard to lift out heavy items, but this is probably the closest I'll ever get to a true double-oven, so we splurged and are hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the lovely people at Whirlpool neglected to mention that we'd require any sort of additional hardware to hook up the appliance and their warehouse has been closed/unresponsive for the past week due to weather. After ten days with just a microwave, electric griddle, and toaster oven, we were getting a little fed up with pizza and pasta. But after a few trips to Lowe's for supplies, Erik was able to install the stove on Valentine's Day - Best. Present. Ever. (And yes, that means that my darling Floridian shoveled 27" of snow, changed a car battery, and hooked up a gas line all in one week! He is becoming a handyman before my eyes.)


The dishwasher and front-load dryer were dropped off as well, but both remain in boxes until we have places to put them. We're still waiting on a re-delivery of the washing machine, which was damaged in transit and had to be returned.

We were able to afford all these amazing new appliances thanks to our allotted rehab funds as well as an Employee Purchase Program through my work, which fetched us 30% off retail on all five pieces. (My momma taught me well!)

As is probably obvious by now, we have officially moved into the house. Since our office is storage, the living and dining rooms are construction zones, and the basement is still off-limits, our actual living space is limited to the upstairs rooms - our bedroom and the soon-to-be nursery.

Here's what they looked like before:

And here are the messy afters:

Boxes make great nightstands.

Left side of the "nursery" - TV and storage.

Right side of the nursery - sofa and ...you guessed it!... more storage.

Since our contractor has been incommunicado for a little over a week, we don't have any updates on when work will resume. We're hoping for little-to-no accumulation from today's predicted snow storm so that we can at least get the main floor up and running sometime in the near future.