El Yo presents the latest house saga installment. Ahem.

"Things are going slowly but surely at the house. After spending every weekend and weeknight over there in May and through most of June, we've had to allow real-life to intrude back in. Luckily, the work is winding down.

The biggest chunk of work was the kitchen, which basically took all of May. Since then we've got the kitchen, dining room, bathroom, office, bedroom and 'library' done. We've got the living room primed, but have been waiting to paint as it's our staging area for supplies. Though today we're going to need to change that, as we'll finally be putting a coat of paint on the living room walls...

Cleaning has been amazingly disgusting. The office (what the seller had been
using as her bedroom) took about 2 weeks of repeated scrubbing with TSP to make a big enough change that we could consider sealing it up, and we then used 3 coats of sealer just to be safe. The wooden door frames throughout the house it turns out did not have dark stain but instead a rather light stain and a truly frightening amount of tar and nicotine.

In any case, the smell of smoke has been significantly reduced, and in some places removed entirely. It does still faintly linger, but we hope it's just the front-room carpet which hasn't yet been removed.

The carpets have been pulled up in the bedroom and office, and the wood underneath is looking pretty good. There are no major stains or damage ... we'll just need a bit of refinishing.

[Ed's Note: Nice pants, Yo.]

The sunroom roof is leaking more regularly than we anticipated (though not a large amount when it does), and there's a bit of recently-discovered dampness in the bottom corner wall of the sunroom; we'll be bringing a general contractor in to take a look at it. The phone and electrical systems are, as expected, a bit too old, so I've got some work scheduled to update them, too.

In any case, the work is finally winding down. A couple of coats on the living room ... a bit of cleaning in the basement... some contracted work done while shuttling boxes in, and we should be done and moved later this month, finally. :)

We've some intermediate pictures up at...
http://asynchronous.org/tmp/house-fixup-through-jun-06/
and
http://asynchronous.org/tmp/house-2005-06-20/

[Ed's Note: Does this entry not seem like it ends abruptly? In fact it is excerpted from an email El Yo sent to our real estate agent, and at this point he invited her over and dear entire Internet, while I am fond of you, I am not inviting all y'all over right this red hot second. Also there was some snarking about how long it took the seller's agent to come get her sign, but that would make no sense unless you saw the sign lying all forlorn in the grass next to our house for a month, or met the agent in question. Then of course, it was freakin' hilarious. ]