We’ve got it bad. This isn’t helped by the fact that all of our married friends save one has either just had a baby or are just about to have one. Every time I hold one of the new nippers my uterus yells “I want a baby!” and I’m quite certain that other folks’ll start hearing it yell soon if I don’t listen to it.
Armand and I had a very candid and realistic discussion about the reno and where the baby makin’ fits into that plan. It’s become clear, financially, that adding a second floor to the house is a long ways away and if we scrap that plan then we’ll be able to renovate the house proper sooner. This means being okay with not having an office and not living here forever. I can be okay with that. We’ve also set a deadline. We’re going to get as much done as we can, hoping to finish, but at this certain point it’s baby time, ready or not. We’re not getting any younger. For realsies.
This means that the end result will be a two bedroom one bath house with a one or two room guest house with bath. Kiddies will share a room till one of ‘um is a teenager – then we move.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Still waiting till there’s enough cash for our perforated drain pipe, 1″ washed gravel, tiller rental, river rock, and grass. Sigh.
I’ll keep you posted.
Well, it’s been awhile. Truth is, we’ve been a bit broke. More truth – I’ve been a bit down about it. In the interest of truthful storytelling here at The LOH I think that I won’t stay mum anymore during tougher times. Renovating a home is hard, the cheerful ease I see on the home reno blogs that I follow can’t be constant, and I need to cease comparing our project to others. We can’t be alone. Other folks have fights. Other folks have a hard time making decisions together that satisfy both partners needs/desires. Other folks are broke sometimes. Perhaps by laying it out here, our normal can be a comfort to you, if you’ve got a project.
I tend to withdraw from my friends when I’m going through something tough, and I’ve been doing the same here. Maybe it’s what I do for a living creeping in, but I do need to remind myself that I don’t have to entertain. I can also connect, which is the most important part of what I do. I can do that by making this a completely honest account, troubles and all. Hopefully, you’ll be with me.
We’re getting back to work here at The LOH this week. This time, although lean, has been productive. We made a feature film (a drama called Take Care), I wrote and put up my first show (Disney’s Silence of the Lambs – the Musical at Upright Citizens Brigade), I did another sketch show with my team, The Space Program, at Upright Citizens Brigade, I shot a music video for new singer/songwriter Cazz, and I’m learning the ukulele. So there’s all that.
Thank you for reading, and we’ll have some home news soon.
:) Brooke
Here are some borderline renegade thoughts in the home reno blogosphere.
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1. No, I have not seen The Money Pit. I have to see it? No, I don’t have to see it.
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2. I don’t like stuff. Tchotchkies. Knick knacks. Bric-a-brac. Stuff that you have to dust. If it takes up space and doesn’t do anything, it’s out. I do, however, like looking at your stuff.
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3. I don’t like fresh cut flowers. I like when they’re given to me, but I would never buy ‘um. I’d rather pick up a potted plant any day.
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4. I don’t like animated movies made in the past couple of decades. Animated movies have taken a torturous turn. Here’s how it goes. A bunch of creative folks come up with the cutest, most sympathetic character one can imagine, and because it isn’t real and most of the time not human, it has no flaws. Now let’s torture said character for 90 minutes. Yes, I know Up! is an awesome movie. I believe you, but Toy Story 2 was a turning point for me. I will never watch them. It’s just to hard on me.
What are your renegade thoughts?
:) Brooke
Due to technological reasons (stolen camera, laptop with Photoshop gone kaput, little cash to do much about it) we’ve been neglecting you. It’s not that we don’t love you – we do. We just needed some time to get our sh!t together. You understand. We’ve been busy bees and will have lots to show you soon, including our first steps out of demolition into beautification. It’s about time.
Stay tuned, and see you soon.
:) Brooke
I hadn’t yet posted a full set of before pics, so here goes. Ready yourself for thoughts/emotions somewhere within the underwhelmed-to-horrified spectrum. Nighttime viewing is not recommended. If it gets too intense, please, just look away and think of puppies. I want you to have a happy New Year.
Let’s start with the heart of the home – the kitchen.
Moving on to the social hub, the dining room.
Let’s relax in the livingroom, shall we?
Sweet nightmares in the master bedroom…
Back of the house:
Garage:
We do get to look at this, however. Beats NYC any day.
Once I’ve got the camera battery recharged I’ll add pics of the future kids’ room, the front of the house, and the last wall of the livingroom.
I can’t wait to update this page with some after pics!
It’s definitely a morale buster for me when we’ve got to spend days working on quick fixes rather than lasting solutions. Good thing I’m not in politics.
Another morale buster is that we were supposed to be in Vegas this weekend celebrating Steve’s birthday, but I got contagious eye infection. I’ll be kind and not post a picture.
We do have to have the house somewhat livable while we renovate.
The door to Armand’s office/future kids’ room is crooked and bowed. Witness:
See the pins holding the hinges together:
As we were pulling down the door, the back door fell off. I’m not making this up. I couldn’t – it’s too lame.
Maybe this is why:
(Can you see the painted hair hanging off of that hinge?)
Oh boy.
We were able to rehang the back door, but we needed a new door for the future kids’ room. We decided to get a solid wood door since we’ll most likely be able to repurpose a solid wood door later on when we get to renovating the interior of the house.
We figured that a solid wood door at Home Depot would be at least $100, so we decided to take a ride over to Silverlake Architectural Salvage to see what we could find.
We came up with a basic one panel solid wood door for $25 which may turn into a dining room table or the bathroom door later on. Who knows?
Look at their other goodies:
I wonder when this hot tub was made.
Saw this whilst in transit.
Paint that window.
(Note how he cuts in around the stickers. Nice.)
We got the back door hung last night and we’ll be throwing the other one up between football games today.
We started casually entertaining the idea of buying a house at the end of October 2008, about a month after the economy of Earth fell into a burning cauldron of hellfire. People like us just fluttered our fingers Montgomery Burns style and muttered, “Excellent”. See, we had been saving money, but not as fast as prices had been going up. Was it our chance?
Our first appointment with a listing agent didn’t go so well. It didn’t really go at all. Armand, our real estate developer friends Dina and Welly, and I waited outside the house for an hour. Dina and Welly, being folks who really know what they’re looking at, were really wonderful to come with us – folks who hadn’t a clue. After 6 phone calls he finally returned one an hour after he was supposed to meet us at the house. He said that he had gotten trashed the night before, crashed at a buddy’s place, and asked us to wait for another half and hour so he could stop for donuts. Wow. It’s one thing to do that, a whole different thing to say that. His name is Sky Minor.
Trying to buy a house in Los Angeles for under $200,000 was going to get frustrating. Frustrating? Oh – pardon me. I meant to say interesting.
The holidays were fast approaching, I was doing a production of The Light in the Piazza (my favorite piece ever written) till February 15th, more banks were dying, and it looked like we were going to have some time, so I took the next couple of months to educate myself. My friends, Steve and Annie, had just bought a house so they had a lot to share about the process. They worked with a really wonderful agent, Ambra Bisconti. We gave Ambra a call at the end of January.
The full-on house hunt had begun!
These are the websites I used:
themls.com (official listings)
redfin.com (my favorite)
zillow.com (has the most info on all properties)
frontdoor.com
trulia.com
I made a master list of contenders based on this criteria: price (under $200,000), location (northeastern Los Angeles – zip codes 90027, 90031, 90032, 90039, 90041, 90042, and 90065), bedrooms (at least 2), and lot square footage (over 4000). The condition of each property didn’t matter – we new that big time fixers were the only ones in our price range.
Starting with a virtual look at hundreds of properties online, I narrowed it down to 82 worth an actual physical look.
During this process, Armand got pneumonia. Awful.
I decided to look by zip code. My GPS and I headed out each morning and crawled around each area, driving up to 23 houses in one day. In most cases I couldn’t get inside the house, but I got enough information to either keep the house on the list or cut it. The list got narrowed down to about 20-30 houses. This list I gave to Ambra. She gave me the key codes for most of them (foreclosures) and set up appointments for the regular sales. Ambra advised us to cut out short sales, so we did, and I’m glad.
Now the list was down to 7 finalists. Armand was still sick as a dog. I showed him my favorite one first, naturally. It took 2 1/2 weeks to get him around to see all 7, as sick as he was. It was February 27th and we were now ready to make an offer on my favorite! Unfortunately, so was the developer who made an all cash offer the day before.
We cried. At this point, I had looked at everything in the northeastern chunk of Los Angeles. Everything. Even burned-out shells from fires and one house being occupied by a pack of wild dogs.
The next day Ambra sent us another listing that had just come up, now bring the total houses considered to 83. We looked. We loved. We were so happy that we lost the first house!
We made an offer. We had offered asking price, $186,500, since we didn’t want to lose it over chump change. Our offer was accepted! Normally, one gets a response around here in 12 hours. We had to wait 9 days. 9 days! They got 3 offers the first day that the house was on the market. The other folks lost the house by $1500 and $6500. We now had 45 days to close, with inspection deadlines, loan deadlines, and miscellaneous deadlines along the way.
The process of buying a foreclosure is the same as a regular sale in California, with the exception that you’re pretty much buying it as is. What made buying the house difficult were the levels of folks who just didn’t care. The house was owned by a bank, who then hired an asset management company, who then hired a listing agent. The listing agent was just about as on top of things as Mr. Donuts in the beginning of this story. No one actually needed to get the house sold. It wasn’t their house. Their lives didn’t depend on anything.
Day after day, I had to drop everything to get paper to the right person by whatever deadline. Ambra had to yell at folks through the whole process. At one point I was stopped at a red light in East L.A. crying on my steering wheel because if I didn’t get that 9A report from the listing agent by 5:00pm it was going to cost me thousands of dollars. All this time, we’re getting dangerously close to the end of April and we didn’t want to cough up another month of rent.
While this drama was playing itself out, I had an incredible experience with Actors Federal Credit Union. Ryan in the mortgage department was there at every step of the way to walk us rookies through. I had joined the credit union 9 years ago in hopes of getting a mortgage there one day. I am so happy that it all worked out. We put 20% down and got an interest rate of 4.65%.
Inspections went well, we got our mortgage, and all systems were go. Our mortgage payment was going to be less than half of our rent. Sweet!
We closed on April 27th, the day after my birthday. What a wonderful present!
I am really happy that I looked at so many houses. I know that we got the best available house in our price range, and I learned so much with every house I visited.
So here we are. We’ve lived here for 5 months now, and even in a state of demolition, we are loving it – because it’s ours.
Back in, oh, 2007, the previous owners decided that grass just wasn’t their bag. What was their bag, you ask? – 119,000 pounds of concrete.
Yipee!
We moved to California from NYC. We have had enough of concrete. Out it must come. (Here‘s our endgame for the Upper Yard that we detailed a few posts back.)
Enter sledgehammer, mattock, and two crazies called Armand and Brooke.
Let the bustin’ begin!
We had found a recycling center that would charge us $10 a load in Armand’s Toyota Tacoma. Well, till the boss found out at load six and bumped the price up to $25. Gulp. That’ll add up fast. And he let it slip that it wasn’t actually getting recycled. Boo.
So we decided to just keep on bustin’ while we came up with another plan for getting rid of it.
Meanwhile, 108 pound me is feeling pretty badass.
Armand busted more than concrete on the second day of work. While his wrist healed up I busted about 80% of it myself.
Now I’m feeling completely badass.
I also dismantled that shed and we sold it as scrap. Got about $6.
Isn’t that bougainvillea going to be beautiful once it’s cascading over that pergola we’re going to build?
The concrete was anywhere from 4 1/2 inches to 1 foot thick.
This took about two months to accomplish, working whenever we had time.
What did we do next? Stay tuned for The Concrete Trilogy: The Big Wheel & Haul. We’ll have something for everyone in the next installment – bikinis, monster trucks, buried treasure, and a twist that no one would see coming.
The first project that we were going to tackle was a hydronic radiant heating system. This entails pulling up the wood floor (which is in bad shape due to numerous strange patch jobs for various heating systems over the years), repairing the subfloor, having the radiant heat installed, and pouring an inch to inch-and-a-half self-leveling concrete over.
Here’s a very impressive resource for radiant heat info – www.radiantdesigninstitute.com.
I first contacted the only hydronic radiant heat folks I could find (EnviroPlumbing) in April and began what became a barrage of emails and phone calls. It took me 5 months to get a quote. 5 months! In that time, I looked on over 80 websites and got quotes from several companies in NM and AZ to get an idea of cost, since the local service provider was so sluggish with the info. Everything indicated that it would cost between $4000 and $6000 for a home twice the size of ours.
In the meantime, I refiled our ’08 taxes to claim the $8000 tax credit and knew that the money would be here in September. Great – we can get our heating system installed before winter. I started laying the ground work for this project in April and thought that I had plenty of time.
The quote finally came in. It was – gulp – $13,400!!!
Wow. I did not see that coming. Time to regroup. Time to rethink. Time to buy some space heaters and tackle this project in May.
We contacted Plumber Mike and said that if demand is such that one can charge 2-3 times the price, and if supply is such that one can keep a potential $13,400 job strung along for 5 months, you might want to get into this. We offered our house as his house to learn on at a discounted rate. We’re waiting to hear back.
In the meantime, the original plan was to scrap the hardwood floor altogether and replace it with formaldehyde-free bamboo in an espresso color. We’ve since decided to by a planer, run the existing floorboards through it, supplement with approx. 100 square feet of unfinished oak, stain it all, seal, and install ourselves. So instead of spending $5000 on bamboo, we’ll spend $1000 on supplies and reuse what we have. I like saving $4000.
Here’s what the floor looks like now. Also, Fenway says hello.
After closing on TheLOH on April 27th and movin’ on in, we’ve gotten some important structural work done.
The first thing that we needed to do was get our house bolted, so we took care of that in May. Houses didn’t used to be actually attached to their foundations, and living in a state famous for earthquakes, we thought we should make sure that our house stays put. Our incredible real estate agent, Ambra Bisconti, introduced us to Mike at White Castle Construction.
When Mike’s team showed up they knew our house was going to be bad as they’re the team that gets the really tough jobs. The crawl space under the house was filled with garbage and cat poop, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Termites had eaten the entire subfloor underneath the bathroom and the only thing holding the tub up was the pipe coming out of the wall. There was also a half inch gap between the wall and the tub that the previous owners had stuck hot glue down and called it a day. Hot glue! Check it out…
Who does that?
So, we donned some makeshift crawl suits and took a tour of the crazy.
Here’s what we found (or didn’t find)…
The subfloor under the tub – where is it? Check out the jack on the right holding it up.
Here’s a better look at the layers of tile, concrete, and rotten subfloor that the guys pulled out of there…
This isn’t supposed to look like this…
This would be our poop pipe. Just leaking out on everything (and everyone).
Now our house is attached to the foundation.
White Castle retrofits every house for 3 stories of safety, so even though we’ve got only one floor, we’ve got more protection than we need. We don’t plan on adding a floor, but we could if we wanted to.
First project – done! Now only 19,004 to go…
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