That's My Bix!

So, we left Las Vegas and bought a house we had never set foot in until the minute we arrived, exhausted by a 1800 mile road trip.

I do not recommend this strategy.

In August, when we were in the midst of packing, I wrote “The house is somewhat of a midcentury wreck — still too much money, to be honest, definitely not a deal by any stretch — but it has fantastic bones and hits many of our requirements neatly. I don’t love it with all of my heart like I did our last house, but I’m awfully fond of it. It’s a bit weird projecting your feelings on something you’ve only seen through pictures — I imagine we’ll feel differently once we get into the house. And if my affection shifts, well, we can always buy another house.”

An understatement, to say the least. The house is not “somewhat” a wreck, it’s an actual maintenance nightmare, mostly in ways that were disguised or not easily noticed during a walk through. For instance, we didn’t learn until we made the offer that it had been rented for at least five years. Apparently the yard was waist-high with weeds until the day before the realtor showed up to take photos. Esteban’s parents carted away three truck beds full of actual garbage that had been just lying out in the backyard in places, including broken pottery and an actual kitchen countertop that had been out there so long that they could actually BEND the wood.

And everything was filthy. Actually filthy. Like, real earnest filth, a fine or sometimes actual crumbling layers of slime and grime over everything. And that was AFTER my mother-in-law had been set loose on the place for two weeks and AFTER I paid for a “move in cleaning” — I don’t even want to think about what it looked like before.

But filth is manageable, right? Nothing that a little elbow grease and sometimes actual Goo Gone and commercial cleaners can’t fix. And if you can’t, well, paint covers a lot. We think they were actually keeping dirty diapers in the laundry room cupboards, for instance — there was an undeniable stench of human waste while scrubbing those.

One of the smartest things we did before we left was hire someone to paint the three bedrooms. At the time, it felt very luxurious, but had I known how absolutely disgusting this place was, I would have picked out more paint colors for more rooms. I don’t even want to think about what the painter covered up, especially looking at the state of the damage on the trim and flooring.

And then there was just the criminal lack of maintenance. Some of the outlets are so old that when you put a plug into the outlet, it falls out because it’s so shot. The furnace didn’t work — and our home inspector apparently heard it turn on but didn’t check to see if it heated. The light fixtures in the bedrooms were so bad that our painter took them down to paint and said “No, I can’t put these back up. I can’t even donate these to Habitat for Humanity — they’re dangerous.” The garage door showed daylight through it. There are storm windows missing. There is significant evidence of past rodent activity in the basement (although nothing fresh, a small miracle). The refrigerator light was out — not burned out, literally missing. The refrigerator was also missing its filter — and maybe no one ever noticed because the water to the ice maker/water dispenser had been turned off due to leaking like a sprinkler in the basement if you don’t have the water for it turned off. That fridge is jammed into the space so tightly that they just cut some of the house trim on the side of the door to make it fit. The stove BLEW OUT the third time we used it — luckily Esteban figured out the issue and chanced that a cheap-ish part would fix it, and it did, but not before we uncovered even more signs of disgusting past occupants and their filth. Every window treatment left behind was stained or broken — we don’t know how many renters this place had previously, but it sounds like there was very high turnover, and maybe it’s because the previous owners were terribly disinterested landlords.

What about a home inspection? Yes, that. There was so much to find and report on, it was a bit like chasing cats. The home inspector did find a problem with the electrical that was a dealbreaker, so we wrote it into the close requirements that the owners had to fix that issue — they “fixed” it by also blowing out half of the front of the house, which of course we didn’t discover until we took ownership and then they refuse to pay for the electrical guy to come back and fix his mistakes, so that’s on us now too.

Then there’s the “what the fuck” element of ham-fisted home maintenance. For instance, the beautiful original double doors that I was so in love with? One has been glued or cemented shut. There’s a three-season room off the backyard, but the door into the house? The side of the lock where you put the key is on the INSIDE of the house. The other side of that door seems to have a million random holes punched into it that have been hastily filled with mismatched wood putty, and whatever happened to the door probably happened to the ceiling too, but they didn’t bother trying to fill those holes. The screen door into that porch? The handle is just broken off. Both showers are held up with bungee cords. The tile frame around the main bathroom is falling off, but someone has helpfully slapped brown packing tape across it, the mirror and the wall, as one might a Band-Aid.

And then there’s the “I don’t even want to know” elements. For instance, there’s a fairly new Pergo floor in the kitchen. However, there’s a random hump in the middle of the kitchen where the flooring bows and flexes. And that flooring was installed so sloppily that not only did they not account for the two pocket doors, which now cannot open due to the floor, but they also installed it around the dishwasher, so if this shitty dishwasher (and it’s so shitty! It’s such an old piece of crap that the basket for the silverware had holes in the bottom so it didn’t actually hold silverware) breaks or needs more maintenance, we get to take apart the floor too in order to replace it.

So far, we’ve replaced the garage door (which looks gorgeous), paid to have the fireplace converted to gas while also having gas run for eventually replacing the stove, replaced all of the exterior light fixtures that are broken or mismatched, fixed the furnace, and started replacing the light fixtures in the bedrooms (which isn’t a big deal, it’s just a question of deciding).

As such, unpacking has been mostly a staggered affair — we still have cupboards in the kitchen, for instance, that need to be cleaned/fixed/repainted before we can load them. Forget about hanging artwork yet, we’re still just trying to get the kitchen in place. We had to buy a heat gun to remove the disgusting dirty Contact Paper glued onto the shelves, which was glued down on top of filthy older Contact Paper. (Like, they didn’t even wipe up the shelf before putting down the paper. WHO DOES THAT.) We ended up buying another leaf blower that could accommodate a gutter cleaner to safely deal with the literal YEARS of detritus in the gutters so that we wouldn’t have ice berms this winter. Normally, we’d just use a ladder, but of course, the ground and yard has been so poorly maintained that you can’t safely use a ladder on several areas around the house. A $50 filter for the fridge (before we figured out the plumbing fiasco) here, a $60 dishwasher silverware basket and a $18 rinse aid toggle there, and then we had to pay the city $95 to replace the city-provided garbage cans because the one left by the former owners had a big fucking crack on the bottom and that’s just a nightmare waiting to happen.

Anyway. That happened.

But we’re glad to be back. And after we have kind of recovered from our disappointment in the shape of the house, we appreciate the good bones, the little delightful details here and there, the original elements that can be absolutely saved and treasured. We’re going all in this time, fixing the stuff that prevent us from being truly happy with our living situation, and trying to mitigate the stuff we can’t, using every ounce of our resilience and creativity.

We wanted a quarantine project. We got one.