Let there be Locks!
October 13th, 2012
Now that we’ve gotten possession of the house there is a burning issue that need to be addressed! We need to change the locks!
With a house that effectively had a revolving front door you never know who might just show up with a key or two and try letting themselves in. Yes there might be nothing of any value in the house but over the years the ‘ole frat boys’ really kept the party going even providing a place to live for people down on their luck.
Now the reason I’m mentioning this is because while its been alluded to a few times with the ‘frat boys’ comments there were more than a couple unsavory characters passing through this house over the years. Our new neighbours seem very friendly but do love to gossip! While I’m fairly sure that none of them will come by the house and try to let themselves in… you never can tell.
The locks have been changed!
The first door presented only a mild challenge in that the screws on the new deadbolt didn’t quite line up making the whole thing hard to screw in. But its in.
Now the second door, taking off the old lock I discovered something interesting. The hole that was in place to hold the lock was considerably smaller than what is a normal size. This didn’t surprise me – the lock looked older than me and over times standard sizes of things change.
The problem is the deadbolt I purchased was new and thus needed the opening in the door to fit what is currently a ‘standard size’ – too bad I didn’t have anything to make said opening.
The front door lock has temporarily thwarted me!!
A couple hours later I returned to the house because the HVAC guy was coming by for an estimate and this time I brought the big guns! The drill and the circular hole implement (yes I don’t know what its called but I do know how to punch round circular holes with it).
This time I won! Hole was punched and the lock installed.
Now no one without a new key can make it in!
The empty house is safe once again!
As an aside: while tackling the demanding task of replacing the locks on the doors I also met with the architect/engineer who we’re getting to plan out the drawings and the HVAC guy to go over the installation of the Furnace and AC.
Things are progressing!
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Can you impulse buy a house?
October 10th, 2012
A little bit of history before I begin… We finally finished all our major renos in our current house, from removing knob and tube to gutting and redoing a kitchen and two bathrooms, and we were well satisfied with the results. Pretty proud of ourselves in fact thinking about how handy we’ve become with the whole reno thing post condo. So there I was a couple of months ago, with no new projects in sight, enjoying a cup of coffee on a lazy Saturday morning, when I had the brilliant idea to go poking around on MLS to see what the poop on the scoop was in the area. Within minutes I found an interesting looking property not far from our current location. The price was looking good for the neighborhood so of course I just had to say, “honey, come take a look at this!” Needless to say, the house was purchased within days (yes we did impulse buy a house!) and panicked craziness ensued getting our house sold in record time and now here we are.
Where exactly are we you ask? Well remember that interesting property at a good price close to where we are now? Well it was a reasonable price for a reason…. Ok, let’s make that a few reasons… Think old man frat house, and forget about outdated think disgusting. Oh yes, and let’s not forget to mention radiators and the dog who peed on the once lovely original hardwood floors. Yup, we have ourselves a project folks. A project big enough to be worthy to write about.
And now we are ready to begin….
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A New Chapter – A New House
October 9th, 2012
This blog was started a little over 4 years ago and in reality it never became anything because I got too busy and just didn’t have time to write. I managed to write a whole 19 posts with less than any real consistency. The idea behind the blog was pretty simple my wife and I just purchased a house that was going to need a lot of work and I was going to use this site to document it so that others could learn from our adventures.
As of my writing this post that chapter of events has completed, the house has been sold and we have purchased a new house. Rather than close down this site we have decided to document some new adventures and those are with the new house. The new house is an even bigger mess that is even worthy of a flip. We’re going to document what we do to bring it up to livability and to being our new simple house.
With that said there will be some changes around this site, first off there will be more than one writer (maybe we’ll average more than 1 post every 6 months this way) and we’ve got a lot of work to do in a very short time. The other changes will probably evolve as we move forward but I am going to keep the few old posts that are already here because there is no point in deleting them.
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