Home-Buying, Part 3

Every day that things continue to go smoothly, I grow increasingly suspicious.

We went to the home inspection today, which took about 3 hours.  The man basically went from top to bottom in the house and looked for every single possible thing that is or could be wrong with it.  We ended up with a many-page printout (which he produced on-site!) detailing everything that needs to be addressed by either the sellers or by us.

Fortunately, it’s nothing too major.  Apparently the previous owners either were or knew a handyman who decided he could install the wires to the air conditioner by drilling a random hole in the side of the house and running them through it.  Which, believe it or not, is the not the appropriate way to install such a cord.  There was also a random extension cord installed in a similar fashion, several plugs which appeared to be grounded were in fact not, and a few shingles were damaged or missing.  So altogether, nothing terribly surprising, and the sellers shouldn’t give us much trouble to get them addressed.

This is not our house, but it is modern laminate. Not bad, eh?

As for us, we’re planning how to update this house once we get to it.  I pulled back some of the ’70s carpet on the stairs and upper floor to discover a diamond-in-the-rough: neglected hardwood floors.  After closing, we will have $5200 in escrow from the sellers to deal with the flooring, so a good chunk of that (we are guessing around $2000) will be used to sand, stain, and re-finish those floors and the stairway.  We’ll also be ripping up the flooring downstairs and installing laminate (which is much higher quality than it used to be) and hopefully re-tiling the bathrooms.

So the tentative plan thus is:

1. Move in late May
2. Pull up the upstairs carpet
3. Call in a carpenter to get an estimate on refinishing the floors
4. Paint the upstairs and move to the downstairs ASAP
5. Get the carpenter to refinish the upstairs flooring (hopefully this step will be complete within 1 week of us moving in)
6. Have our furniture and possessions from Minnesota delivered
7. After the downstairs is painted, pull up the downstairs carpet
8. Install hardwood-lookalike laminate flooring in the entire downstairs
   
9. Buy area rugs and possibly a runner for the staircase
10. Re-model one or both bathrooms

So there goes our June and July.  That’s why the dissertation has to be done before we move!

Yes, there's a mural, and yes, it's wood panelling. Why do you think we have so much work to do!?!