"Yo, you need to rent The Money Pit, you know with Tom Hanks?"

This comment was very nearly the beginning of so many fights with so many people over the course of our renovation...people I respected , good friends even. But none of them could ever know what a twist of the knife a term like "money pit" was to me. Or that I had already seen the movie...and that it sucks (although I did laugh pretty hard at the part with the bathtub and the stairs and the collapsing and the mocking of some else's pain). Anyway...

I've talked a bit about our house here and there...mentioned it a couple times, maybe preached or borderline ranted about it and buying homes in general. But ultimately I'd like to get into the nitty gritty (read: hellish underbelly) of what it took to be able to sleep, cook, shower, and poop here. Naturally pictures are critical...so, here's our house.


That's the front. And here's the back...


It's an old house...1863. We think anyway. The real estate listing said 1837 but...the real estate listing said a lot of things. Like that we were in a school district we were most certainly not in...and that our house was 2200 sq ft...which it hardly is. Unless you're counting our dungeon of a basement, and our musty unfinished attic, and the garage, and the pumphouse. Ok...anyway, while toiling to install our radiant heat we found a little wooden plaque in the ceiling joists of our first floor that had the builder and inspector's names on it and the year 1863 listed. So we'll go with that, certainly over anything that the baby from Dinosaurs might have come up with.

Let me state up front that our house was livable when we bought it. A ~70 year old widow was living here quite happily (we assume) for many years prior to us buying it. God knows how she mowed the lawn or cleared the driveway of snow, but live here she did. We knew we would want to update the kitchen, replace a toilet or two, eventually re-side it...and surely several other projects TBD, but we figured that we would try to move in at the end of the 6 weeks span between the closing and the end of our lease.

Ultimately we reduced that livability to roughly 11 tons of debris and that 6 weeks turned into 6 months.