Our Home

We were blessed with a couple of strong guys on Saturday and were able to get all the furniture moved to the new home. We are now officially living in the home!!!!! We walk into the other home and we now can hear our voices echo off the empty room walls. Sounds kind of funny.

The kitchen faucet has come in and has been installed. We can now get water from somewhere other than the bathroom tub. Out faucet is so cool. Pictures coming as soon as I take them. I installed the air conditioning unit in the back porch so it also will cool the kitchen so that we can stand to be in the kitchen again. Most of the kitchen is still in boxes but will get sorted and found a home real soon. We are looking forward to being able to use the countertops soon.

We now have a sink and range installed in our kitchen. I need to run the electrical to the built-in oven and the range yet. Our kitchen faucet had not come in yet but should be here in about a week. All of the cabinets and countertops have been installed. I finished with the electrical outlets today. We now have a total of 6 outlets in our kitchen. I still need to run water to the dishwasher and to where the refrigerator will be when we bring it over from the other house.

My wife’s brother in law (Jonny) was laid off from his job. This is not as bad as you might think. He was thinking about going back to law school to get his law degree so he could help rescue people out of human trafficking. This was just the catalyst needed to put that plan in motion. He and his wife (Kristin) and kids will be moving to Virginia Beach where the school he will be attending is. My mother in law happens to be living with them and so when they move, she will be without a place to live. So the gift of the plumbing in our new home was a multi blessing. Let me explain. Next door to us lives my wife’s other sister (Janell) and her husband (Steve). When we move out of our home they were planning on moving in to the home we are in now. The good part is that their landlord agreed to rent that home to my mother in law. So, we need to move out so that Steve and Janell can move into this home so that my Mother in law (Marilyn) can move into their home and Jonny and Kristin can move to Virginia Beach. Now all this has to happen before August first. That’s four “houses” that have to be moved in a very short period of time. We plan on moving in the middle of July. That gives us about five weeks to get the house ready and move in. PIctures are coming soon.

So, here is the good news. One of the guys from church wanted to do a mission project in the community and choose our house for his project. They choose to put in all the plumbing (water and sewer), the bathroom (shower, sink, and toilet), the kitchen sink, and run lines to the washer/dryer. These are the items that needed to be done to allow us to move into our home. We had no idea that God had this blessing waiting for us. We thought that we would have to wait until next tax return to be able to do this work.

I was looking at the sewer lines and the main sewer line that goes out to the street is above the ground for a few feet from where it leaves the house until it enters the ground. This does not meet code and will need to be buried underground. It is along the south side of the house. If I put in a retaining wall the same height of the wall that holds the front yard, I can easily bury the sewer line deep enough to meet code. I was looking at the sewer main in the house and found some long cracks in it. As this is older cast iron pipe that just runs diagonally across one of the areas in the basement, I wanted to replace it anyway. As for the water pipes in the house, there are none. There is some older PVC (plastic) pipe there but it breaks easily when bent so it needs replacing anyway. When we are done we will have all brand new sewer and water pipes in the entire house. This also lets is put our bathrooms and other plumbing just were we want it to go.

We found that the drywall in the house was laid on top of the original lathe & plaster walls. In this configuration, when a hole is put in the wall to install an outlet or a light switch, the plaster behind the drywall crumbles and makes the drywall bow out from the wall. So we will have to tear out the walls and put new drywall up directly on the wall studs.UPDATE: We do have some good news; only about half of the rooms were done that way. So the other half we can use as is. Yeah!!

I was thinking that we would have to replace the power panel in the house but when I looked into the model of panel that is there now, it is a pretty good one that we can still buy breakers for. It looks like we don’t have to buy a new power panel either. Praise God for that.

Most of the wiring in the house is an older style that does not meet the electrical code. We will have to replace that. It was wired kind of weird so I will need to rewire most of the house anyway. The outlets are currently in the baseboards and code says they need to be 18” off of the floor. This means that every outlet needs to be moved. This does allow us to pick where we want the outlets to go.

We called back to the city and asked a few questions and found that we could get the building permit for as little as $140 instead of $421. That is a lot more like what I was hoping for in the first place. We are restrained at this point by lack of funding to make the changes that need to be done to move in. In Virginia, you can only get a home equity loan if the property is your "primary residence". That is you have to be living there. We need to speak with a couple of lenders to see what can be done in our case. We need to know what the lenders need to prove it is our primary residence.

We got the bill for the building permit. It came to $421 and a few cents. It was a lot more than we expected. Oh well, that is just one of the necessary expenses of remodeling.

The spray-on roof sealant seems to be holding. I do need to get back up there and put another thin layer on just in case the very thick layer that is there now cracks. It is going to rain most days this coming week so we have a good test of the patch. It will be good to have all the wood dry out good to see what kind of damage has been done. This leak has caused a good deal of damage to the studs and drywall in both the kitchen and the master bedroom. It has also caused the hardwood floor in the master bedroom to suffer wood rot. About half of the floor has been damaged beyond repair. One more extra step to do before we can move in.