2019 was a fairly busy year for both personal and work efforts.
With the new tax laws brought forth under the current administration, we were not able to itemize for our taxes this year. This was the first time since my daughter was born that this has happened. What it did highlight, is taxwise, owning our home no longer brings the tax benefits it once did. So a casual decision was made to prepare the house for sale, and get ready to do that.
The hardscape outside was redone, the less said about that experience the better as that was possibly the singular worse contractor experience ever. There is still a goodly amount of work needed to bring it up to a sale ready condition. The local yard guy that has been cutting the grass will be tasked with that in the late winter.
The downstairs carpet was in need of replacement, but we got a bit of a push to do that before being quite ready. For some reason, the humidifier on the HVAC system decided to start humidifying this summer when the AC was running. Unfortunately the water just ran down the drain tube, which promptly got plugged up and started overflowing into the workshop.
This went on for an extended period of time, eventually saturating the carpet in the adjacent room. So, a major clean up effort ensued.
The carpet and padding were removed and it was decided to finish out the last two rooms in the house that had not been rehabbed, the storage and craft rooms.
The baseboard and door trim were removed, the drywall was patched and both rooms got a light texture spray to match the rest of the house. Two coats of a beige paint on the walls made a huge difference. New baseboards and door trim to match the rest of the house were installed with the craft room getting a cove moulding at the ceiling.
The Friendly Painting Company was hired to come and paint the walls and trim in the remainder of the downstairs and it looks great.
The final piece to the puzzle was the installation of some 1100 square foot of floating laminate flooring with the requisite shoe moulding. With that, the rehabilitation is done. It’s taken us about 3 months of virtually every weekend, but it looks great.
One of the things that all effort this brought to light is the amount of “stuff” that had accumulated in the eleven+ years in this house. The sheer volume was staggering. So, a significant amount of it (half perhaps) was culled and today we will arrange the remainder with a keen eye toward culling even more.
So, perhaps that was the silver lining of the dark cloud? As the plans are to relocate, having less to move is a decided plus. The area looks much more spacious and open. Almost too open….. Oh oh
until next time