Thursday, May 16, 2013

Remodeling Stinks and the Wisdom of Young Children

I haven't been around blogging much the last week or two and I have missed it.  We have unfortunately had to do some unexpected remodeling on our house.


We noticed recently that one side of our front porch/balcony was sagging quite a bit.  The former owners had apparently added some new trim and repainted the front porch to hide the fact that the porch was rotting off the house.  And our inspector, once again, missed a very obvious major issue that involved costly repairs that should have been negotiated during the purchase of the house.

Luckily he did catch that the water heater needed to be raised a few inches...   What a champ.

What we initially thought would be a minor repair of replacing a few boards on the deck turned out to a complete ripping out and replacing of the entire bottom deck/supports.  The supports and bottom of the posts were completely wet and rotten and everything had to go.


After replacing the entire bottom deck we noticed that some trim on the top balcony was falling off too, and that involved tearing out the entire support on the sides and front of the top balcony to make it safe. We wanted to delay a full balcony replacement at this time (and I hope we made the right decision).

All of these unexpected but needed repairs stressed me out quite a bit (sticker shock), so I took a computer break and I hung out with the boys and their visiting cousin Mattie.


Here is my sweet husband with the boys and my niece Mattie at my mother's house.   (I used the Pretty Preset Matte B&W on this edit.)


Here I found all three of them cuddled together a few mornings ago.  I needed to see this to remind myself that though there will always be unexpected expenses and stresses in life; life is good.

I keep on reminding myself I need to live life more like a six or eight year old; appreciate and enjoy each day and not stress too much about the future.  Children are born wise.

Hope everyone is having a great week!

Do you want to download my favorite CoffeeShop Actions or Design Elements in one convenient zipped file AND help support this blog? Just click here for my action pack or here for a download of some of my most popular design elements, storyboards, and textures.

For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.

6 comments:

  1. If the sellers concealed/hid a problem you should have recourse. You may be able to get them to "help" with the repairs if they concealed a problem that they were aware of. I think that's fraud, actually.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I honestly don't think the other owners had any idea of the scope of damages. They probably thought only one corner had some rot. Our inspector just did a poor inspection.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for your post and a great reminder to myself that I needed. We have recently retired and now living on a set income, which in itself is taking some getting use to (by me anyway). As well as that, life has been throwing us other curves. I like your reminder that even with the stress, life is still very good and I am thankful because it can always be worse. I need to think like a child again also and just enjoy.

    :) Enjoyed your post and hope things go better in your new place...seems there's always something to repair and once ours was paid for it was evident we needed to rebuild a new one, but that was out of the question. hahahaha

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh, my! I can empathize with you on the repairs! We had to have a load of work done and wound up living like gypsies during the ordeal! I'm just glad you fixed it so no one got hurt!

    I wanted to tell you this. It became my mantra, raising a family of three on my own.
    Always -
    No matter what comes our way, we always manage. We always have. We always will. It may not always be on our terms, but, we will always have what we need.
    by Me!

    Blessings to you and your adorable family! Thanks for all you bring.

    Su

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to leave a message, I love reading them! All comments are personally moderated by me and I will post and answer them them as soon as possible.
Rita