Becoming Homeowners

When we were in the process of buying our house, we came across some challenges. First of all, it was bank-owned, and the bank was not in any sort of hurry to sell it. When we put in our initial offer on Thanksgiving, we were told we would hear back from them by the following Monday. We waited all day on that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and kept on waiting into the next week until we finally heard back from them. It seemed like forever!

Like I said, the bank was super sloooooooooooowwwww at closing the deal. The home had not been lived in for quite some time, so the water and gas were turned off. Because of the type of loan we were getting, the bank had to send someone to come appraise the house, but they couldn't do that until they had the gas and water turned on. I wish I knew what bright mind decided to have the water turned on before the gas.... IN THE MIDDLE OF WINTER!! Well, that's what happened and you can guess what happened next. The water froze in the pipes and made them crack.

We had the gas turned on not long after we heard that the water had turned on and started heating up the house. We had the faucets on, hoping the water would start running, praying that by some miracle, the pipes hadn't cracked. We left the heat going and kept checking up on whether the water was running yet or still frozen (we kept shutting it off and on of course so it wouldn't flood the house when we were away). When it finally thawed, we quickly found out that we did have a cracked pipe. The ceiling in the basement was bulging from the weight of the water, so we poked holes to let it out.

Well, we couldn't get it appraised with a broken waterline, and the bank said they would send someone out to fix it... Well, it didn't happen that week, or the next... we could see where this was going and it was going nowhere fast! So, we took initiative again and thanks to Josh's dad (who is amazing at welding), we got it fixed. The only problem now was we had a huge hole in our ceiling... Bummer.

While this was happening, we had moved out of our apartment and into Josh's parents house while we waited to close. Our apartment was on a college campus and because a new semester of school was starting, if we moved after the start of the new year, it would have cost us nearly a month and a half of rent for just a couple weeks of living there! We said no way to that and moved the week after Christmas. Because all of our stuff had to fit in their house along with us, there wasn't a whole lot of living space. His parents were so great to have us there and I'm thankful they were willing to put up with a crowded house for a few weeks. :)

Here we are a year later and we finally have the hole in our ceiling fixed. We were lucky to find a guy to do the mudding that had worked with the person who did it originally. Once we have it painted, you won't even be able to tell there was a hole there. I wish I would have taken more pictures through the process to document it, but I didn't. Oh well. :) The picture below shows how big the hole was that we had to cut out to fix the pipe and put new sheetrock in.

Josh and his Dad spent an evening earlier this year to put the sheetrock in to fill the hole, and got it mudded just a couple weeks ago. Here is a picture of it all mudded. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it looks like the exact texture of the rest of the ceiling. I'm so glad! I could have never done that myself so we're lucky to have found someone that could. All we have to do is paint and it will be good as new.

This is just the first of many projects that we would like to do with our house. Now that I'm out of school (YAY!), I hope to spend more time on painting and getting things the way we want them. I will keep you updated on the progress.