The House Strikes Back

Our Homeownership Saga

Web Site Errors

We have recently been fighting with our windows server to get it to run WordPress.  There seem to be some issues with a shared windows server running WordPress.  If you are having any issues, feel free to send us an e-mail at admin@thehousestrikesback.com or leave a comment in this post. Explain the error you received or are receiving. It would also be helpful to know your operating system (windows / mac / linux / ect) and what web browser your using ( internet explorer / firefox / chrome / ect)

Thank you all for your help and extended patience while we figure this out.

Surprise Gift

Today when we arrived home from grocery shopping at Cub, we found an unexpected gift waiting for us near the doorway to our bedroom.

Click “read the full article” to find out what it was…But it is probably not for the squeamish.

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A Much Overdue Welcome!

Before we even bought this house, we had planned to have a blog that would let everyone see what we were up to. We had the name picked out well before closing day. We had the website purchased within a few days of closing. We have over 5 GB of pictures from everything we have done so far. And, I’m saddened to say, we are very behind on sharing it with all of you.

My plan is add a few new entries every week. I have enough material to keep that going for a long time. I had hoped to be adding all of it as the projects were being completed but life got crazy and that didn’t happen. But its all news to you guys, so it’s not really a big deal.

For those of you who haven’t see our house yet, I will be adding plenty of pictures of the interior and exterior, along with, for you design junkies, what my color schemes are.

There are many posts on the main page here for your reading pleasure. But also check out the projects page for some of our current and future projects (link up top or on the side).

I hope you enjoy what you read and continue checking back! Please feel free to comment, we’d love the feedback!

A small teaser of what is still to come on this blog:

  • How we got our arcade machine and washer/dryer in the house (they were a challenge)
  • The gross state of the kitchen floor before I cleaned it
  • New and improved kitchen sink strainers
  • The story of why adding gutters to the north side of the house is so important
  • Some updates on the re-finishing of the porch floor
  • Our many new IKEA purchases and what we did with them
  • Some of our landscaping projects

Continued Cat Escapades

A few nights back we were putting away some groceries and had the cabinet under the kitchen sink open so that we could stash away our plastic bags for later use. While we were doing that, Sam, our 10 month old kitten, was wandering around the kitchen. Sam is a girl by the way; her full name is Samus (points if you know the reference). We finished putting everything away and I started to close the cabinet, when I realized that I hadn’t see Sam in a while. I asked Marc if he had seen where she went, and he hadn’t. So I looked around in the cabinet. I didn’t see a cat but I saw a hole in the bottom of the cabinet where the pipes go into the basement. Knowing that she is still fairly small and very crafty, I got a flashlight to inspect the hole. Upon inspection I found the end of a tail. Somehow she had fit past the pipes and was now between the bottom of the cabinet and the floor. It was several minutes before we could get her back out. Needless to say, the hold was filled to prevent this happening twice. Enjoy the pictures! **In the first picture you may have to click on it to get the bigger version, but she’s there.

Sam Deep Under the Sink Sam Under the Sink Sam Under the Sink

The Purple Paw Print Paradox

On the day I put the first coat of a deep purple paint on the walls of our office, there was … an incident. I realized it a while after the miscreant had left the scene. I came back to discover some suspicious purple markings on the, otherwise beautiful, hardwood floors. An investigation ensued. In exhibits 1-3 we can see the purple markings, thought to be paw prints from an adult feline.

Exhibit 3: Paw printExhibit 2: Paw printExhibit 1: Paw print

Exhibit 4 shows the weirdly untouched wall, a mere foot, behind the “paw prints”. You may also notice the open window, where it has been theorized that a feline creature may have been exploring. It is still unclear if the striped “cat toy” may have been involved.

The Scene

Now the lack of witnesses to this thoughtless activity makes capturing the suspect very difficult. Also, it is still unknown how the purple paint was transferred from the wall to the floor being as there is no direct evidence that the wall was ever tampered with.

We do however have information from an unnamed source ,who states that they saw a feline, Pez DeOtis – age 7 (pictured below), later that day with a purple paw.

The Suspect

Unfortunately, the suspect had cleaned off the evidence before we could take samples or photographs. As such, it is hard to definitively pin it on this particular feline. He does however have a long list of previous incidences (spilled water dishes, knocking items off tables, etc.) that make him seem good for it.

We will continue our investigation into this vandalism, in hopes to get justice for our floors and their horrible defacing.

Day 2

The second day we owned the house was a Saturday and we couldn’t wait to start fixing and decorating and modifying everything we could find. Marc finished installing the new locks and keying them all to the same key for simplicity’s sake. I procured paint for all the rooms so that I could get the project done before we moved in. I had spend the last several weeks trying to find a pleasing palette for the house. Once getting all the supplies, I decided to being with the living room. The living room was painted in a weird tan/brown-ish color that I found very unwelcoming. It was much too dark of a color for the space. So I changed it to a light green (paint chip called it “honeydew melon”). What I didn’t realize was that the old color was too dark for the new color to be able to cover it properly. So 3 coats of paint and 8 hours later I had the living room done. I will show how it turned out in a later post once I have more accurate pictures of the color.

Closing Day Celebration & Discovery

The night of May 7, both Marc’s and my immediate family got together for a BBQ. It was pretty fun but I feel could have been better had it not been 45 degrees outside. Cold weather does not make for a good BBQ and as such we ended up spending a lot of time indoors. Obviously if its 45 degrees outside, then inside will be chilly too. So we kicked on our furnace to heat things up, only to discover that it seemed to need to start up quite frequently. Upon further investigation we found a very disgusting and extremely clogged furnace filter. Not only was it well past its replacement time but it was also starting to fall apart. (see pictures for full appreciation). So as you can guess, our first house purchase was new filters for the furnace.

Furnace Filter 1Furnace Filter 2Furnace Filter 3

Closing Day

We officially became homeowners at about 3:30pm on Friday May 7, 2010. It was about a month from the time we made the offer on the house to when we got keys. Possibly one of the longest months we’ve had in many a year. It was torturous waiting for everything to fall into place and making sure that all the paperwork was in order. Not to mention the worrying about whether we had enough money to close. But it all fell into place.

The quick and dirty about the house itself. It was built in 1906 and has 867 finished sq. ft. It seems small but it doesn’t feel it when you are inside. Each room, except the bathroom, feature marvelous 10 foot ceilings that make the space feel very open. The bathroom and kitchen were remodeled by one of the previous owners and while they don’t really keep with the charm of the rest of the house, they are very nicely done none-the-less. The basement is what I would call semi-finished. It is obviously on its way to becoming a finished basement but someone stopped short of a full renovation. This basically means that it was framed off into smaller rooms, drywalled, and wired but the floors and ceilings were never finished. There is simply a lot about this house that is better shown through pictures (and we have plenty!) so I’ll leave it at that.