The Jinx

We have gotten so used to this project taking longer than we anticipate that decided a while ago to not rely on timelines. It seemed like every time we put a date on any activity plans would fall through or contractors had to reschedule, so we made an unconscious and mutual decision to keep our timeline to ourselves to save having to tell people that it's taking longer than we said it would. We let our hopes get the best of us last week, and jinxed ourselves once again. We thought that we would be able to start painting this week so took the time to focus on finishing patching up our shiplap walls and installing trim and baseboard, but received a call on Friday that the painters could not actually start until the second week in January. It was disappointing, but I guess it's cool that we finally got around to finishing a few projects. Work continues and we still see progress, it's just not the type of progress that we thought we would see this week.

It took us a while to figure out how to trim out the space between these two close-together windows, but are pretty confident that this will look natural once sanded and painted.

First coat on our green door. This pop of color is going to look fantastic against our white walls and wood floors, once painters finally come hopefully in January

Boxes are piling up from light orders, hopefully Val the electrician can come over soon and installed so we don't have to use flashlights at night anymore.

A Flurry of Activity

We gave ourselves a deadline when we scheduled painters to start the second week in December. Before painters come, they need all of the surfaces that they plan on painting to be installed, and our surfaces have been incomplete for the entire year that we have owned this house. I don't feel confident patching things by myself, but I have jumped in as a sous carpenter and work alongside James lending him words of encouragement and a helping hand. We have guys putting in trim, Arcadio is back building us a new window, and our new steps were built. Things are moving swiftly and on time to get us ready for the next big thing. 

James did an amazing job putting shiplap in our loft space. The door won't have a handle, we're planning on installing a push latch to keep the space as clean as possible.

Finished patching up the master bedroom last night so that the guys can install trim today.

Some recycled flooring has been installed under our new steps. I love how these first two steps look, softly connecting the upstairs to the down.

Trim is being installed around all of our windows and openings. I hadn't realized just how much trim would help the house take on a more finished feel. 

We won't throw anything away that could be used again. We took out most of the door jams during remodeling and are finally at a point where we will be able to put them back in. 

Oh what a difference a day makes! Yesterday morning I left for a few hours and came back to a beautiful board room. I thought this room looked great before, but once this trim was installed it felt like a much better space.

One Year of Work

And what a year it has been.

When we bought Southmore the windows were darkly tinted and there were vines growing in the roof.

Rebuilt and fully functional windows. A nice change from before.

We bought Southmore about one year ago. I wish I knew the exact date because it seems important, but I would have to go through our bank statements and that seems a bit high effort to find an anniversary. We knew that it would be a fixer upper, but we were naive in what we thought would be enough to fix years of neglect in the house. What we originally thought would just be some drywall replacement and doorway widening snowballed when we realized that the previously widened doorways had not reinforced the headers and the hastily applied drywall was covering up years of active termite damage. We found rotten floors and treasures in the ceilings, and realized soon that we would need to consult the expertise of architects at Janusz Design.

We inherited poorly designed fur downs and a mirrored mantle from the previous mantle. A cool idea in the 70's I guess, but not in keeping with the times.

This room still needs some love, but we removed the fur downs and stripped the mirrors and paint off of the mantle. Oh, and we found a bonus window behind the paneling!

Joe and Lizzie were supremely necessary to doing our renovation right, but we had to learn that everything takes time. Ideas take time, drawings take time, edits take time. Before we knew it our lease was up and we had to talk to our landlady about letting us pay by the month. We couldn’t sustain that many bills, so were grateful for the opportunity to live at a friend’s house while they were out of town for the whole summer. We thought this new deadline would give us the push we needed and, when it didn’t, we spent weeks living at our childhood homes. We finally decided that we had had enough living anywhere but our own house and moved in two months ago, but it has still been far from finished.

Bathroom still isn't finished yet, but a far improvement from how it was when we first stepped into it.

We finally have some new big events scheduled, but I no longer naively believe that our house will be finished in three months. We have scheduled painters to start on our house the second weekend in December, which means that we can finally schedule to have our floors refinished soon. I still hope to have our kitchen built before we grow old in our house, but getting the floors refinished means that we can finally bring furniture into our home.

At it's peak, our "board room" was full of harvested shiplap boards to the point where we could hardly find anything we needed. We've been chipping away at our collection for the past six months.

We have a few piles of boards in our master closet, but it has been really amazing watching our walls come together as the mess gets smaller.

We won’t have to throw down a picnic blanket when guests come over because there isn’t enough seating, we can easily get our powder room installed downstairs, and finally get a washer and dryer for our home. I’ll be happy if our house is finished within two years, because the hope of getting a few important things done soon is keeping me happy for now. It has been a long year and we have learned a lot, I wonder what we will learn in the next year.

This small area near the back door was a barely usable powder room. This was one of the first things to get demolished, and the demolition revealed extensive rot and termite damage.

Future location of a washer and dryer, but current home to our mini fridge. Much more open now, and full of light hope for the future.

Halloween at the Newmans

Sorry about the late post, we've just been so busy patching up walls that I forgot to update our friends and family about our progress.

I didn't grow up celebrating Halloween. My dad says now that he didn't like the idea of kids knocking on doors and feeling entitled to receive candy, but the story he told us when we were young had more to do with feeling unsafe in our neighborhood. We also sometimes got lectured about halloween being the devil's holiday, but I think it was more fear for our safety that took us out of the city or to a movie theater that one day each year. When we finally moved to a neighborhood where my parents weren't worried about us playing in the street, the relaxed halloween rules felt late. We were getting too old to trick or treat. 

Despite Halloween not being a formative part of my childhood, I still love the holiday. I am not good about getting costumes together or creating macabre scenes in our front yard, but there's something about the sense of community and childhood innocence that I really love about the last day in October. Our house is still a long way from being finished, but I took the opportunity of finally having our own home to throw my first ever pumpkin carving party! It rained all day and was unsafe for all invited to drive to our house, but we had such a blast with the few friends that were able to safely join us that evening. While we will most definitely be carving pumpkins again in the future, I did learn that a week before Halloween is too long a time to leave pumpkins on the porch to rot.

While Halloween was never a part of my childhood, I was still aware of the fabled house that gave away full-sized candy bars and decided that I want to be that house. I put out a call on Facebook to find friends with warehouse club memberships and was super pleased to find that I had at least a few friends with either Sam's or Costco memberships. I met with the wonderful Jenni a few days before Halloween, purchased 120 candy bars at a fraction it would have cost me elsewhere, and started what I hope will be a tradition seeing kids seeking my house out each year.

I ended up getting ahead of myself with the amount of candy I purchased since it rained all day in Texas, but we made an impression on the kids that did make the candy trek and hope that they tell their friends of a fabled house on the top of a hill that lets goblins and ghouls grab handfuls of full-size bars. We started small this year, but hope to see the amount of kids visiting our house grow as the years pass.

The Halloween rain had a surprising perk in that it created the perfect backdrop for our alligator great dane.

Steady As She Goes

One of the reasons that James was excited for us to finally move in to Southmore was the relative ease with which we could now do home repairs. He would no longer feel compelled to spend all of his after work and daylight hours over at the house by himself while I wondered when I should have supper ready for him at whatever house we were living at the time. He could patch a few boards here and there, would not need to transport tools from place to place, and could generally feel less stress than he had been feeling about the project.

Two months ago we worked hard getting ceilings ready for drywall installation.

While these benefits are generally true, I am starting to realize just how important it is to not focus on finishing projects, and to just focus on going one step at a time. We have been working diligently on patching up our walls, but some of these weeks have felt less productive and more discouraging than others.

Amazing what these white walls and ceilings do to brighten up the space and give it a more-finished feel

This past week, for instance, we both came down with a bit of a cold. The general lethargy that comes with coughs and sneezes meant that we were unable to accomplish as much as we had hoped we could.

We used long boards harvested from our ceilings to patch up the longer spaces on the walls. If we had to buy all of the shiplap that is currently in our house, we would easily spend tens of thousands of dollars. By recycling, we are able to use what we have and save money.

Still, we are fortunate that we have the resources to tackle our obstacles. A steady supply of dayquil shots and nine hours of sleep each night for almost a week gave us the burst of wellness and energy needed to make a noticeable difference in our living room. 

We have a whole room upstairs dedicated to organizing our recycled shiplap by size. This organization helps cut down on time used to patch other walls.

These pictures do a good job of making it seem like our whole house is more complete than it actually is, but it feels good to look at this one corner in this one room and feel like the rest of the house is doable. 

There Goes the Electric Bill

If moving in felt like we were on vacation in an alpine cabin, it now feels like we are staying in a five star resort. Okay, we're not near resort-level yet, but our house does have many comforts that it did not have when we moved in. 

Unfortunately AC units are prime targets from enterprising thieves, so we have built a strong cage to contain it.

Our first week living at Southmore I consistently took two cool showers a day because we did not have air conditioning and I was not designed to withstand Houston early-fall/late-summer weather. Fortunately for me the fact that we did not yet have our gas hooked up was no problem, because the cold showers were plenty warm for our hot house. Despite not even wanting a hot shower during that first week, I was still excited to have a hot-water option for whenever our house would be cool enough that a warm shower could be enjoyable.

Disney keeps it's recipe for "go away green" a secret, but we were able to find a decent substitute with "Spice Garden" by Behr

As many of you read on my Facebook, turning on hot water turned in to an unbelievably difficult adventure filled with attempted midnight visits by Centerpoint and victim-blaming when I called to complain. Fortunately I had an enterprising friend reading all about my problems who pointed me in the right direction and, after a phone call to somebody that could actually accomplish something, our gas was hooked up in the middle of the week.

AC monster in the attic

Our house was still incredibly warm due to the whole not-having-air-conditioning thing, so I took one novelty warm shower before going back to the cold showers I had grown to love. We called Building Air Services and asked them when they could install our unit, and were happy to hear that they would be able to come by just a few days later. They had some kinks to work out in the first few days, but I can now confidently say that we have a working air conditioning unit. 

One of these days I'm sure I'll want our workers to lay down a barrier between their dirty shoes and our floor, but right now our floor is a perennially dirty, multi-level, splinter inducer.

Our electric bill has pretty consistently been under $10 since we bought the house almost eleven months ago, but that is about to change. One of these days I will experiment with house temperatures and energy usage to try to optimize comfort and cost, but for now I am happy to crank the unit low and no longer have to take multiple showers each day to maintain a pleasant odor.

Wet weather meant that the workers used scraps out of our trash heaps to keep their shoes as clean as possible and the unit relatively dry during install.

The Cabin

We moved in this weekend. Moving days are always tough, because moving is the absolute worst, but this move was supposed to be painless because we have had 85% of our belongings packed and in storage for the whole summer already. Another aspect meant to lead to the ease of moving was the fact that we decided to only move one bedroom's worth of stuff into Southmore. One bed, a couple bedside tables, a lamp or two . . . there's no real point to moving all of our belongings into the house because we would only have to move it all out again when it is time to refinish the floors. 

Even small moves turn big when a mattress is involved.

This move was vibrating with the excitement about finally sleeping for the first time at the house we have owned for ten months, but was also tinged with trepidation at the prospect of moving into a house that still does not have central air or proper electricity. Sure, we could run extension cords to the bedroom that we would be sleeping in to light a lamp, and we could buy a window unit to keep the room cool, but the lack of amenities made it feel like we would be moving into the house for no other reason than we had given ourselves a deadline. 

All of this would need to be patched before moving in.

The planned ease of the move was swiftly cancelled out be the amount of physical labor needed to make even one room remotely livable. We decided a while ago to move into the smallest bedroom once we realized that it would be difficult to move the piles of reclaimed shiplap from the other two rooms, but the bedroom that we would be moving into still needed shiplap on an entire wall. James worked, not tirelessly because he was often exhausted, but diligently and lovingly to patch up the room that would be our first sleeping place. We still don't have any rooms that are finished, but we now have a room that I can confidently call "the closest to finished to date."

James' hard work pays off.

We've taken to calling our first bedroom "the cabin." The darkness of the wood walls and the sound of the struggle of the window unit working overtime really make us feel like we're staying in some hot mountain summer cabin whose visitors long for the day they return to civilization. It's not that we're not enjoying the novelty of staying in a place with so few luxuries, but we're ready for the day when we feel clean and cool in our house.

Rudimentary closet. We'll put shiplap on the walls inside the closet after we've patched other rooms.

We've all missed this mattress. There's something about one's own mattress that leads to a better night's sleep.

That crate makes the room feel a bit smaller, but we're used to sharing our space with such a huge creature.

First Big Purchase

We ordered kitchen lights last week. I never thought that I would be so excited about something as completely boring as kitchen lights, but here I am. The things that used to seem boring to me now catch my eye when I least expect them to. I walk down the streets and look for the ripple in old house window glass that betrays the age. I enter friend's houses and look up to see what's lighting the space. I am so interested by things that I never thought would be interesting. So here I am. Twenty-five years old. Just moved out of my parent's house and into my in-law's, and I'm excited about kitchen lights. 

I suppose one of the reasons I am so excited about these lights is because the kitchen has been more work than we could have anticipated. When we bought the house we assumed that we would be using the meager kitchen that came with it for at least a few months after moving in before we demolished the cabinets to be rebuilt. As with every other aspect of the house, this was a naive hope that was quickly and thoroughly squashed. Kitchen demolition was exciting, though. Right up there with bathroom.

It was in our kitchen that we discovered that we had three layers of linoleum under a layer of wood floor and all on top of original floors. The floor discovery was exciting, but the discovery of drywood termites was not. It was in our kitchen where we got excited about what seemed to be fantastically preserved wood floors underneath plywood, which we later discovered was a cheap wood floor substitute that could not be refinished or used. It's our kitchen that our architects convinced us to buy top-of-the-line appliances for, where the refrigerator would only be counter-depth and the kitchen would seem a bit bigger. It's this decision to wait to afford the appliances that means that we won't have a kitchen when we finally do move in.

We have made a few steps toward a decent kitchen lately. We pulled up all of the bad flooring and used some recycled hardwoods to create a seamless floor throughout the house. We've installed new plumbing, harvested shiplap boards, run new wires, and built a powder room under the stairs. Despite the multitude of things that we have accomplished in this kitchen, I am most excited for the lights. 

Able to see through the wall now that used to separate the front door from the restroom

Flooring installed! Will be a few months before we refinish it, but the fact that it exists is enough for me right now.

Drywall installed, Construction sink borrowed, $150 gas stove to get a temporary gas permit, and balloons on the ceiling to help us decide which size lights to buy!

Cedar and Moss's Alto pendant! Very excited about this, and anxiously waiting for them to be delivered.

Hurry Up and Wait

I am hopeful about our house every day. Some days that hope is stronger than others, but I never regret buying the house or any of the work that we have put into it.

I can picture our living room as a finished and decorated space. I peruse Ikea and CB2 for rugs and couches. I search almost daily to find the perfect bed frame and have resigned myself to the likelihood that I probably will not ever find something that is truly irreplaceable. I imagine the second bedroom as a guest room or nursery. I try and imagine where the most ideal location would be to put Sebastian's crate.

I am still able to imagine a future in a house that has no move-in date, and I have only started to realize that it is okay. Working with contractors is a notoriously harrowing ordeal. In a perfect world we are their only client, but in the real world they have multiple jobs running at once. We can hound the plumber to finish as quickly as possible, but then the tile guys still won't be able to work on the bathroom for two weeks. Finally able to get the drywall company to come hang everything, but they still can't get the taping and floating crew to start until next week. I have always respected James, but the frustration of acting as general contractor and the calm way in which he interacts with each specialist has given me an even greater (if possible) respect for the man. This project would be further behind than it already is if it weren't for him.

We are incredibly excited about the drywall, though, despite the setbacks in finishing it. For too long the progress on our house has been difficult for others to grasp. We have improved the house drastically so far to be sure, but all of the improvements have been behind walls and through gaping holes in ceilings. Now that drywall has been hung, we have more structure to the house. The holes in the ceilings are hidden, the master suite has walls, and the house is finally starting to look as good as we know it to be.

Halfway through master ceiling drywall 

This master suite is going to be super cool!

Peering through the closet into a future bathroom

It's really amazing to see this space closed in. This small master bath is going to be perfect for us.

Running Out of Time

James and I bought Southmore last November and assumed that we would move into it when our apartment's lease was up in February. We were excited about moving into our own home and no longer paying rent + mortgage. February came and went, Southmore was still far from ready, and we were still paying double. A few months later we were given an opportunity to live in a friend's house while she and her family traveled in Europe for the summer months. We jumped at the chance, and joked with all of our friends that we were "summering on Addison", while simultaneously being grateful to finally have a hard deadline to tell our subcontractors to finish. Unfortunately summer has now come and gone. The homeowners returned last week, and we experienced more setbacks during renovations than we anticipated. We rented a storage unit, placed all of our belongings in it, and a few days ago moved into my childhood home. We're only able to live here for two and a half weeks, so hopefully this new fire under the project will be what we need to make Southmore liveable. I no longer care about getting this house to the furthest state of finished before we move in. I just want hot water and a bathroom. 

Thankfully we have people working over there most days this week and next, so hopefully the house really will start coming together soon. It needs to come together. If it doesn't, we'll need somewhere else to live for a few weeks once our time at my parents' is done.

A Few Deep Breaths Later

Eight months ago James went to the permitting office to file a repair permit with the city of Houston. The house was going to need a lot of repairs, but we were told by one of the people that we are working with that we wouldn't need a remodel permit because all of the external walls are remaining in place. James had a fantastic experience at the permitting office. He never had to wait more than five minutes to meet with an employee, and was out of the building after fifty minutes. We posted the permit on the window and could finally get started on building rather than destroying.

The renovation order goes something like this: framing gets put in place, all of the other rough-ins (plumbing, HVAC, electrical) are installed, all of the rough-ins get inspected by the city, the framing gets inspected by the city. The city used to inspect structure first because it is installed first and then everything else as it happened, but realized that tradesmen tended to chip away at the structure to make room for their pipes and wires. Structure is inspected last to keep tradesmen honest.

We watched with joy as HVAC, plumbing, and electricity rough-ins passed, and were excited to finally get our structure passed since it had all been put in place months ago. When the inspector walked in he took one look at the beam installed between the breakfast nook and kitchen and said, "you aren't permitted for this. you need a remodel permit if walls are going to move." If the walls. Are going. To move. Not just the outside walls. So James went to the permitting office again and this time did not have as agreeable an experience. He was gone for hours talking to person after person, and finally was told that he needed plans signed off by a structural engineer. Once he had those, he could get the proper permit. Once he had the proper permit, he would need to transfer all of the inspections from our first permit to the second one so that there would be no confusion. It has been a very confusing week.

​I went to Southmore on Friday to meet with a security company to talk about getting a system installed, and James pulled up with a yellow paper in his hand and a smile on his face. We have the proper permit now, and only need to tweak a few aspects of the framing to pass our structural inspection. My anxiety about this project has been exacerbated due to this hiccup, but I feel like I can take some tentative breaths again. Not having the proper permit was a disappointing setback, and it was scary to think of the hoops we needed to jump through, but work can now continue again and that is something that makes me happy.

Renovation Realizations

Right after we decided to buy this house but before we signed the papers, we made a list in our heads of what we would need to do before we moved in. We knew that we would need new electrical and plumbing, and that we would need to turn the one existing bathroom into the one functioning bathroom. We might need a few new windows to replace the ones with obvious damage, but could probably get by without replacing everything right away. The kitchen seemed fine, might need a few tweaks here and there, and we would obviously need a new air conditioning unit but could use the existing hardware. Otherwise, we could take the next five years to live in a construction zone and pay for everything as we could.

I wish that this project was as easy as we had naively believed it would be.

A lot of amazing things have happened since November. We cut down a lot of the foliage in the backyard, demolished the kitchen, realized that all of the drywall needed to go, found live and active termites, treated those termites, and then decided to hire architects. Our architects dreamed of a vaulted master suite, and convinced us to follow that dream in their drawings. They further explained to us that the cost to frame everything out would be nominal, and that we would much rather frame everything out at the beginning of the project rather than in a few years to minimize disruption. We learned that you can't just pay to fix one room of the house, that in order to fix the one room the whole house needs to be adjusted.

The family that I nanny is on the second week of a two week long Summer vacation. James and I took this break in my work as an opportunity to take our own vacation away from how stressful this renovation is becoming, so we spent last week in Colorado staying with a friend and hiking through the Rocky Mountains. Vacations create laundry, so when we got back I spent the first couple of days of my second week with no work to clean up the house and do a bunch of laundry. Unfortunately, I have never been very good at taking a "staycation." Sure, I can watch a few seasons of a show and a movie here or there, but I get incredibly bored incredibly quickly. It was on the third day of this boredom that I decided to spreadsheet all of the checks that we have written to various contractors for Southmore costs. I won't go into too much detail and I won't show people the spreadsheet because I was taught that it is gauche to talk about a few different things, salary, costs of things that you own (probably because it gives people a better idea for how much money you have), politics, and religion. However, I'm grateful that I now have a better understanding for why James has been so worried lately.

​I can now take my knowledge and use it to better budget my personal spending. I can start buying more vegetables and poultry and less red meat. No more trips to the coffee shop to get a cappuccino and Nutella croissant. I realize now that I can't afford to go to my cousin's wedding, because even though I could buy the plane ticket with points the cost to eat out every day and rent a car would be prohibitively expensive. These realizations haven't been easy to come by. But that's what being an adult is like, right?

Windows

When we purchased Southmore we had no clue to the level of work we would be putting into this house. Termite damage was covered up by drywall, rotten subfloors were covered up with plywood, the bad wiring and plumbing were hidden in the walls, etcetera. One of the main things that was clear to us that we would need to fix was the state of the windows in our house. The front windows all had darkly tinted glass on them, windows were sagging in the bedrooms, sashes were rotten, and a couple of windows were broken or just did not exist. 

I am pleased to report that we are fixing these issues at the moment.  We briefly considered replacing the windows with double paned modern windows, but were talked out of it by Architect Joe who argued that the age of the house and its tendency to breathe would negate any positive effect of insulated windows. I would love to share with you a link to our window repair guy's website, but I can't. He seems to get work by word of mouth, which is how we got his information. Joe asked us at one of our last meetings if we wanted the name of his "window guy" and immediately followed with "do you speak Spanish?" 

Our answer to both questions was yes (a resounding yes to the first question, and a tentative one from me for the second.) Fortunately, James is both good at and confident in speaking Spanish, so we gave Arcadio a call and were grateful when he agreed to work for us. Arcadio is one of the few people in Houston that specializes in repairing old windows, and the skill that he possesses has been immediately apparent. 

The guys remove the window from the wall, scrub it and sand it extensively, repair original parts, rebuild missing parts, and then reinstall the window. We are keeping the panes that were put in our house in 1936, panes that have a bit of warp and character to them from existing in the same spot for eighty years. People pay premium to get this look with new windows, and we're getting this look naturally. Our house is looking better and better, and I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

Progress

We own a house! Every once in a while I have to repeat to myself that we, James and Hilary, own a house near downtown in Houston, Texas. Our house is two stories, it is brick, every neighbor we have met is nice. I repeat these good things in my head so that this house that is unlivable at the moment is, in fact, ours. We may not live there, the renovations might be happening slower than I would like, but it is ours and we own it.

For the last two weeks Steve's guys have been working hard to build headers where they need to be built, and walls where they will need to go. James goes over to Southmore every few days to talk with the guys and see what he can do to help. Is there something that James can demolish that evening to make their day quicker the next day? Should we have a meeting with the architects to make sure that we are all on the same page for closet dimensions? How can we best communicate our respective needs?

We are probably fortunate that James has such a rapport with the men working on our house, but it is so natural and ingrained that we do not know an alternative. When we first told our friends about our contractor, they each responded with horror stories and warnings about contractors that swindled people out of money, or did not finish the project, or were simply incompetent. Our responses have always been and remain the same. Our contractor is nothing like that. Our contractor is trustworthy, reliable, extremely talented, and the guys he hires are the same.

Because of this talent and trustworthiness, I am able to show y'all progress. These pictures have been from a small section of our house, but they are indicative of the change that is happening. The previous owners never reinforced ceilings when they opened up doorways, but because the house has shiplap walls the ceilings never collapsed on the inhabitants. The guys jacked up the ceiling and built headers where they needed to exist. We are happy, and hopeful, at the progress.

Plugging Along

HGTV has taught me that even the most difficult of remodels should take no more than an hour or so. I keep having to explain to myself that life is not as easy as television can make it seem, and every once in a while I actually take my own words to heart. Today is one of those days, a day where I needed to remind myself that we have a timeline and hopefully we will have our house ready by the day we need to move in. 

James and I are incredibly fortunate that we have been given a place to live for free this summer. My parents live next door to a wonderful family that travels for a few months each year, and need somebody to housesit for them while they are away. We did not even need to think about it, the chance to no longer have to pay rent+mortgage was too great an opportunity, and we readily accepted the offer. This does, however, give us a more concrete timeline to have our house ready for us to move in. This timeline has put a fire under our project, and we plan to move in mid-August, when we will get kicked out of our friend's home.

James has been very wonderful in his demolition, and our first workers are planning on coming over this week to begin framing out our new spaces. These workers are men that James spent a summer with during his college years, and James has been extra careful to leave each space clean which is something that they taught him when he worked with them. We even went over the other night to sweep up a large mess because we weren't sure if they planned on coming today or not (we still don't know, but no worries there.)

There's still a lot of work to do, and our next four months are going to be crazy, but at least we know now that it will only be four months before we live there!

Learning to Love the Neighborhood

When James and I started searching for a house to buy last year, we began in the neighborhoods we knew. We looked in Montrose, the Heights, and near the Museum District, and were quickly discouraged by the fact that we could not even afford an empty lot in these neighborhoods. We downloaded real estate apps, broadened our search, and looked into houses east of downtown. We found a cute little bungalow that was new on the market and thought that we would do what we’ve seen so many times on HGTV shows and lowball an offer. The agent in charge of the property actually laughed at James when he made an offer and told him that there were already many other offers on the property for well over asking price. This was the new EaDo neighborhood, after all, and property was desirable that close to downtown. We then decided that the only near-downtown neighborhoods we could afford to live in would be either north or southeast of the center of the city.

I don’t know how James felt when we first toured Southmore, but my main thought was “the price is good and the proximity to downtown is perfect. We should just go for it before we can’t afford to even live here.” 

I was practical in my thoughts, not romantic. I thought of all of the past remodels we would have to undo, thought about the backyard that we would have to uproot and reimagine, and wondered what our neighbors would be like. I began to love the house when I had to fiercely defend it from our friends and family that were worried about the neighborhood. It is so near the third ward, after all, and Dowling St. is less than half a mile away. People tried to dissuade us from closing on the house, but the more people tried to convince us otherwise the more fiercely loyal I became to our home and the neighborhood.

n the six months after we bought the house, I have made an effort to get to know the area by walking Sebastian down . I’m learning my way around, and each time a neighbor drives up and welcomes us to the area I come to like it more and more.

Design

We've been meeting with Janusz Design since the end of January. We are hoping to turn this three bedroom one bathroom house into a three bedroom two and a half bathroom house by September 2016, but renovations never go as planned. We'll see!

Taming the Jungle

When we first toured Southmore House we were disappointed by how small the backyard seemed to be.  We looked around and saw a small grassy spot with a jungle behind and assumed that the fence was just beyond the tree line.  It was only when we really explored our jungle after we purchased the property that we realized just how big the yard truly was. 

Our property, we were pleased to discover, is 6,250 sq./ft., which meant that our backyard is bigger than we could have dreamed.  Unfortunately, since nobody has lived in the house in at least a decade and the yard has gone wild for longer than that, we then had a sizable project on our hands (as if this whole house isn't project enough).  Our backyard had been overrun by Golden Rain Trees and by vines, the likes of which I wish that I could tell you but my vine knowledge is sorely lacking these days.  When James and I set about chopping down the tens of trees in our backyard, we assumed that it would take ages to make any sort of visible progress on the yard.  We soon learned the power of happy helpers, and decided to solicit as much help as possible.

The help began with our next-door neighbor, Rick.  Rick and his wife Sandy purchased the house next door to our Southmore House five years ago as an investment.  They saw how the neighborhood was improving, and wanted to buy a house inside the city before they could be priced out of it.  What they did not take into account when buying the house was just how long it would be before somebody came along and fixed up the house next door.  They have watched over the years as the house fell more into disrepair and the backyard grew wilder.  If they were ever to sell their property for a profit, the house next door would need some maintenance.  They were visibly happy to meet us, and even happier to see us take such an excited and keen interest in getting started with repairs.  Our excitement was contagious, and it was one of those exciting excursions that I took over to our new house during which Rick declared, "I'm coming over, and I'm bringing my chainsaw." 

James and I weren't yet ready to chop down everything in the backyard, because where would we put it?  Heavy trash was two months away and it is far easier to store trees upright and firmly planted in the ground than dying in a pile somewhere.  Rick's excitement could not be contained, though, and he chopped down anything he could get his saw on.  Later that week James came over to glance at the progress and decided to try his hand with an ax.  It was with that ax and his downward swing where we realized the extent to the overgrowth in the yard. Where we looked and saw earth, grass, vines, and trees, the ax felt the hard surface of a driveway.  Prior to this ax swing we did not realize that the driveway extended far beyond where we had believed that it did.  We did not realize that the trees growing on the right side of the yard were trees that had learned to thrive from cracks in old concrete. We would need to chop down these trees and root them out, but it would be too much for us to do on our own. The first weekend we had friends and family come help us on Southmore we hadn't really anticipated just how much a group of hard workers can motivate each other.  After hours of sweat, a little bit of blood, and a lot of tenacity, we were able to clear the vast majority of our overwhelming jungle.  There is still a lot to do, but we are happy with the progress we have made in the last few months.

Our New Old House

Living in an apartment one is often at the mercy of their landlord.  We have a 120lb Great Dane, so our apartment choices are limited, and when we found someone that would lease us a two bedroom unit in a duplex near downtown we were ecstatic.  It didn't seem like a problem when we signed the lease that Sebastian wouldn't be able to use our yard at all and the landlady doesn't like dogs, but those things began to bother us.  When we started looking at house prices in Houston, we quickly realized how expensive it would be to live in the neighborhoods we know and love (read: Heights, Montrose, Museum District, and Midtown), so we broadened our search and found that we would only be able to afford a fixer upper east of 288.  This realization led us to Southmore blvd., and our new-for-us house.  There have been years of bad renovations and it will take us years to get it just right, but we love it already.

The facade of our new house! We love the brick.

The stairway has tinted glass in specially cut holes in the wall

Movie theater style fur downs in the living room (also mirror on the fireplace and the wood wall is covering up windows)

Boarded up and dark dining room beyond the living room

"Half-bath" toward the back of the house

Kitchen

Original bathroom and only "functional" bathroom. Downstairs didn't have a toilet.