Leaves, Gutters and You.

Yesterday, Avy worked on the house by herself for a while, since I was at work. She tore up some more carpet and whatnot. The place is looking better by the minute, and that funky smell is slowly but surely disappearing--thank god.

Funnily enough, Avy says the smell didn't seem too bad to her until she started working on the floors by herself. She says it hit her kind of suddenly when she pulled up a chunk of carpet in the bedroom.

But never mind that... let's talk about leaves, shall we?

This new neighborhood is full of trees, which is really quite lovely, especially in the fall/winter, with the leaves changing colors and falling, etc. But you know what's not so great about leaves? They fall on your house and wind up in your rain gutters, especially if your house is old-school, like The Serpico House. Long story short, I snuck a peek at the gutters over the weekend, and I was not pleased. The gutters are in fine shape, actually, but they're full of leaves. This is bad.

Leaves are the enemies of gutters--they clog them up and cause water to go places we don't want it to go... like into the house or the foundation of the house. Not good. I was able to sort of quickly push the leaves out of one gutter over the weekend, but most of the roof isn't too accessible without a ladder (and I ain't got one yet), so I had to accept the fact that I will not be able to to clear the gutters completely for a while. It sucks, but I have to think that if the gutters were OK thus far, they will be OK for a while longer.

I'm thinking it would be pretty sweet to upgrade our gutters to these bad boys...

I don't know what these things cost, but I'm gonna guess it's expensive--whenever they don't list the price online, you know it's not cheap. Damned if this doesn't look like a really good idea, though, but I'm going to ignore this option for a while. I can clean gutters until I can afford to add the snazzy, self-cleaning kind.

I really don't like the idea of climbing around on the roof, pawing leaves out of the gutters, but it's obviously not beyond the realm of my abilities. It's obviously not a complex activity, but it's not pleasant. And paying someone to do it? Well, I don't mind paying for a valuable service, but I also don't have money for that kind of stuff.

Of course, there are other options. Like this thing, for example.

Seems pretty straight-forward, right? We just received a lovely leaf-blower as a gift from my folks (they no longer have a yard since they live in a high-rise condo now), so all I need to get would be the additional kit in order to make this happen, and then I could stand on the ground to do this. I like that idea. No ladders. Yes.

Of Carpet and Other Things.

Somewhere amidst the turkey and stuffing we managed to get work done on The Serpico House this past weekend. First off, I would like to mention that doing any kind of home renovation with Xavier in the house is kind of crazy. The boy wants to check out everything--the fireplace, the stove, the drawers, the steps--and it's all stuff that would probably kill him, so we have to ever vigilant to make sure he's not setting himself or the house on fire or breaking his bones on one thing or another. We really appreciate the folks who helped us out with him--my parents, Lacey and CJ. Without their involvement, I am pretty sure we'd be even crazier than we are now. Thanks, guys.

Xavier is the foreman on the Serpico job--"Hey, time is money. Bear hats ain't cheap."

Bypassing the nicey-nice things like yummy thanksgiving leftovers with my parents and figuring out the gas fireplace (light the pilot... and it works!) , let's talk about the floors. You've seen the nasty-ass, stinky carpet in previous posts. Let me tell you what happened...

Remember the carpeted bathroom with the gray-and-pink tile? Well, thankfully, that carpet came up easily--one strong pull, and here's what we have....

Pink is SO not my color.

Yeah. More pink and gray. Not my first choice, but, luckily for us, it's in nice shape, and there's only one area with adhesive remainders near the door. We're thinking a little Goo Gone will do the trick on that stuff. The floor itself is honestly not bad. We'll need to do some caulking around the tub and walls, but otherwise it'll be fine until we can afford to do a full-on gut and renovation. We will, however, get rid of the curtains. A man can only abide so much pink.

The first big room we tackled was Xavier's room. It had the icky green shag-style carpet. Nasty. Here's what we found when we started pulling up that crap...

This padding stuff looks like really old pizza,.

Yes! We were pretty excited to see a nice floor under there. We think it's oak. Or something. Whatever. It's nice and in good shape. Oh yeah, check this out...

Yep. The carpet padding still bore its Sharpie marker tattoo. And, ew... it was rotten. As was the carpet. We made a rookie error when removing the carpet, though--we just pulled it up and yanked it into the hallway. That's not the preferred method of the pros, and I blame myself for being over-excited about the whole thing. Hell, I didn't even wear gloves while tearing it out. (That was dumb, too. I'm pretty sure I don't want tetanus.)

What we were supposed to do was pull up the carpet and slice it into 3x6' chunks and roll them up with tape. Makes things a lot smoother for clean-up. That's not what we did. We made a mess.

Instead, what we had in the hallway looked a lot more like Trash Heap from Fraggle Rock.

I guess you can see the family resemblance, huh?

That wasn't fun to clean up, but we managed.

The tack strip in Xavier's room was newish (maybe 10 years old?), which meant it was hearty. In other words, it put up a fight, as did the many, many staples we encountered under the padding. Pliers, putty knives and pry-bars to the rescue! After some prying and sweeping, I think we wound up with something pretty nice...


Not bad at all, I thinks. But are you noticing something around the edges of the baseboards? Yeah, we noticed it, too. This....
Funky-ass gap, huh? I guess it's something like an expansion gap that the builders figured nobody would ever see, since we believe these floors have never been without carpet. Yep. So... it looks like we have a date with some quarter-round molding and a miter box. Yay. I'm guessing this will be the case in every room, since we encountered the same concern in the upstairs hallway, too.

Extra nastiness--the padding in the hallway had become so dead and worn that it was more like sand than padding. We expect most of the older carpet will have this kind of padding, which also explains the musty smell.



Gross, right? It's like sand under a spider-web-like membrane. On the plus side, all we have to do is sweep it up after pulling up the carpet, so, even though it's pretty disgusting, at least it doesn't have to be rolled up.

The tack strip in the hallway was a lot easier to pull up--we were getting foot-long hunks of tack strip out of the floor in the hallway, which is a big step up from the four-inch hunks we got out of the bedroom.

Seeing the hallway like this made me feel pretty good.
I'm sure Ms. Serpico would have been horrified at the wood floor, but I can't help that. We may call it The Serpico House, but it's becoming our house.

Now we just have about 1,500 square feet left to do...

Keys, Alarms and Dampness.

All the papers have been signed, so it looks like the deal is done. Due to a scheduling mishap, we get the actual keys to the house tomorrow. Woot!

The keys... Ha! Here's a little amusing side story: apparently there are no known keys to the front door of the house. Turns out Ms. Serpico never used the front door. She only used the back door, so she eventually lost track of the keys for the front. I can see why she'd prefer the back door, though--the driveway leads right to it, there are no steps, it opens into the kitchen... yeah, makes sense. The front steps are kind of steep, too, so I can imagine an older person wouldn't want to mess with those. And, as an added bonus, she also somehow misplaced the key to the garage, so that's just unlocked all the time, and it can be automatically opened by simply pressing a door-bell-like button. You'd think someone named Serpico would be a little more security-minded, huh? Guess not.

We'll need to get new locks for the front door and the garage door, I guess... or have them re-keyed.

Re-keying seems like a good idea, right? I mean, we wouldn't have to buy anything new or replace anything, and the locksmith (who would obviously be a highly trained pro) would be able to come and handle that business on site for about $75 ($45 for the visit, and ~$10 per cylinder.) That seems reasonable to me. Plus, it wouldn't involve me buying kits of some sort and then figuring out the proper method for installation... and almost definitely screwing it up. Although... I am pretty sure I wouldn't screw it up. It's a lock. I have never installed one, but I doubt it's beyond my range of skills. I have some faith in myself.

Replacing the locks on my own... hmm... that's gonna be cheaper, for sure. It's basically a trip to Home Depot or Lowe's (or a hardware store) and an expenditure of maybe $18 for the front door deadbolt. That idea has appeal because it's cheap. And, again, I'm pretty sure I can do it myself.

Having said that much, I'm also sure that my common sense would abandon me (some say it was never doing anything but paying an occasional visit, anyway), and I'd come home with this thing...
Honestly, it looks pretty sweet to me, and we do love techy stuff... but not at five times the cost of a normal deadbolt. That's kind of silly. But just a paragraph ago I was willing to pay someone about the same amount to come and re-key the existing locks. Hey, I'm just weighing my options, OK?

And, speaking of security, we were informed that the alarm system in the house is only semi functional. I think it was installed ages ago, and it hadn't been used for a while. So if we want to make use of this thing, we'll have to get in touch with the alarm company and have a rep come out to update it. I don't know a lot about the way alarm systems are installed, but this one has some sort of transformer living in the attic, and, from what we've been told, it buzzes. Well, since the attic is accessible via Xavier's room, you can bet we don't want any buzzing noises waking up the little man at night. I think we'll just disconnect the transformer for now. We can worry about having an alarm system later. Yeah, so there you go, all you would-be burglars... we won't have an alarm for a little while. We will, however, have two large adults living there, both of whom have extremely strong protective natures. Also, Mack the Attack turtle will be roaming the house, and seriously, you don't wanna mess with him. He's been known to send rottweilers running off, yelping, with just a hard stare. You've been warned.



The sellers also let us know that the basement needs to have a dehumidifier running at all times, and they're not leaving one for us. Bummer. I thought it smelled kind of musty down there when we checked out the house before. Looks like we're going to have to invest in a good dehumidifier, but that's fine--I kind of figured we'd need something like that. I think I have a good one picked out, too.



The reviews are almost all positive, and the price is fair, I guess. According to the info I've seen on this 70-pint dehumidifier, it should do the trick for our basement. I know we could spend something like $1K on a dehumidifier, but screw that... it shouldn't be necessary to spend that much money clear up our space, and, as I mentioned, the Frigidaire unit I like seems to work really well for just about everyone who reviewed it. I just want our basement to be a functional, pleasant space... with no musty smell or mold. Ew.

In more positive news, the sellers are leaving the hutch and buffet for us. They heard Avy commenting about the furniture, and they decided to be nice and leave both pieces. That was sweet of them, I think, especially since Avy and I have decided the best move would be to try and sell the hutch... we can get a few bucks for that thing, and, ya know, those fancy dehumidifiers and deadbolts don't come cheap.

On the Cusp of Fighting Alligators

This is it, peeps--tomorrow the papers will be signed, and we'll finally be allowed to enter The Serpico House and start working on it. I mean, yes, there will be a bunch of this-and-that and what-have-you before we're actually living in the house, but tomorrow will be the day it really begins.

So what do we want to do right away?

We've decided to address the floors first. Why the floors? Well, to put it bluntly, the carpets in there are funky... and not in a cool, James Brown kind of way. It's not that they're dirty, really, so much as they're just kind of awful. Thankfully, it doesn't appear that Ms. Serpico owned a dog or a cat, so the carpets aren't terribly stained or repugnant and stinky, but they do smell kind of stale and old, and they've got sort of paths worn into them. I would guess most of the carpet is at least 25 years old, and the newer stuff is less than five years old. We want it all gone. We're fairly positive there is nice hardwood under most of the carpet, and we're also pretty sure most of it has never seen the light of day. Wall-to-wall carpet was apparently the way to go for most people until fairly recently. Of course, these days we know it's just a major pain in the ass--it's annoying to keep it clean, it collects and attracts dust and other allergens and just plain gets worn out.

With any luck, we will hopefully find old tile under the carpet in the bathrooms... and possibly linoleum under the carpet in the kitchen. We can hope, right?

Of course, the big downside to removing all the carpet in a wall-to-wall carpeted house is this nasty stuff...

Tack strip. You know what it is, right? This is what the carpet-layers nail into the floor around the perimeter of your rooms and use to make the carpet stick to the floor. Awful stuff, really, and no fun to remove from a wood floor, either. One of my former homes had a huge first floor completely covered in awful, ancient blue wall-to-wall carpet. I pulled that crap up the first day we took possession of the house, and it fought me the entire time. But the removal of the carpet wasn't the worst part of that endeavor... nope. The worst part involved pulling all of the little carpet staples out of the middle of the floor (the installers were quite thorough) and ripping out those damn tack strips.

That process was brutal--sitting on the floor, inching along with a flat-head screwdriver, a set of metal pliers, a rag and a small trash can. It went like this: wrap the end of the screwdriver with the rag (to keep from marring the floor), coax it under the edge of the tack strip until it starts to come up, emit cries of frustration and pain after impaling fingers on those tiny metal tack-strip teeth, grab end of tack strip with pliers, pull up tack strip, more cries of frustration as tack strip snaps in half, leaving big-ass nails still embedded in floor, grab nail with pliers, pull nail like a maniac, remove nail, throw in trash, curse at floor, inch along... repeat. It sucked, let me tell you.

I finally got it all done, and it was really not fun at all. Humorously enough, at the time I was sure I had been handling the tack strip removal incorrectly and just got lucky by not ruining my floor--there's got to be a better way, right? Nope. Turns out almost every DIY outlet recommends the method I described. Wow. We can put a man on the moon and invent a thing to stick in your car that literally tells you how to get from place to place, but we can't come up with a better way to get this nasty stuff off of the floor? Come on, scientists--get to work on something useful, willya?

And, naturally, we will have to bust our humps to get this stuff up quickly, because once the carpets are up, leaving the tack strip on the floor is like letting little tetanus-bearing alligators live in every room of your house. And, with Xavier being the kind of kid he is, you can bet he'd find a way to face-plant directly into this stuff. So it's gotta go right after the carpets bite the dust.

The Proofing of Sound.

There's a lot of misinformation about soundproofing out there. Even a lot of my musician friends are kind of clueless about the realities of this simple, yet complicated concept. I wish I had a dollar for every band person who told me that egg-crate foam would sound-proof a room. I'd be eating steak every night. One particularly loud-mouthed guy was so sold on the benefits of egg-crate foam that he covered his drum set with the stuff in the hopes of making it quieter when he bashed around. Yeah, you can imagine how well that worked out. Dumb-ass. Similarly, I wish I had a dollar for every punk rock person who told me the old carpets nailed to their sheet rock walls made it nearly impossible for the neighbors to hear their band rehearsing. I'd be driving a Mercedes, Avy would be getting her hair and nails done twice a week and Xavier would be pooping in solid gold diapers.

I'm not sure if these people were totally out of touch with reality, played very quietly or simply had very understanding neighbors (probably all three), but one thing is for sure--none of these methods will make much of a difference in the audibility of loud sounds outside of a normal room. That's not how sound-proofing is done.

But why am I talking about soundproofing?

Well, I'm a musician. I play loud, ugly music for loud, ugly people, and I'd love to have a space in our new home for rehearsals. The problem, of course, is that we are moving to a very nice, sedate neighborhood where the neighbors will most likely take a dim view of 300-watt tube bass amps, 24" kick drums and loud-ass guitar-playing.

So we're going to have to see about doing some sound-proofing in the garage before we attempt to rehearse there. This is the garage. I don't have pictures of it from the inside, but I think you can probably imagine that it looks a lot like a garage in there--concrete floor, brick walls, shelves, etc. It's a garage. Duh.

You can also see it is attached to the rest of the house. It's right next to the living room and kitchen, and it sits directly below the office on the second floor.

Now, according to everything I have heard/read/researched from reliable sources, the only real ways to block sound from escaping from a room (sound-proof) are to add mass to the walls, decouple the rehearsal space from the rest of the house and make the room airtight. Sound is made of vibrations, and if the walls surrounding those vibrations are too massive to be vibrated by those sounds, they will not allow the sounds to be conducted beyond their surface, especially if those walls aren't directly attached to any part of the rest of the structure.

In a case like ours, adding a lot of mass to the walls and ceiling will be sort of difficult--after all, it's just a garage, and making the walls and ceiling overly massive will reduce the amount of usable space in the room to an impractically small size. Not to mention that this approach would cost a lot of money, which I ain't got.

However, there are some other options that will make the volume of sound escaping from the garage much more bearable for my neighbors and wife.

The thing I'll need to do is make a space in the garage often called a "room within a room." So, first off, I'll need to build five walls (including the ceiling) in the garage. This means creating a wooden (or metal) frame and then hanging sheet-rock on the frame.... and then adding a second layer of sheet rock to the first layer with a substance called Green Glue, which is supposed to help keep the walls from vibrating, thus eliminating the conduction of sound (the aforementioned loud rock n' roll) from within the room into the surrounding environment. This stuff is used as the filling in a sheet-rock sandwich, and, according to spec sheets, it converts the normal vibrations caused by loud sounds into heat (somehow) and allows it to disperse without being transmitted, effectively dampening the sounds greatly.

On my end of things, it looks like this... Green Glue costs $175 per case of 12 tubes, and each case apparently will cover about 192 square feet. I'm not sure about the dimensions of my garage, but that seems to be about the size of it. The cost of 192 square feet of drywall is about $105. The cost for the framing materials, screws, etc, etc, may amount to another $150 or so, give or take. And, from what I have been reading, I'll need to use special decoupling brackets for the bottom end of the framing. These supposedly will also assist in diminishing sound/vibration transmission through the walls and into the outside environment. Oh yeah, it's also apparently going to be really hot and stuffy in that little room... because I can't just join the central air/ventilation system from the main part of the house into the new space in the garage without doing some pretty serious sound treatment on the ventilation system--cutting a hole for the A/C vent would damage the sound-proofing effectiveness of the walls in much the same way that cutting a hole in the bottom of a boat would damage the seaworthiness of the vessel. Instead of water leaking in, sound would leak out. And I'd be just as sunk.

An additional sound-proofing option involves the use of sound absorption sheets. These are fairly reasonably priced, blanket-like things that can be draped all over a room, and, according to reliable sources, will reduce the perceived volume of some pretty loud sounds by a great deal. Not to get too technical, but if an average rock concert puts out approximately 130 decibels of sound (for comparison's sake, that's about as loud as a jackhammer, but quieter than a gunshot), my band's rehearsals probably clock in around 110 decibels. The subway is about 90 decibels. Average conversation clocks in around 60 decibels. Tests done with this stuff seem to indicate that proper use of these sheets can drop the volume of sounds measured at band rehearsal levels to something consistent with that of an average conversation.

It'll cost about $600 to treat my garage with this stuff. Not cheap when compared with the sheet-rock option, but it seems to be effective.

I guess my first move will involve buying a decibel meter. They're not expensive. I will need to measure my band's volume levels so see how much sound I'll need to block. I'm guessing it's around 110 decibels, but I won't know for sure until I have a way to measure.

I'm thinking we'll get the sound absorption sheets first and test them out, since it'll only require minimal skill to get them on the walls and ceiling, and they may be sufficient for our needs... but I'm not counting on that, since we're pretty loud. We'll test it out and see our results. We'll probably have to do both--double-sheet-rock with Green Glue with sound absorption sheets on top.

Sheesh. Sounds like a lot of work just to keep my obnoxiously loud band from disturbing the peace of my new suburbanite neighbors, but, well... such is the life of a responsible suburban filthy rocker.

The Basement and Such.

We've outlined the two upper floors of The Serpico House, but check this out...

The basement.

Holy paneling, right? Off to the right there... no, your eyes are not deceiving you... that is a mini-shuffleboard table. It's hand-made and covered with carpet on the sides. But don't get too excited--apparently the family plans to take it. I halfway hope they don't, but the other half of me wants it to go away so that we don't have to figure out what to do with a 15' mini-shuffleboard table. Having said this much, I did recently see a a DIY furniture/remodeling show where the home-owner made a really sweet butcher-block counter-top out of an old bowling lane. It involved some relatively minor carpentry, and they wound up with a counter-top that had a cool story. I believe the little lane numbers were still in the counter when they mounted it.

So we're thinking this will be an all-purpose recreation room space. Avy wants to take photos down there, and she also wants to use it for her belly-dancing crew practices. We're also thinking it'd be fun to have a TV with the video-gaming stuff, as well as a stereo.... and a couple of places to sit.

When we went to check out the house, the basement smelled a little musty, but it was dry (no evidence of mold or anything), and we think it'll be comfortable in there as long as we have a dehumidifier running in the wet weather. We'd like to use it for entertaining and stuff... heck... it even has a bar.
Yeah, I know. Funky, right? I don't even drink, but I think having a little bar in the basement/rec room is a pretty cool idea. All we need is a little fridge under there.

We're not crazy about the paneling, and we've kicked around some ideas for spiffing it up. We've seen DIY shows where the experts sand down wood wall paneling, use spackle to fill in the spaces between the panels and then prime and paint the walls. I'm kind of tempted to try this. I'm honestly not the biggest fan of this shiny paneling stuff, but I'm a little worried that I would totally screw up the sanding and spackling thing and end up with a real mess of a basement, which is probably worse than having a shiny paneled basement... maybe.

The basement is really pretty big, and the majority of it is finished, but there's also this...



I think, at some point, this was supposed to be a laundry room. It's a little, semi-finished room next to the big room, and it's got a pair of sinks in it. Thoughts for this room:

1. Avy could use it for soap-making. All she'd need is a hot-plate for heating up the various soap-making things. It's got two sinks, as I said, which is the other important element for soaping. The room can also be locked and used for storage of the more dangerous soaping chemicals (lye and other stuff), which is good, because we don't want Xavier to decide to eat lye. Not that he's that dumb, but he's my kid, so you never know.
   
2. We could make it into a laundry room. As I already mentioned, it seems this was the original intention for the space, so it wouldn't take much to make it into a dedicated laundry space. I kind of like this idea, mainly because it would clear out space in the kitchen and allow us to have more counter space/eat-in space.
   
3. We could make it into a little bathroom. It's certainly big enough to be a bathroom, and if we're using it as an entertaining space, it'd definitely be nice to have a bathroom available on the same floor. What would it really need in order to be a bathroom? A toilet. A normal sink. A more attractive floor/wall combination. It's certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.
   

So there's that room... but wait... there's more...


There's this funky space next to the finished part of the basement, and Avy has staked a claim on it. She wants to make it into a little work-out room with an eliptical machine. Yes, that is a new HVAC unit and water heater, and yes, you're seeing the old HVAC deal sitting right behind it--we're gonna have to enlist the help of some burly friends to get rid of that thing.

So the idea is to put up screens to cover the icky stuff (HVAC, water heater, etc) and put down a foam rubber gym floor thing for the eliptical. She wants the space to be a little work-out chamber where she can go to sweat it up for 1/2 hour and then close the door. Obviously, we will be able to move the screens to store stuff. I think this will be one of our easiest rooms to finish.

That's basically the whole house.... except for the garage, and we don't really have pictures of that right now. The garage, however, will be my domain. That conversion will be a whole story... as much as I detest the term "man cave" (sounds like a gay porn title!), that's what it will be, I guess. I don't care about having a garage for my car, and my car wouldn't fit in there, anyway. I'd much rather have a place to play music and keep my gear, so I plan on gutting the garage and making it into Wizard Eye headquarters. That's going to involve soundproofing and other craziness, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm sure my neighbors will be SO excited to hear bass feedback, screaming and theremin freak-outs... I mean, isn't that why people move to the suburbs?

Uppa Da Stairs.

I promised I'd show the upstairs of The Serpico House today, and I am as good as my word.

Let's have a look...
That'd be my dad pointing at the fold-up steps to the attic. This room will be Xavier's chill spot. Icky green carpet. Meh. It's gonna go. It's a nice room otherwise, though. Once the carpet is out, I think a coat of paint will do the trick on this one.

The attic is actually a good size (I walked up the steps and checked it out.) Apparently some of the other home-owners in the area have finished theirs and added a real staircase, which creates a very usable third-floor room. I do like this idea, but that can happen at some point down the road. As of right now, I think it's just going to be a hatch-thingy in the ceiling of Xavier's room. We'll have to figure something out with it before he becomes a teenager, though. Otherwise, you can bet it will become a den of illicit things very quickly.


Across the hall from Xavier's room is the office.


It's nice-sized room, for sure, and we're thinking this will be the place where we keep Avy's sewing stuff, the computer doo-dads and some of my guitar/music things. We also want to put a bed/futon in there for possible guests. Once again, the nasty carpet must go. A little paint n' spackle, and I think it'll be groovy. The window off to the right is a door leading to sort of deck thing. It's kind of odd--it leads to this hunk of flat roof above the kitchen. There's no decking on the roof, and there are no railings around it, either, so I don't know why the door is there, but all of the houses in the area have these things.

Possible uses for this extra space:

1. A deck. Duh. We could put some decking and a railing up there, and we'd have a nice little spot to watch the birds in the morning. Not a horrible idea.
   
2. Make the office into a master suite by building the deck area into a big-ass, baller bathroom. One of the back walls butts up to the back wall of the present second-floor bathroom, so this is a good possibility.
   
3. Nothing. Just keep it clean of leaves and make sure it's all painted up with roof paint and leave it alone.

We're going with the third option for now.

OK, so... on to our bedroom...Here we have the big bedroom. We plan to use this one. It's really a good size. The pink carpet is... um... not staying, and I am not sure why there's a chair rail all the way around the room, but... hey, it's a big bedroom with a two big closets. Xavier really liked the closets. A little paint, and I think we'll be good to go. I kind of hope they leave the bed. I think we could sell that sucker on Craigslist for a pretty penny. That's paint money, kids.

And now, another horror show. The bathroom.

Yep. Pink and grey. And carpeted. I guess it's not horrible, but Xavier doesn't look too excited about it. We want to do a total gut on this, but that might not be feasible any time soon, so I think we'll start with paint and getting rid of the damn carpet.

There's also a pretty horrid, cracked chandelier in the upstairs hallway--it makes the hallway glow red like it's a whorehouse in Amsterdam. That'll have to go, too. There's also a mystery light switch in the hallway with tape on it and a little note to "leave this on." Being the jerk I am, I turned it off to see what happened. Turns out it opens a portal to Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says hi. Actually, nothing happened as far as I could tell. That kind of thing can't stand in my home. Switches should have some kind of function or be banished to the great rift.

I see some wiring work in my future with this thing.


I'll show you the finished basement on Monday.

The Goods.

So, you've got the back story, but let's face it... what you really want to see is the actual place, right?

Well, OK. Let's have a look. This is "The Serpico House" as you arrive at the driveway.




Pretty respectable and grown-up, right? Avy's pretty grown-up. Xavier's kind of respectable. I am neither of these things. Oh well, every neighborhood has one house that lowers the property values for everyone. I can't wait to litter that yard with car parts and an old refrigerator!

Kidding. I'm kidding. I will mow the lawn and trim the hedges like a good neighbor. Nobody will have any idea about the many depraved, low-class things happening behind closed doors at The Serpico House. Muahhahhahah... or something.

Let's walk in...




Yes, I see it. The corners of the steps need fixing. I'll get on it. I've already looked into the proper methods for repairing broken concrete steps, and I promise to get started as soon as possible. We haven't even signed the papers yet, OK? Sheesh.

Let's skip the front door (it's a door, ok?) and check out the living room.



As you can see, we used a wide-angle lens to capture as much of the room as possible, but I think you get the general idea here. The furniture may or may not be left behind when we take possession of the place. If it hangs around, we'll pick and choose, and then... hello, Craigslist. We are not too proud to make a few bucks online. Nope.

The carpets are as dismal and generally foul as they look, but we have reason to believe a nice hardwood lies beneath these gross, smelly things. And, yes, that's a real fireplace.... a gas fireplace with a remote control. Yep. I think that's gonna be pretty sweet once winter comes around, which, by the looks of things, is probably tomorrow. What happened to fall?


This is a view of the living room from a different angle. The fireplace would be behind you and to your left if you took this picture.. but you didn't take this picture, so stop taking credit for it. Oh yeah, those people in the picture? That'd be my dad (Bob) on the right and my mom (Shelly) on the left. That's the realtor in the middle, holding the toy truck. Just kidding. It's Xavier, the Smallest of Bears, leading the tour. He walked in there like he owned the joint from the very beginning. I think he knew something we didn't.

Right off the bat, I can tell you we are gonna try to sell that fugly mirror on the wall there. I'm pretty sure the owners aren't taking it. I will hope against hope that they will, but I doubt we will be so lucky.

Next, the dining room.



Pretty standard fare. More stinky carpet. I am, once again, hoping the furniture will be leaving, but, if it stays, I think Avy wants to keep the hutch thingy. Personally, I don't like those things, but she likes it, so... happy wife, happy life, right? I really hate the chandelier. I want that gone immediately... I'm thinking recessed lighting, or, if we can't do that, at least something that will sit closer to the ceiling. Call me odd if you want, but I don't like the idea of some big dangly wood and metal thing hanging from a chain over my head while I am eating. Oh yeah, you can't see it, but there's a bay window to the right. Pretty sweet.

Here comes a horror show. The kitchen.

Why, yes, that is, indeed, carpet. In the kitchen. What the hell? And... um.. yeah. A drop ceiling. And shiny wood paneling. And coral-colored counter tops. Don't ask me why the Serpicos wanted their kitchen to look like an office building crossed with a log cabin crossed with.. um.. something coral-colored, but it probably has something to do with sticking it to the man. Anyway... this is what we've got, so we're gonna see if we can make it work somehow. Avy says she will learn to tile. I say... YAY. Because I don't think I would be any good at tiling at all. And, yeah... you are seeing the washer and dryer at the end, there. On the plus side, everything in this room is absolutely immaculate, and we've been told that everything works perfectly. The Serpicos apparently took very good care of their things. I believe it. Aside from the rug being nasty, the place is immaculate.

There's a little half bath next to the kitchen...




Nothing earth-shattering... but there's frickin' carpet in there, too. Ugh. And I think we want to see about getting some different lighting, a different, non-medicine chest mirror and possibly a smaller sink. And ditching the carpet. So yeah, you know... not a lot of stuff to change here, right? Ugh.

But this is nice...



One thing Mrs. Serpico did correctly was build a nice patio and take care of her yard. She obviously loved the outdoors, and you really get the idea that she spent a lot of time out on this lovely little patio. The back yard is pretty large, and Xavier already loves it. He's only visited it twice, but he's checked out every corner already.

OK, we'll go upstairs tomorrow.

The Back Story

This was once my personal life blog, but I've decided such things are a bit too emo for my tastes, so now it'll be all about this whole new house project in our lives.

So, first off, the whole thing with the house...

We've been wanting to move out of our area (Holmesburg, NE Philly) for a while. While it's not a terrible place to live, it's not ideal. Crime has been on the upswing lately, and that is obviously a concern. Safety is a big deal. Hearing gunshots at night and reading about mid-day home invasions a block away certainly are factors in our decision to find a new place.

Additionally, our small condo has practically no storage, and Xavier's toy/puzzle/general stuff level has been increasing by leaps and bounds, which has made our living areas shrink. I don't begrudge the kid his toys, but... wow. Our living room looks like a toy store sometimes, and it's really easy to clutter up such a small space. So we definitely need more room for everything.

And then there's school. The schools in our direct area have gotten generally not-so-wonderful reviews, and, if the kids running around our neighborhood are examples of the kind of education available in Holmesburg, well... yeah. The less said, the better. Xavier is only two (or, as he puts it, "Teeeewwwww!"), and, while we don't have to worry about real school for a bit, we just want to be sure we can guarantee he'll have a nice student/teacher ratio, high-quality curriculum, safe environment and all that good stuff. And, as much as I don't want to put down Philly teachers or schools (because I know they bust their asses for very little pay!), I have serious doubts about the Philadelphia school districts and their ability to provide these things.

And private schools? Too damn expensive. Too far away. Just... no.

So, as luck would have it, my parents (who are pretty damn great people, by the way), saw a house up for auction in the suburbs. Without giving too much specific information away, the house is not far from the area where I grew up, but the kicker is... this house is outside of the city. Good stuff. Avy and I did some research, and we discovered this colonial house was built in 1950, and it's only had a single owner--a family with the rather interesting and unique surname of "Serpico."

If I have to tell you why that is kind of amusing, you are probably not an Al Pacino fan, but that's the source of the name for this blog. Anyway, Mrs. Serpico passed away, and her family decided to auction off the house.

One thing led to another, and we went to the auction. Oddly enough, we actually lost during the bidding process, but, through a series of strange events, the high bidder wound up walking away from the deal, so, as the next highest bidders, we won the house. The official paperwork and handing over of the deed goes down at the end of November. We're on pins and needles until then.