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I’d love to show you all huge progress pictures. We started doing demo on January 30th and by now I was expecting to be sharing pictures of things that were being put back together. But Mother Nature had something different in store for us. Sigh! We got nine inches of snow on Feb 3rd. That put a halt to EVERYTHING for a few days. (If you are not from the Seattle area you should know there are hills everywhere and not nearly enough snow plows because we don’t get snow here very often…nevermind this volume!).
Once we got the roads cleared a bit I thought we would be able to get back at it but we hit another snafu. There are only a few places my contractor can dump construction debris. They were all closed for a week due to the snow. So the demo guys were at a stand still. Sigh. The silver lining was that a dumpster was being delivered on Feb 8th so the guys could finally empty the house. Unfortunately the dumpster was too big to fit in the driveway and the dumpster company left it on the street in an illegal spot. We had to have them come right back to pick it up because ANOTHER snow storm was to hit that afternoon and the snow plows would not be able to get by. Thank goodness they were able to come back because we got 6 more inches of snow on Friday night and another 2-3 inches on Sunday night. Come on Mother Nature! (And we aren’t done. There are more snow and ice threats all week.)
At this point we are really popular with the neighbors. We’ve got toilets sitting on the front porch, a trailer filled with trash in the driveway and a whole lot more that needs to come out! Because of that Kate and Ellie and I put together some treat bags for the neighbors to apologize. But Mr. Fun, the resident extrovert, was out of town so we quietly dropped them off on all the front porches. Hopefully they were well received!
So where are we? Here are some progress pictures. The demo is almost done and they are just waiting to get all the debris out of the house.
We do have a new roof. That is great considering how much snow is sitting on it and, we presume, it WILL eventually melt! The mold remediation team will be coming in when they can get up into our neighborhoods. We knew there was some mold in the attic because of the roof leak so that is not a surprise. We also knew that there was a leaky window in the basement that we were going to take out and that there could be some mold there. Weirdly there was a HUGE rumor that went around the block that there was $200,000 work of damage to the house and that is why it took so long to sell. WHAT?!?!? I’m highly allergic to mold so I DEFINITELY would not have purchased a house that was rumored to have such issues. I even hired a mold inspector to look at the house before we made an offer. As far as we can see there was almost nothing in the basement (where the biggest damage was rumored to be) and we already knew about the attic. At this point it may cost $10-15 thousand to remediate it and that was already accounted for in our budget. The only good thing abut the rumor is that it means the house was still available for us to buy it five months later!
Fingers crossed that this snow goes away and stays away. I have never prayed for rain in February but these are unprecedented times!