A partial list

I've mentioned a couple of times how everything in our new house was broken when we moved in. I'm not sure, however, that I've really managed to convey exactly what I mean by everything.

I mean, literally, everything.

EVERYTHING.

And to show you that I really do mean everything, I offer herein a partial list of all the things that WERE broken, and we've already fixed. Notice that I don't include the things we haven't got around to fixing or just throwing out yet (okay, I might bring up a few); this is only stuff that we discovered was broken and that we've actually managed to do something about. Oh, and keep in mind that I'm probably forgetting a few things, too...

(Oh, and I know I said I'd write about those mysterious vents on the roof, but I neglected to take any pictures when I was in the attic dealing with those vents, so I'll postpone that little tale for now. Have no fear, though: I have to go back up into the attic to fix something and I'll try to remember to take photos this time.)


The Roof
Well, obviously. It was by far the single greatest expense we've ever signed away, but that whole project has been pretty well covered already.


The Kitchen Tap
Beyond being a terrible design choice for the sink (we had pots that wouldn't fit under it when put into the sink, and would have to be filled sideways, and even though it had a little directional nozzle on the end, the tap was still so low that you couldn't even aim the water up the sides of the basin at all), the tap would also shoot water all over the back of the counter whenever you pushed on the faucet - like, for instance, to move it from one side of the sink to the other. We replaced all the gaskets inside the faucet the day after we moved in, and have since replaced it entirely with a much nicer tap, but that does bring us to the next point on our tour...


The Water Filter
While replacing the broken kitchen tap, I removed a rather large, blue, beat-up water filter from beneath the kitchen sink. The lines to and from the cold water supply were cracked and pretty much just in the way, so I took the whole thing out. For curiosity's sake, I opened the thing up, and confirmed that the filter probably hadn't been replaced in YEARS - the whole inside of the container was coated in scale, and the filter itself was completely brown.

Of course, the corollary to this story is that there is still some scale or something in the lines, and the fancy new kitchen faucet we bought keeps getting clogged up and slowing to a trickle. Which means I have to reinstall the water filter - a process that has already required three separate trips to Home Depot or Rona, and I still haven't found the right parts yet. I COULD get it working, but not without an extra three or four feet of water line for the water to sit and stagnate in, or a hideous kludge of pieces stuck hopefully together on one end of the line.


The Front Door
I've probably mentioned that the front door is the only non-glass door in the house that had been painted (and not just left as builder's primer), but I don't know that I've mentioned that it was broken in other ways. The latch on the handle wouldn't catch properly, meaning that if we wanted the door to stay closed, we would have to lock the deadbolt each and every time. I fiddled with the latch and the strike plate a few times and managed to get it to work with varying degrees of success for short intervals, but changes in temperature or just using it all the time would quickly make it stop latching again.

This grew wearying rather quickly, as we'd have to take our keys with us every time we went outside, even if it was just to coil up the hose or bring the recycling bins in, or else the cats would start sidling towards the open door like it was some kind of feline gravity well of danger and irresistible curiosity.

Well, given that we wanted to paint it anyway, and the weather stripping around it was cracked and ... well, broken, we finally figured out a weekend where we weren't planning on going out anywhere and took the door off its hinges so we could sand and paint it.

Fortunately, the front door came equipped with one of those fancy screens that rolls up beside the door when not in use - kind of like a sideways roll-up blind. Unfortunately, of course, it was broken (the screen was ripped along the top and bottom edges), but we figured it would at least keep the cats in while we worked on the door.

Given the excellent weather, I set up a painting station outside in the driveway, and proceeded to dismantle the door hardware. I got the old handleset and deadbolt off just fine, but when I went to remove the sweep on the bottom, I found a new and exciting reason to curse Frank's name:



I have no idea what he cut that with. It's like he had a spastic grizzly bear hold the door steady while he took a running start at it with a circular saw. The stupid bear must have kept flinching or something, because I don't think I've seen a more ragged cut in my life. I cleaned it up as best I could, and the new sweep at the bottom managed to hide it okay (barely), but I still know it's there, and it haunts me.

The door does look good now, though:



Well, okay, we still haven't painted the outside, but the new handle set is awesome, the new weather stripping has stopped the drafts, and the door at least closes properly now, without needing the deadbolt.


The Upstairs Toilet
Oh yes. Don't think I've forgotten about you, you evil piece of shit. This isn't over between us.


The Upstairs Bathtub
The drain plug in the upstairs bathtub didn't work. No matter how we jiggled, pulled, twisted, or swore at it, the drain would not seal properly. I wound up just removing the mechanism and buying a rubber plug.


The Master Bath Toilet
It's certainly not to the degree of difficulty of the other toilet, but I've already made a couple of minor fixes and repairs to the toilet in the Saddam Hussein bathroom.


The Master Bath Bathtub
Can't remember if I've mentioned this, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the tub - below where the waterline would be if one was to actually attempt to take a bath in the ridiculously shallow tub. The War Department has attempted to patch it, but the goop didn't seem to dry very well and we're not sure if it's going to hold. We'll probably just wind up not using it until we get around to renovating that whole bathroom.


The Downstairs Toilet
One of the things the home inspector pointed out to us was the fact that the downstairs toilet was leaking around the wax ring, and underneath the linoleum. We've ... well, sort of fixed it. If you count ripping everything out of the room so we can redo the entire thing.



We'll get to that eventually. Hopefully. Maybe?


The Wood-burning Stove
Actually, it's not that the stove was broken, per se, it's just that it wasn't anywhere near up to code, had never been used for anything except burning paper, and didn't sit quite level in the fireplace. So.. not really broken, I suppose, but given that it still required fixing, I think it deserves inclusion on this list. Especially given that it cost us an arm and a leg to get it working.


The Washing Machine
The first time the War Department went to put laundry in the dryer, I had to vacuum it out first because it was all full of various bits of debris. We got the clothes into the dryer and started a new load in the washing machine... which promptly started SMOKING.

We said screw it, and just bought a new set:




These Things



Frank had an entire garden full of Noma Moon Rays (or cheap knock-offs) and not one of them worked properly. A few of them would occasionally give off sort of a feeble, sickly glow, making the garden look like it was infested with radioactive fungus but most of them were full of water, broken, or both. Oh, and the wheelbarrow they're sitting in? That was broken, too.


The Garden Shed
One of the doors to the cheap-ass tin garden shed came off in my hand the second time I opened it. It took close to three hours to dismantle the doors, clean out all the debris from the tracks, replace the plastic bits that keep the doors in their tracks, and reinstall the doors.


The Window Screens
Actually, most of the screens were in pretty good shape - they just needed to be taken out and washed off - but all of the little plastic clips that keep the screens in place? Replaced. Every single one. Granted, pretty much every window was missing at least one clip, or had some form of garbage wedged into the window as a stand in, but each screen still had to get four brand new ones.


The Door Handles
Oh, man, I could write an entire post just on the damn handles for the sliding glass doors off the sunroom. Let me sum it up this way: there are three sets of doors, three different types of handle (with three different sizes and spacings of holes), and despite several trips to Home Despot, we STILL need a screwdriver to lock and unlock one of them. Oh, and when we moved in, the handle of the one between the sunroom and the living room was broken right in half - and fixed with several yards of duct tape.


The Sunroom Trim and Shade
Speaking of the sunroom, there was a sort of shade canopy thing rolled up in a corner of the sunroom when we moved in. When it started getting hot during the day, we noticed that the sunroom got pretty damn warm, and so we pulled out the shade thing to try and mitigate some of the heat. Well, the canopy was, of course, in tatters and evidence of former repairs was pretty plain, given the bits of duct tape stuck to various random bits. We also noticed that the trim to which the canopy was supposed to attach was loose and in dire peril of falling on anyone bold enough to actually try sitting in there.

So thanks to my mom and her trusty sewing machine, we got a new shade made up, and I devised a system of brackets that wouldn't put any additional weight on the trim (which we reattached using screws instead of just glue and the odd finishing nail). It's still pretty damn warm in there during the day, but with the doors on each side open for a cross-breeze, it's very comfortable. And, if I may say so, very stylish indeed:




The Outdoor Faucets
When we moved in, the faucet out front was wrapped in wet burlap (the faucet was leaking), the one in the back had been shut off completely (the faucet was leaking), and this thing on the side of the house...



...was leaking.

They're all fixed now, and yes, we kept the quail faucet. We weren't going to, but then we noticed that a) the faucet is actually well-made, solid brass, and in good shape, and b) we have a family of quails in the neighbourhood. They're really very cute.


Everything Else
Here's a sub-partial list of broken stuff that we're mostly still working on:

• Baseboard heaters: they will all need to be replaced eventually - we've already done about half of them.


• Light switches and wall sockets: again, we've already replaced half of them, but apart from a couple of overloaded circuits, the electrical in the house isn't TOO bad. The outside stuff, of course, is a different story.


• Range hood fan: not broken so much as just blocked with an enormous old chunk of wasp nest.


• Hand rail on the stairs: I "fixed" it by wrapping part of it in painters tape. Ta-da! No more goddamn splinters. Looks like hell, of course, but it'll have to do for now.


• Window seals: the seals on the windows of the sunroom roof and the two windows in the dining room are toast, leading to condensation inside the glass. Nothing we can do but replace them, but we have to recover from the sticker shock of the roof first.


• The faucet in the upstairs bath: not content with having the toilet borked, the shower head needing to be replaced (twice), and the plug not work in the tub, the taps on the sink faucet are also broken. There's a small cap on each of the taps that covers a little hollow. Inside the hollow is the screw that holds the tap handle and cartridge together. Both of the caps are broken and won't stay on the handle, meaning that water can get down to the screw head and rust it out. Great.


• The side gate: the fence was built way too close the tree, and the roots have heaved up one of the panels, making the entire section useless - and pushing the end post closer to the house so the gate no longer closes properly. Yay for deer eating all the plants! Not!


• The garage door opener: seriously - the damn thing is dialed all the way back, and it STILL manages to slam the garage door closed.

Well, that's certainly not an exhaustive list, but I think you get the picture. Next time, I'll either finish the ongoing saga of the bedroom floor, or finally get around to explaining the mysterious vents.

Or, you know, I might just have a whole post dedicated to This Week in Mayonnaise. Who knows?

A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.

What about happiness?

When you move into an older home, and as you explore the new house and get to know its quirks and foibles, I think you can't help but start to get a sense of the people who lived there before you.

Were they packrats? Did they tend to use some rooms more than others? Did they have a tendency to delay necessary maintenance? Did the neighbours like them? What sorts of things were important to them? What was their colour and design sense like? Were they consistent in their choices?

It's amazing how these and other questions (even the ones you didn't necessarily want to ask) can be answered by the little traces they leave behind.

As you start to construct the personalities of the previous owners, I think this process becomes significantly easier - despite how hard you may try NOT to learn any more than you have to - if the person who lived in your house before you was the kind of a person to leave a LOT of clues...

In our case, the previous owner left a whole slew of things (even besides the statues) that really make us wonder just what was going through his head. For one thing, the guy was obsessed - OBSESSED - with temperature. There were no fewer than six different thermometers mounted either on the outside of the house, hanging on the walls inside, or, in at least one particular case, hanging on the wall inside with a wire lead drilled through the wall to a sensor on the outside so it could display both temperatures at once. In addition to the many thermometers, almost all of the thermostats are marked up with liquid paper, pencil lines, or even Sharpie annotations.



The amount of time he must have spent fiddling with the thermostats and heaters and comparing them to all of his thermometers and whatnot is remarkable. It's especially noteworthy when you realize that despite all of the analyzing and double-checking, he never actually replaced any of the heaters or thermostats. He seemed to be content to just make his little marks with the liquid paper and pencils and trust in his dollar-store thermometers to let him know whether it was warm enough or not.

I think another facet of the temperature obsession was something of a fixation on energy. With the exception of the three bulbs in the ghastly lamp in the hall (two of which were burnt out when we moved in), every single light in and out of the house had a compact florescent bulb in it - including all TWELVE sockets in the gruesome bathroom fixtures. The ones in the garage are particularly irksome because a) they take a couple seconds to turn on when you flick the switch, and even then they take a couple more minutes to warm up to maximum brightness; and b) we need a ladder to change them out, but there's so much crap in the garage that there's nowhere to put the ladder so we're stuck with them.

Every time we go to Home Despot, we drop off a couple of the CF bulbs in their recycling bin and buy a few more incandescent bulbs - the CFs just don't give off any light!

Frank (I figure I might as well just use his name at this point) also seemed to dislike most colors. That, or he had a violent aversion to painting anything. When we moved in, there wasn't a wall in the house that wasn't white. Well, except for the enormous mural of the mountain valley on the back wall of the garage, but that's different, and the subject of another whole post, I'm sure. Everything that was painted was painted white. The untextured ceilings were white, the walls were white, the trim was white, the doors were...

Actually, the doors aren't white. Not exactly. They're all sort of this yellowy-off-white color that's singularly unattractive. It's like teeth-that-haven't-been-brushed-in-a-week non-white. A painful non-color. As a matter of fact, they all look like they've only ever been primed with builder's primer and have never actually been painted. Which, we realized when we started taking down the closet doors so we could start on the floor, is exactly the case. Every door in the house, with the exception of the front door was installed straight from the factory and never painted.



That picture really shows the difference between the nice white trim paint and whatever botched attempt at an actual color (sun-bleached-buzzard-skeleton-yellow?) builder's primer is supposed to be.

Now it should be mentioned that Frank is by no means solely responsible for all of this - or even any of it for all we can say for certain. After all, he wasn't the original owner of the house - he may not have even been the second for all we know. Then again, we know enough from talking to the neighbours that Frank had lived in the house for at least fifteen years, so we're fairly sure we can lay at least some of the blame on his shoulders.

We also know from talking to the neighbours that Frank had a bit of bad habit in terms of letting people take advantage of him. For instance, he once paid a guy to pressure-wash the driveway and, when the guy offered, to power-wash some of the moss off the roof. One of the neighbours had to run across the street and tell the workman to stop power-washing UP against the grain of the roof and taking the shingles off along with the moss. Frank had no idea.

So it may not have been Frank necessarily - it might have been a friend, or a hired handyman, or somebody else - that spread mayonnaise all over the walls in an attempt to patch the holes left by picture hooks or whatever.





Okay, so it might not be mayonnaise, but I'll be damned if I can say for sure what it REALLY is. I thought at first it was just unsanded drywall patching compound or PolyFilla, but it's not that. Someone else suggested it might be toothpaste, as they had heard somewhere that it was supposed to work for that kind of thing, but the stuff on our walls doesn't have a minty flavor. Then someone else pointed out that it looked a lot like shiny, dried-up mayonnaise and for want of a better suggestion, that's what I'm calling it. It even shares pride-of-place with the world's most forlorn valance on the wall above the bed in the master bedroom:



It's freaking EVERYWHERE in the house. Every wall, every room, every conceivable place you could find a hole, there is one - stuffed with mayonnaise. Hell, Frank (or somebody else) even used it to seal the wire for the doorbell to the inside of the door jamb where it comes in from outside.



Apparently, mayonnaise paints up pretty nice, too, as you can see from the outside portion of that same wire.



And while we're outside, it's not really clear what we should make of this sign hanging right by the front door:



I'm not going to tell you what Frank's last name is, but I will say that it is NOT Molldara. Which maybe tells us more about Frank than his real last name would... although perhaps not as much as the stuff he left in the drawer in the master bathroom:



No, we didn't inventory that. We dumped it out into a garbage bag and scrubbed the drawer out with bleach. Twice.

This house has two fireplaces: one with a wood stove insert in the family room and the other a normal, wood burning fireplace in the living room. Straightforward enough, except.... well, the wood stove in the family room cost us almost $2000 to have it brought up to code. The guys doing the work said it looked like the only thing ever burned in it was paper. And the one in the living room, well, it sort of had an insert of its own. Behind an over-sized, brass-plated fireplace screen with glass doors was this thing:



Huh, we thought. An electric fireplace. Then we flipped it over:



I... I'm at a loss for words. Really. You just have to look at it and figure it out for yourself. The truly odd thing? Aside from hosting that electric thingy (which is now resting comfortably at the bottom of the Hartland landfill) the fireplace had never been used. For anything.

When we moved in, Frank had helpfully left four remotes for the garage door sitting on the kitchen counter. The weird thing was that each remote had three buttons on it. Obviously, the biggest of the buttons was for the garage door, but we had no idea what the other three buttons were for, or if they even worked. One of the remotes had something written on the buttons (in Sharpie, of course), but aside from "gaRagE", I couldn't really decipher what they said. One looked like "ouslde lanB", and the other was simply labeled "Fp". After thinking about it some more, and wandering around the house clicking the buttons at random, I figured it out.

"Fp" stood for fireplace. The cord from that hideous contraption up there came out from the side of the screen and was plugged into a weird device that was, in turn, plugged into a wall socket. Sure enough, the button on the remote triggered the device, and I could turn the "fireplace" on and off from pretty much anywhere - even out in the driveway.

"ouslde lanB" was a little harder. It wasn't until I noticed this ungodly scar on the wall below the front window that I realized what it was for:



Yes, that is a piece of linoleum and a metric shit ton of mayonnaise used to patch the drywall, but whatever; the important thing is that "ouslde lanB" stood for outside lamp. The third button on the remote turned the carriage lamp at the side of the driveway on and off. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the wiring for the lamp was run through a piece of irrigation tubing buried in the front yard. No, that's not up to code, or even remotely safe, and yes, there are at least two other places where he's done the same thing for electrical service for the pumps in the fountains. (Our home inspector noticed the switches and whatnot, but Frank assured him that all the wiring had been done by a professional electrician. Shyeah, right.) I'm not even going to go into how wobbly and just plain bad the carriage lamp is (which is too bad, because it's arguably the nicest light fixture on the whole property), but suffice to say we'll be either pulling it out or redoing it.

Speaking of light fixtures, I believe I mentioned in my first post that the ghastly thing in the hall was the second-ugliest light fixture in the house. While there's absolutely no question about which fixture is the ugliest, there's some debate about the third-ugliest. So how about we put it to a vote?

The War Department gives the bronze medal for ugliest to this pair of flying saucer-inspired pieces of shit in the family room:



The only light those bastards give off is straight down; they seem to be utterly incapable of illuminating a closet, let alone a family room.

That's a solid contender, I must admit, but I still say the bronze should go to this abomination from the design-hell that was the mid-eighties:



That thing wouldn't even look good with incandescent bulbs in it; with the CFs, it's enough to make you shut your eyes and wish it would just go away. It never does, though. Oh no, it's always still there.

Judges?

Oh, and while we're talking fixtures, let's discuss plumbing fixtures for a second. I've alluded to this several times, but it really does need to be seen to be believed. Without further ado, I present to you a master bath, inspired by Saddam Hussein himself:







Those accessories had to be put in purposefully and deliberately, by the way: the tiles by the window had to be replaced, and a hole cut into the ceiling of the family room underneath just to install the taps and drain for the tub. (And yes, that's the same master bath that had the carpeted floor.)

So what have we really learned about dear old Frank? I can't say; I'm too busy worrying about what the new owners of OUR old house have figured out about US.

Anyway, I could go on and on here, but this post is already in the running for most excessive ever, so I'll just close with one last thing. I'm not going to offer any comment on this; I'm presenting it merely as it is, a disturbingly existential pondering encapsulated on a clear plastic label, affixed firmly to a drawer in the kitchen:

So... where to begin?

I've been pondering this for a while now, and don't really know where to start. We've been in the new house for about five weeks or so and we've already done so much that it's hard to know where to begin.

Fortunately, I am a creative soul and I've come up with an idea. What follows is two separate perspectives: the first is the description of the house as provided by the seller's real estate agent in his listing/advertisement; the second is the description of the house if WE were the ones writing the listing... and maybe not actually trying very hard to sell it.

Don't worry - I'll include some pictures for those of you with shorter attention spans (*cough* Dad *cough*).


The text from the agent's listing:

This lovely 3 bedroom 3 bathroom 2360 Sq Ft Tudor style home is set on a .23 acre lot with several fountains, a pond, flowering borders, a rock garden and a greenhouse. Inside is a large living room with fireplace, a separate dining room, a large open plan kitchen with a sunny breakfast room and an adjoining large family room with its own fireplace and a sunroom leading out to the garden. Upstairs is a spacious master bedroom suite with lots of closets and a full ensuite bathroom with a deep soaker tub, perfect for relaxing. Two more sunny bedrooms and another full bathroom complete the picture. Located on a VERY quiet street close to walking trails and parks.

Sounds pretty nice, eh?

Now, here's what the listing would have said if the agent had been COMPLETELY honest:

This lovely 3 bedroom 2-and-a-half bathroom 2360 Sq Ft Tudor style home is set on a .23 acre lot with several thirteen assorted statues and fountains, a brackish pond, flowering borders, an unkempt rock garden and a somewhat ramshackle greenhouse. Inside is a large living room with a never-used fireplace, a separate dining room, a non-functional half-bath, a large open plan, terribly out-dated kitchen with a sunny breakfast room and an adjoining large family room with its own stained carpet, fireplace and a leaky sunroom with terrifically smelly carpet leading out to the garden through two doors with broken handles. Upstairs is a spacious master bedroom suite with lots of closets, dust-enriched drapes and a fully carpeted ensuite bathroom with a deep soaker tub equipped with a ridiculously low overflow drain, perfect for relaxing splashing around shallowly, and highlighted with fixtures chosen by Saddam Hussein himself. Two more sunny bedrooms and another full bathroom with leaky toilet complete the picture. Located on a VERY quiet street close to walking trails and parks.

Needless to say, I do have photographic evidence of all of this, but for now, let's stick with the statuary. Here is a sample (by no means an exhaustive collection) of the statues and fountains we seem to have inherited...

This is the only statue visible in the front of the house and really the only one that I kind of like.



I want to put him in a nice spot in the backyard and then surround him with a small tableau of grinning gargoyle statues, arranged as though about to eat him. I think that'd be cool.

This fine fountain features a trio of dolphins, each equipped with a water nozzle in its beak. (War Department added for scale.)



I cannot even begin to imagine how we're going to be able to get that thing out of there. It must weigh four hundred pounds - and no, I'm NOT talking about the War Department.

This fine specimen isn't really all that offensive... which, I suppose, is why the previous owner felt he needed TWO OF them:



This virgin Mary and her reflecting pool sit right outside the kitchen window:



Well, a friend took the Madonna away, so it's actually just a grotty old concrete pond now. I'll be smashing that up in the spring.

This is probably the largest statue in the yard, and despite appearances, is not a fountain. It's just huge. And ugly. And huge.



Did I mention it was huge?

This one... well, this one offends me on some deeply primal level:



I dunno. I mean, I look at that, and I just want to reach for a sledgehammer. I've told Amy that when the time comes - and the time will come - to remove that thing, the only way it's leaving the yard is in pieces. I simply can't allow it to continue to exist. Seriously. I can't wait to wind up and take a swing right at its curly little, water-squirting head. POW! Right in the kisser! And that goes for that crazy fish horse of yours, too! Ha ha ha ha!



Ahem. Sorry. Let's move on...

And finally, given that you're probably as tired of looking at inanimate blocks of concrete as I am of uploading pictures of them, I'll spare you the mermaid, cupid, and frog statues (no, I'm not kidding) and leave you with this "lovely" angel statue, perched at the top of the very back of the yard and, as this picture suggests, visible from the master bedroom window:



The deer? Heh, those are real. Man, I love this neighbourhood...

Here we go again...

Welcome to Broadmead!

I've got a couple of longer posts in the making, but for now, welcome to the new blog. I plan to update this much more frequently than the old one. Which means, of course, that my next post will be in ... six months.

But seriously, we've already tucked right in to the renos, so there's lots to show you. I've posted a teaser after the jump.


This is the light fixture in the stairwell/hallway of our new house (click to appreciate its true grandeur):



That fixture is notable for two reasons:

• One, those are HAND-MADE porcelain roses. Somebody paid a lot of money for it.


• Two, it is only the SECOND ugliest light fixture in the house.

Welcome aboard. It's going to be a hell of a ride.