Day 10 – Monday

Today I buy a better screwdriver. I spend my lunch break at Lowe’s, which is becoming quite the norm. I wander around there. I look for the things on the “discount rack”.

Day 9 – Sunday Evening

I get restless eventually and head over to the house. I try to take the hinges off the cupboards. But I think I need a better screwdriver, cause it’s not working out very well. I look at my hands. They are blistered from sanding. They hurt. I go back to my nice clean apartment and play with my cat.

Day 9 – Sunday Afternoon

Was I supposed to do something today? Oh, yeah. I was going to go back to my new house and work on the cupboards. But it’s like 2 in the afternoon, and my arms and back are sore, and I don’t think I can do anything today. Plus I think I drank too much last night. What the hell? Sundays are supposed to be for rest.

Day 8 – Saturday Evening

I have finished! After about 10 hours of sanding and staining about 845 sq. ft. of hardwood floor, (yes, I can calculate square feet now!) I am pooped. My arms hurt and I have a nasty blister on the palm of my right hand just beneath my pinky finger. Ow. It hurts. But whatever, I got the job done, hit my goal and I did all of this in between doing my laundry at the Regent Square laundry mat (this is the most fabulous laundry mat I’ve ever used) and grabbing a bite at the Square Café. Yeah, now I can go home, shower, and head to the Brillobox to see The Great Ants, a band recommended by the bass player in my band. He says they have a fantastic female drummer.

Day 8 – Saturday Morning

Today, I am going to make an early start. My parents are coming next week to help with the bathroom and painting the cupboards and closets—hooray! So today, I want to re-sand and polyurethane the floor. By sand, I don’t mean I have to get the big sander out again. No, I just have to run sand paper over the floors to make them smooth, and then reapply another coat of polyurethane. I bought something that looks like a broom for which I can attach the sandpaper to, so I don’t have to be on my knees all day. I also bought a tacky rag—it’s this sticky rag thing that one uses to wipe of the sand. They do a very good job of picking up the sand.

I have to get this done today so that tomorrow I can take off all the hinges and handles and put the primer on the cupboards, as my mom told me to do. The primer goes on first before the paint, so I won’t have to use so many coats of paint.

I also have to do my laundry today.

Day 7 -- Friday

I am tired. I took a break from the nastyass cupboards to try to clean the nastyass bathtub. This is second attempt at cleaning the bathtub. I have already used one bottle of SoftScrub with bleach and an entire bottle of plain old bleach. God forgive me for not being "eco-friendly". Plus I used lots of elbow grease. My mother explained to me years ago what elbow grease is. I don't really like to use it, but I'll pull it out if I have to.

Day 6--Thursday

I should mention that over the past three days I’ve made numerous calls to my parents asking when they could come and help again. They said next week. I’m moving in this house in less than 2 weeks. Holy shit.

I'm still trying to clean these nastyass cupboards. If nastyass isn't a word, it should be one.

Day Five (Tuesday): The Lowe's Treasure

I discovered on my lunch break that Lowe’s has awesome sales on random things on two racks in the back of the store. It is here that I found paint for only $4 a gallon. Good paint, too. It was just mixed the wrong color for whomever it was mixed for, I guess. They also have pints for only a $2. I also bought some door handles for the cupboards that I decided I would have to clean instead of paying $2,000 for new ones. What fun! Sales on things I need. Of course, at this point, I need everything. When buying clearance items at Lowe’s, be very careful when you get to the register—they never take off the discount unless you tell them your items are on sale. Then they have to get a manager to override the price. This is annoying if you have a lot of items.

I head over to the house after work and debate what to do about the floors. Then I start cleaning the cupboards. This takes hours and hours. They are filthy. With a capital “F”.

Day Four: Sand between coats!

I have a job and so I had to go to work today. But in the evening I headed right over to my new house to start cleaning. The doors were icky brown overtop white paint. My pet peeve is dirty doors. I hate dirty doors where you can see nasty black fingerprints. And I hate dirty light switches from people’s dirty icky fingers that they either just used to pick their nose or didn’t wash after eating finger food.

I also wanted to check up on my polyurethane job. I hadn’t felt the floors since they had been dry. I kneeled down and swiped my hand across the living room floor. But it didn’t feel nice and smooth, even though they looked nice and shiny. The floors were really very rough to the touch. They would have to be sanded again. My advice: Sand between coats! Always sand between coats!

Day 3: Sunday

I woke up and spent all day applying the second coat of polyurethane. (If you don’t open the windows, you will get a buzz going.) If you’re around too much polyurethane, you’ll start to repeat yourself frequently.

Day Two--Saturday

I’m still sick. But I take lots of Tylenol and soon forget about my aches and pains. There’s work to be done! And my Mom and Dad are making me do it since they came all this way to do work themselves. Yesterday we had almost every floor sanded (that’s the living room, dining room, and 2 upstairs bedrooms). I wanted to have the third bedroom floor sanded, but unlike the rest of the house the hardwood floor in this room was probably 50 years old instead of ten, and it had all kinds of grease smeared and the boards were uneven and missing/broken, etc. I convinced my parents we should try to sand it anyway; despite their yelling at me that I never believe anything they say. Well, they were right (I guess). The sand paper kept breaking since there was so much grease on the floor, and apparently that costs extra money—the more sand paper you use from Home Depot, the more they charge you. So we had to leave that room unsanded for now, and I’ll have to figure out what to do about it later.

The other thing that held us back was that the fuse kept blowing when we turned on the sander for some reason and then all the electricy went dead. I never did quite figure out what all that was about. I’m not sure what I was doing, looking back. I was very hopped up on medicine.

Oh, yeah, and the edger sander that my parents brought with them (they actually own one) broke and I had to go to Home Depot and rent another.

So, finally, we get the sanding finished and it’s time to put the first coat of polyurethane on. Oh, no, I almost forgot—first we had to get the excess sand off the floors by mopping them using just a little bit of water, let them dry completely, and then we began to apply the polyurethane.

And that’s when I began to feel a lot better. How pretty!! I couldn’t believe how nice these floors were turning out. It was like magic. I could finally sigh a sigh of relief.

While my Mom and I were sanding, mopping, and brushing the polyurethane on, my Dad was playing plumber in the bathroom. My bathroom is very small and the first thing I needed to do was get rid of the hideous cabinet sink that took up way too much room. After much debate, we had decided to get a new sink that attaches to the wall instead of a pedestal sink. (Actually, I had originally bought a pedestal sink off of some nasty woman on Craigslist, but she lied and said it was in perfect condition and ready to go. It was not--the fixtures were all bent and screwed up, so they wouldn't attach to anything. I tried to take it back to her, but she said "I got what I paid for". the bitch.)

So my Dad was hooking up my new bathroom sink for me! Yay! What a hero he is. Except that after 4 hours of listening to him holler and scream about the bleeping people (previous owners) who glued tile to the drywall, all I was left with was a hole in the wall and a sink that still didn’t work. It seems that there weren’t any studs in the wall so there was nothing for which to attach the sink. If he could have nailed the sink to air, his plan may have worked.

I swear it was his idea to get the wall sink and not the pedestal sink, so why was he giving ME dirty looks? I was the one without a sink.

It was late and my parents were tired and had to go home. So I spent the rest of the night by myself applying the polyurethane. (If you don’t open the windows, you will get a buzz going from this slimy stuff.)

April 14th: Day One-Friday

My parents have finally sobered up and returned from Florida. This HOUse I have bought is in Pittsburgh, and my parents live in MD, so they are not only helping me with the house, but they also have to travel a couple hours to do so. What nice people.

The day started off really shitty. A Friday. I’m meeting my parents at my newest stomping ground, Home Depot, around nine in the morning. I wake up dizzy and nauseous. What am I pregnant? I NEVER get sick. I haven’t been sick in two years and the day I am supposed to do more manual labor than I have (total) in the past two years, my head won’t stop spinning and I feel achy.

But whatever, I suck it up and finally make it to Home Depot, where my parents tell me I have to buy things to make my house look pretty. Polyurethane. That’s what goes on the hardwood floors. A long wooden stick with a pad on it. That’s what is used to spread the polyurethane all over the floors. Paint thinner. That’s what you use to get the polyurethane off your hands. And face. And hair.

Let me tell you about my house. It’s a shit hole. It’s been empty for two years. The people who previously inhabited this house terrorized it. They took all of the duct work out of the house, put rocks in the gas line, hung hideous green and gold blinds everywhere, left the bathroom floor to rot, among various other weird things. (Fortunately, the VA, whom I purchased the house from, had paid someone to do a half-ass job of fixing these things.)

There was also carpet and rugs nailed to the hardwood floor, which had never before been coated with polyurethane. You see, if hardwood floors haven't been coated with some sort of protectant, like polyurethane, it ruins. The wood soaks up all the dirt, grease, piss, Coke spills, whatever, and they stain. That’s why they had to be sanded.

So my parents told me we had to rent a sander (which you can do at Home Depot or Lowe’s) and sand the floors. We had to have two sanders—a drum sander and an edger. The drum sander is used to get the dirty stuff off the floors. The edger is used for, duh, going around the edges of the room. It’s a lot smaller. I don’t know how to use either of these noisy beasts, and anyway, I’m sick, so my parents use the sander. It looks like hard work. It looks heavy.

My mom screams at me to clean something. I told them I had to get new cupboards that day, and I wasn’t going to clean them, and wouldn’t we have time to get ceramic tile to do the kitchen floor? And then there’s the sink in the bathroom that needs replaced, and can we puhlease hurry up a little bit so we can go to Construction Junction (a local nonprofit that is like a Home Depot, only with used and dirty stuff). I thought we could get some (cleaner) kitchen cabinets there.

My parents both looked at me as if to say, "you're crazy". It was at this point that I realized my house wasn’t going to be perfect before I moved into it. I started to whine. It didn’t help.

I thought my Dad was going to wring my neck and my Mom kept assuring me that we would get everything done eventually. Eventually. That it “would be easier to work on the house once I was moved in”.

Oh, dear. I have a lot of work to do. And my parents only came up to help me for two days.

I’ve started this blog at the remodeling process instead of beginning with the process of buying my first house. My reasoning for this is because I think it would end up being less of a blog and more of a childish rant against incompetent real estate agents, government agencies, title companies, and mortgage rates. All I can tell you without getting myself really worked up, is that buying a house is real freaking headache. And now that I’ve got a house, a house that sat empty for two years and needs a serious facelift, not to mention a new paint job inside and out, new plumbing fixtures, and new floors, etc., well, never mind the headache—now my stomach is also starting to really hurt. Did I mention that I’m moving into this house next week!?

I should also begin by telling you that I am remodeling this house pretty much on my own, (as a single cat mother) although my parents, the lovely people that they are, are being a tremendous help, thank God. I myself, being 29 years of age, and still fitting into that “young urban professional” profile have no clue how to hold a hammer, put a screw in a wall, or hang a blind, let alone renovate a whole house. I could not do this without my parents’ help.

That said, the week I finally closed on the house my parents were in Florida, living it up and sipping margaritas on the beach. I called them to ask what I should do now that I am a homeowner with a house that needs remodeled. They said I should clean something until they were able to come and help me. Easy enough. I started cleaning. I cleaned the cupboards in the kitchen until I decided they were too dirty and I wanted new ones. I had done my work for the week! Why clean anymore when everything is just going to get dirty anyway with all the “remodeling” that’s going to happen when my parents come to help me?

I decided to go walk around Lowe’s instead. And Home Depot. I spent most of the remainder of the week wondering around these two stores thinking of what I needed to get done in the house and trying to figure out how much this was going to cost me. I wondered and wondered. Those stores are wondrous.

And then I called my parents again, hoping they would be back soon. They decided to stay in Florida a few extra days. Every time I called them they were drinking something, which is odd for my parents, who don’t typically drink a lot. That’s just great. My parents decide to turn into drunken beach bums while I’m trying to remodel my house. I don’t know anything about remodeling houses. And so I started to get nervous.

Then I started to whine. Daddy, you said you’d help me! I told you I couldn’t do this without you! Whine, whine, works every time. Actually I think it was at the point when I was in tears on the phone explaining to my father that I don’t know how to do anything and all I do is wonder around Home Depot aimlessly, when I finally got through to my father that I seriously needed help. That’s all I do, Daddy, I wonder and wonder. Sob.

So my parents came to help. They had been telling me for weeks that it would take no time to sand the hardwood floors in my new house and that there really wasn’t all that much work that needed to be done in order for me to move into my house. I believed them. How naïve of me. If only I knew a week ago what I know now. Explain to me how the two most pessimistic people I know could be so overly optimistic about the length of time it would take me to remodel my house. I thought I’d have it done in a couple of months.

Haha…and so it begins…