So, yes, alas, the cowboy and I have split up. He's wandered off, back to Texas, too far away, and far too busy to think about a weekend fixer-upper back here in the lovely north of Minnesota. It was an okay parting, as partings go. Still friends, and apparently, suddenly, now property co-owners. A more nervous person might be alarmed at that prospect, but I still co-own property with my ex husband, so really - what's one more piece of land with an ex?

We aren't sure what the plans are yet, for this place, but we've briefly tossed around a few ideas - maybe having it remodeled, then renting it out. For sure the decision can wait till spring, which was when we'd originally planned on resuming the work anyway.

Such is life. You play it as you go, no matter what hand you're dealt. :)

I'll be keeping up this blog, but the entries may be few and far between till spring. I'm hoping for an early one this year.

I haven't updated in awhile, because we have not been working much on the place. There are a couple pieces of news to report:

One, we jumped the gun putting our old disgusting carpets and padding into the dumpster. When my brother called for a pick-up and told them what was in it, they said, "Oh, you can't put old carpet in there."

Yikes. If you're ever confused about what type of construction materials can go in a dumpster, and this happens to you - the dumpster company has to pick the carpet and padding out (not by hand, they have equipment to do it), and it gets disposed of elsewhere. There was some added charge to do it. I think we had the dumpster an extra week too, so all told - from the original $275 quote, it cost us about $330. Glad to be rid of a lot of the mess and debris. Well worth it.

The other thing that happened was this - all of you fellow Minnesotans know that we've had some very cold weather already this October. So, at the beginning of the month, my brother called to tell me some of our pipes seemed to have frozen up. :(
It turned out not to be a big deal, they must have been just partially frozen or whatever, but when Paul turned on the furnace, they thawed. All are working fine with no problems. :) And did you notice what I wrote?? Our furnace works!!! YAY! I was planning to ask someone to have a look at it before we tried it out, but again, it looks like our luck is holding! Thrilled, as usual.

:))

Someday this will be the view from our house. (Not our yellow guest house...) :)

Not a lot to report this week, but I wanted to post some pics of the rooms with the flooring removed. Tom and I also heaved the old smelly rolled up carpeting into the dumpster last weekend. Paul has been doing some dumpster loading too, so it's filling up pretty well. Should be full by the end of our 2 week dumpster rental. :)

Tom has been on the road most of the time since 'carpet weekend' so we haven't been out to work on the place, but I did stop in this past Saturday just to see if the air was a little fresher now that the carpets are gone. Much improved! Yay!

My brother Paul, who has really good handyman/construction skills, has been doing some of the work for us, during his off-hours. So there has been some progress made even though we haven't been there. :)

He checked the well, which seems to be working properly; the hot water heater filled and doesn't seem to leak; he is installing toilets in the bathrooms and replacing some plumbing pipes under the kitchen sink. This is all great news. :))

The best news is that it looks like our major plumbing pipes are fine. We were anticipating having to repair burst pipes, etc, but it appears that we don't have any that need repair. Yaaaay!!!

We have a large construction dumpster coming today, and Paul is going to start filling it with some of the materials from the other demo'd house that was left on the property. And he has someone lined up to take the steel beams, aluminum sheeting, and other construction materials that can be reused for something else. Glad to see someone get some use out of materials that would have otherwise gone to waste.

I couldn't find any option to recycle the old carpeting and foam pad, so that's dumpster bound too.

We are ready to get up there and do more cleaning, and I know Tom wants to start on some of the demo and repairs too. I'm thrilled that we'll have water once all the outgoing plumbing lines are given a thumbs up. Happy with the progress! :))

Tom can't wait to head back to shower after the carpet pulling day. Me too. Glad that part's done.

We just got the power re-connected. Had to take a pic of the zero reading. We tried the lights and fans inside and everything came on. Yay! It looks like we won't have to deal with any weird wiring problems anyway. One more big thing checked off the worry-list. :))

Most everyone knows that I love frogs and toads, and I had to get a pic of this little metallic tree toad. :))

This is the pile of carpet and padding, and some of the linoleum we removed on Saturday.

The clean up begins.

We spent about 4 hours on Saturday starting the clean up. Tom cut and pulled up the old carpet and foam pad, and I rolled each piece up, tied it and took it outside. It was dirty and rankly scented, to put it mildly. Mucho dog pee. Icky.

We did get all the carpets and padding pulled out, rolled and tied though. There is still some linoleum to pull, but we did get started on that too and everything came up fairly easily. None of the carpet or linoleum was glued down, which was helpful.

It was a hot, sweltering day, and we had to take several breaks outside just to catch some clean air.

After taking a closer look at the kitchen, we're leaning more heavily toward replacing all the kitchen cabinets too. Kitchen floor: we'll replace this with some nice tile, or Pergo flooring.

We're also going to see if we can eliminate that small wall with the little windows in it. Ugg-lee! :P
(And yes, those are the infamous dog turdlettes on the floor...)

This is the living room (bottom photo), where it appears someone lit a wood fire or something, with no venting to the outside. There are black smoke/fire markings on the walls and ceiling. Tom wants to completely tear out and replace the walls in this room. In the other parts of the house we will be cleaning/Kilz'ing and going over the walls with sheetrock.

It felt good to get all that flooring out of the house. Sunday we went back and did a good sweep out. It's good to have the stinky carpets out of there, and to have at least the big chunks swept off. Yay!

A good hot shower and a few drinks later at the Elvis show in Breezy Point, helped to erase the stinky odor from our noses and memories.

About a week ago, Tom and I became the owners of this 20 acre piece of rural property in northern Minnesota. The land is beautiful, about three-quarters meadow, the rest wooded, and abuts thousands of acres of state woods. This is the kind of place you don't come across that often, an old farm homestead, peaceful and calming. (This would be the moment for a dreamy, sweeping musical piece, like the theme from Gone With The Wind...)

But I digress. Getting back to reality - included with this property is an eight-year-old prefab house. (Insert that loser sound here; wah-wah-wah-WAH~) This house had been pretty well trashed inside and would not have been our first choice for a home-type, week-end or otherwise. But, as the saying goes, it is what it is. After looking it over, it appears to be in solid structural shape, but just needs some major fixing up inside. This journal is intended to be a record of our clean-up/remodeling progress to transform this place from homely to homey. We will be doing the work with a tight budget in mind, and doing as much of the work as we can, ourselves.

Check back - I will be posting some pics, inside and out, of the house, so you can see what we're starting with.