Closing, its just the beginning.
May 8th, 2007 by ariana
We closed on the house Friday! So much has happened over the past few days it feels like a lifetime since then.
I’ll start with the walkthrough on Thursay night. We hadn’t seen the house in a few weeks ad were pleasantly surprised to see everything had bloomed, including the gorgeous Japanese Cherry tree in our front yard. The bank of windows in our master bedroom act like a picture frame for the blossoming branches:
But we weren’t there to admire the landscaping!
My good friend Elliot of Riverside Builders was kind enough to come by and give us some much needed guidance. I was so happy that he really loved the house! One of our main questions is if we need to replace the entire roof right away. The previous roof job was so bad, they didn’t even put flashing around the chimney or dormers. As a result, the chimney has leaked and as a quick and dirty fix, many many layers of tar had been applied to the chimney.
Elliot noticed that all of the waterstains in the upstairs bedrooms were only in the corners near the chimney. He thought we could maybe get away with just adding flashing if possible without ripping up and re-doing the rest of the roof. He had another interesting idea which is to replace the boiler with one of the new ones that vent directly to the outside, thus eliminating the need for the chimney at all and we could then knock it down and patch right over it.
Then, Elliot and Jeff made the best discovery!
Under the ratty disgusting old carpeting throughout the entire upstairs is a layer of wood grain linoleum. And underneath THAT, like a priceless gift waiting to be unwrapped are the beautiful original old hard wood floors.
I was so excited I almost cried!
Everything else looked fine, the small repairs called for in the contract had been done so we wen’t the next morning and signed documents for about 3 hours. We went straight to Home Depot, and then to our new house where Jeff carried me over the threshhold and our new lives as home owners had officially begun.
And then the demolition started.
I will post about that later (with before and afters!) but right now I have to go paint cabinets.
[…] I think I mentioned in my post about our final walkthrough before closing how exuberant we were do learn that there were original hardwood floors under the ratty and […]