Week One - Hooooo mah gawd

So we've had the rental for a week now and renovations/discoveries are underway. Yep discoveries.

When a house hasn't had power or water for a year and a half, you get some fun surprises when you turn those things on. Luckily there still hasn't been anything major but there were quite a few light fixtures that didn't work, the doorbell didn't work, the A/C thermostat doesn't work (or the A/C - the fuses are completely gone).

So far most of the water fixtures work. In the master bath the tub and shower are only getting a drizzle of water, though. Not sure what's up with that. It's likely we'll have to call a plumber out to investigate. =/

Other than that we've starting on fixing broken shit and started painting some. Here's a photo roundup of the first week:

The carpet in every. single. room. is fucked up. I have no idea the how or why of its current state. I mean seriously, wtf happened? We'll be having the carpet in the whole house replaced but that'll happen closer to when renovations are done.

A large tear in the linoleum flooring in the kitchen:

The front and back yard aren't in too bad of shape. Sure there are weeds, but those can be handled. I already spread out some weed and feed in the front and back to hopefully help. With winter around the corner I doubt we'll get to the "lush" yard state, but hopefully we can hold off additional weeds.

The front gardens are overgrown with weeds as well. I worked on this tiny garden leading to the front door. These pictures are when I was about halfway through pulling all the weeds. We're going to fill this tiny spot with a rock garden and a potted plant.

The main front garden. The line/ditch you see around it is where they lined the garden with leftover house bricks. They were uneven and overgrown as well. Pulled them all out. I'm planning to make the garden bed area smaller, pull the weeds, and add some red mulch. The bushes are actually in decent condition and just need trimmed.

Bricks I pulled from the front garden:

Here's the kitchen where we've dumped a bunch of supplies. We had the colors of the house matched and bought paint to get started repainting inside. Like the carpet, nearly every wall is marked up and/or dirty. There were also a few dents in the sheetrock that Jesse patched up.

This wall corner is filthy. Looks like a lot of hands grabbed it as people rounded the corner. Gross.

You can see the ring of dirt around this light switch.

I'm guessing this is some kid's "art". hehe

Unfortunately even the trim is banged up/dirty/marked throughout the house. We'll be repainting it and all the doors too.

Jesse repainted the kitchen while I started on one of the secondary bedrooms. You can't tell in this picture, but the room is a light baby blue color. I'm repainting it the off white that covers the master bedroom.

The previous owner obviously didn't give a shit about the carpet. This is baby blue paint stains in the secondary bedroom. It looks like a paint tray spilled over its edges. 

This is the back porch. Yeah it needs a pressure washing. =P The back porch light was not working but thankfully it just needed a new bulb. I also cleaned the light fixture because it was caked with dead bugs.

Another fun discovery. The inner workings of this toilet are completely broken. I'm guessing it took just as long to rig up this wire hanger to be a new flush handle as it would have to just fix it properly. Lots of rust inside now.

Look at that dirt ring. XD

The front of this bathroom drawer is completely broken off and missing. One of the kitchen drawers was also broken off but left behind so Jesse was able to fix it. Unfortunately we'll have to find a new drawer front for this one or replace the whole thing completely.

This is the front door. We'll be replacing the hardware and repainting it.

That's it for now! As you can see there's a lot of work to be done, but again it's mostly cosmetic. So we continue on!