For those of you that don't know the history, we just closed our 96 day escrow (yes, you read that right, 96 days!) on Thursday February 4th, 2010 and became homeowners. The people we bought the house from are...interesting, to say the least. The house was about to go into foreclosure (and actually did for a day toward the end of escrow, long story) and the house was controlled in pieces and parts by the family, their trust and the handled by a bevy of lawyers, trustees and various other interested parties. In short, a complete nightmare to deal with.
The sale finally went through after an insane amount of negotiations, and we did make a deal with them that they could rent the house back from us for 2-3 weeks while they continue to pack and get moved back to Indiana. So, for the next couple of weeks, we are working at the house while they continue to live there and clear out. Not an ideal situation, but it was a very unique sale. Our Escrow file is over 12" thick if that tells you anything about all the craziness of this purchase versus a run-of-the-mill home purchase.
Have you seen that show "Hoarders"? It was like that when we first saw the house, and then got progressively worse after we put in our offer. When we arrived to start our first day of work, we expected the house to be in about the same condition as the last time we saw it, possibly a little better as they were in the midst of packing. How wrong we were. I almost had a stroke when we got there to start work. Here's a partial list of the fun stuff on the property:
- 2 shopping carts
- broken down 1970's camaro
- 7 scooters/tricycles
- 3 plastic castles
- fridge full of moldy food
- several 40's of Kobra Malt Liquor
I know, it sounds like we are moving to the Ghetto. Nope, it's downtown Fullerton. And we bet that the neighbors are going to LOVE us after we get the place cleaned up. We really did follow Real Estate 101 and buy the worst house on the block. Thankfully we are up to the major task of cleaning the place up and making it our own.
The property consists of a 3 bedroom/1 bath Main House, a 1 bedroom/1 bath Back House and a 3 car garage. We had them clear completely out of the Back House so that we could get started in there while they live in the Main House and clean out the garage (no easy feat).
The work we got done today:
We were terrified of scraping the ceilings after everyone told us how hard it would be. This was our first task so we could get the messy job out of the way. After getting all of our Home Depot booty unloaded and the place somewhat organized, we brought in the hose and sprayed down the popcorn ceilings and let them soak for 15 minutes as instructed. We purchased these 
handy tools at Home Depot meant to be used for Heavy Knockdown Texture, they've got a slightly flexible rubber blade on the end of a handle, and with Warren being almost 7' tall, he didn't 
need a ladder. We started scraping...easiest job ever! It was messy, but we didn't care about that as we were going to remove the carpet as soon as we scraped the ceiling texture on to it. It took about, oh, 5-10 minutes to scrape the ceilings completely, about 300 square feet or so.
We took a break to go back to our favorite hangout, The Home Depot, for our second trip 
of the day, and purchased drywall to cover the tacky wood paneling that had been installed right on to the studs, and would have been a nightmare to remove, so we are going right over it. Warren got to purcahse a Shop Vac too, so he was a happy camper with a(nother) new toy.
We took down the unsightly brass and faux oak woodgrain ceiling fans and I spray painted them white (after I hosed all the grime and dust off of them), those will be reinstalled in a day or 2, after we get the ceilings repainted. Then we removed the carpets and pads, and that was it for the day. With the ceiling scraping going so easily we hoped to get more done, but the back and forth trips to Home Depot slowed us down. Now that we are in and have the supplies needed, as far as we know, it should speed up!
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