Dear Scrappers....

The items in our backyard are OFF LIMITS!!  WTH?! 

Someone stole our awnings out of our back yard today, the ones we took down a couple weeks ago.
Seriously, the back yard.  Not off to the side, not anywhere obvious.  Literally, flattened and tucked in alongside other items just a foot or two from the back of our house.

Seriously?  Someone would have had to looked at the house, said, "Hey, there's only a few awnings on that house, maybe the other ones are still around somewhere."  And then gone poking through our yard to find them!

I called around to all the local scrap-yards I could find online.  I emailed pictures of the awnings to every email I could find.  We're annoyed and want them to get caught.

It's not the money that bothers us...  They probably weren't worth more than $50.  It just feels like a violation.  Someone was in our yard, close to our house, and stole something.
And what's to stop them from doing it again?

Awnings Are Coming Down!

Ever since the first time we saw our house, K has been saying, "Those awnings gotta go."

I didn't care either way, really.  The awnings were fine, doing their job keeping the rain off our heads as we go in the door.  The window awnings did block the view more than I liked, though.  And I know awnings are supposed to be helpful with shading the house, but our house faces South, so the couple side windows are really the only ones that get intense light.
I agreed with K that the house would look drastically different without them, and I told her she should take them off if that's what she wanted.

I can't believe they lasted a whole month, truthfully.

Work in progress...  My handy-lady on her ladder.

Determined...

And the result...?  Our house is awake!

Not all of the awnings are off, yet.  We took off the 3 from the front of the house, and 3 from the first-floor side windows.  We left the ones on the 2nd floor, for now, because those will take a little more effort to get down.  And we left the big awning over the side door, since that's the door we always use, and it's nice to have for the rain, and eventually for the snow.  We'll take that down when we can replace it with something else right away.

We like it!  K was right, it does look nicer.  Plain, but still nicer.  And we'll make it look better soon.

Basement Bedroom - Mold!

Check out our colorful basement bedroom:

Forgive the choppy panorama-- this was during our first walk-thru of the house & I was hurrying.

It's really actually a nice room, under all this loud paint.  Big closets, nice egress window, basic walls and ceiling.   The floor has some fairly gross carpet, and under that is some linoleum tiles, like the rest of the basement, but mostly just concrete.

The corner on the left is where the water damage occurred.

K got started on repainting the walls, and noticed a musty smell that would not go away, no matter how much we aired out the room.  Upon some investigation outside, she found that the drainpipe on that corner of the house had become separated from the gutter at some point after the tenants had moved out (we assume, but it could've been before.)  So the gobs of rain that we got all through May were just streaming in next to the house, and settling right in this corner of the basement.  She tapped the walls in the lower corner, there on the left, and yup--  soft sheetrock.

No longer just a simple paint job, K got started cleaning out the mold and repairing the walls.  Lucky for us, the water hadn't affected a whole lot of the walls, and K was able to take out what was damaged and repair just those areas.

Repair in progress-- studs replaced, water-barrier paint on the cinder blocks.  Moisture-resistant sheet-rock going in.

After the sheetrock was pulled out, we made an interesting discovery.  The cinder blocks in this room had a very fancy splatter paint on them.  The underlying color was like a pale beige, and over that was gray, pink, and light brown splatters.  Very obviously done on purpose, since the application of all three colors was so even.  So curious to know what this room looked like before and what it was used for!  It's definitely nice to have another bedroom in the house, but this is still the basement and this is still Minnesota.  I can't imagine that sleeping in here year-round would be very comfortable, so I wonder if it was used for something else.  I'm really liking this wall paint, honestly!

So, the room is on its way.  Not nearly as quick and painless as we hoped it would be, but it certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been.  After some of the mold problems we saw when looking at houses, I know we were pretty lucky that this is all we have.

I actually felt bad painting over this with the water-barrier paint!