Gutting the Stench.

It has been a year. When we started, every room in the house had its own swirling cloud of flies. The top floor smelled like dog piss, the basement smelled like mildewed cat piss, and the main floor reeked of cigarettes. (The sellers were smoking in the house while we walked through for our first tour.) Oh, and the well stocked refrigerator, left without power for weeks in the heat of summer, offered the faint aroma of a rotting corpse.

Interior Befores and Garbage Everywhere.

Before we closed on the house, the bank gave us a list of items to be addressed before they would approve the loan: install two stair railings, scrape and prime any peeling paint, repair a non-functional toilet, and activate electrical service. (The sellers hadn't paid the electric bill, and power had been shut off.)

Knowing that the sellers would be basically unable to do anything, we offered to do the repairs. So the realtor gave us the lock box combination, we let ourselves in and got to work.

Most of these pictures were taken on the first day we had access, a whole month before close. Most of the personal items strewn about the house were obviously unwanted and abandoned, and garbage service had been stopped for some time, as evidenced by the mountain of garbage bags in the side yard. But the place was still kind of ambiguously occupied, with some important bulky items like a T.V., mini fridge, and bed still in an upstairs bedroom.

Can you smell these pictures?

This Is It: Exterior Befores.

We bought this Northeast Portland house eleven months ago as a major fixer. We took walls down to the studs, re-plumbed, re-wired, and gutted the kitchen and baths, filling countless containers and dumpsters with demolition debris. Then drywall went up. In March, we moved in, setting up our home in the basement.

The changes since then have been less dramatic, and we still have much to do, but progress continues.

And now we’re blogging.

The plan is to tell the story of our home renovation one post at a time, highlighting one feature or room or phase or story. It will be a historical document covering what we’ve done, probably, rather than a daily update of what’s happening right now. For the first post, here is a quick walk-around, showing the house exactly as it looked while it was still for sale.

Stay tuned. This is exciting.

Tony & Jaime!