Our First House

Rich and I were married in March, 1977 and in August of 1978 at the tender age of 21 and 22 we bought our first house.

We paid $26,900 for it.

It was a small, 1125 sq ft ranch with 3 small bedrooms, 1 bathroom, no basement and it was on a pie-slice shaped lot so most of the yard was on the side of the house.

It was only intended as a starter house but we ended up living in it for 21 years. We raised both of our kids in that house, and the great neighborhood it used to be.

Sometime during those years we replaced the ugly baby-poop colored asbestos siding with vinyl siding in a light grey.

We rarely had any extra money during the time we lived in that house so improvements were few.


We knew we wanted to sell it as soon as Shauna graduated from high school and as that day got closer we did what we had to do to make the house sellable.

This is what it looked like in early 1999 before we sold it in August.

We got $89,000 for it.

From what I heard from the people that lived next door (and still do) the couple  we sold the house to lost it to foreclosure about 5 years later. The house sat empty for a long time and then finally sold for $25,000, less than we bought it for back in 1978.

Whoever bought it had to put a ton of money into it because from sitting empty for many years the walls had molded from the damp crawl space.

Then it was a rental for a while and a few years ago it was finally sold again, but I'm not sure for how much.

The neighborhood is not like it was when we lived there.

Anyway, the people who own it did a beautiful landscaping job. It doesn't even look like the same house!

See for yourself !

I took this picture off of Google Street View because I didn't want to stop in front of it and take a picture!

I'm impressed! I would love to see the inside. Maybe some day I'll get brave enough to go knock on the door!



Until the next time!!

New Sink

We finally got around to replacing the sink that came with our house.


Again, as with the deck, I say "we" but I mostly mean "Rich" because he does the majority of the work. I'm usually just the helper!


Anyway, when we moved in to this place we went from a nice big, deep double sink in the kitchen to a shallow, lame double sink with no room for anything!

I started looking for a new sink pretty quickly. I knew I wanted a single instead of a double. They are not as common as the double sinks but I found one in the Spring  that was the size we needed and would work in our kitchen. 

But then the deck took over and I figured that was enough of a project for the summer so we put the sink replacement on hold.


Now that the deck has been finished for a while,  I figured it was time for another project for us (Rich).  I bought the sink a few weeks ago and it's been sitting in our living room until this past Saturday.

The first thing to do, obviously, is to remove the old sink. This involved undoing the two water lines, the line from the dishwasher to the garbage disposal and the plumbing from the two drains.


Next was making sure that the new sink fit into the opening. It was a little bigger so we cut a couple inches off around the perimeter, tried it and it still didn't fit so we cut some more and sanded some off and finally got the sink to fit!

Then Rich had to redo the plumbing from a double drain to a single drain. Luckily he was able to do that without having to buy any more pipes.

We did get a new sink connection for the garbage disposal because the old one was scratched and worn looking and I didn't want to install in in the brand new sink.

Then we reconnected the water lines and that was it!

Nice big sink with the sprayer right on the faucet and lots of room for soaking bakeware and whatever else!  It's a bit industrial looking but I don't care. I'm all about the function these days!

So now we've taken care of the two main things we didn't really like about this place; the kitchen sink and nowhere outside to sit. I don't see any big projects in the future. Maybe some painting but we'll see.

We went to Shauna and Brad's for Halloween. Watched Levi so they could take Maxwell out trick or treating. He did really good and looked so cute!

That's it for now!

I feel the Christmas spirit coming on which is unusual for me! I have a new Christmas tree that I bought after Christmas last year and I am looking forward to putting it up!

Until the next time...