I just got back from checking out our new house. We got the keys today and I rode over in the evening to assess the general condition and offensiveness of the cigarette smell. We are moving in two weeks, and this will be our home until we design and get approval for our project. We had previously thought that we would rent out the house in the short term, but that presented a number of complications that we weren’t comfortable with (see this post for more), and ultimately, we wanted to spend some time living in and getting to know our new house, our neighbours and our neighbourhood.
With this in mind, we needed to assess the bare minimum amount of work we needed to do in order to be reasonably comfortable for the next year or so, and to prioritize what two working parents who had barely started packing could accomplish in two short weeks.
Apart from a large pile of questionably recyclable junk left on the curb; overflowing garbage bins with additional bags piled on top- opened and picked through by birds and raccoons, and a bunch of paint and solvent cans left in the basement, the place was reasonably cleared out.
Take the tour:
The smoke smell upstairs was oppressive and made me feel instantly coated in a layer of filth. I set about opening windows, only to discover that many of them were either inoperable or painted shut. All original single pane wood windows, the windows that did open had no locking mechanism to leave them open securely.
I opened all of the doors to increase airflow. Most of them were in poor condition. I had to wiggle the locks and yank the handles around to release the locks and push them open. The old drive-under garage doors have a gaping hole between them. I can almost feel that winter breeze blowing through.
There’s a finished room in the basement, whose carpet is clean but has an old vacuum/wet dog smell to it, and there’s some stained carpet covering some of the unfinished basement areas that’s a stink generator and must be removed.
There’s a window in the upstairs bathroom that is rotting out, and the single sheet of glass has separated from the edge on two sides.
Great tour! The chimney in the basement with the metal door is a cleanout. There will be a plate covering a hole in the fireplace floor where a person could just seep all the ashes. Then every now and then you’d go downstairs and clean them all out in the basement, rather than getting the upstairs ashy.
um, “sweep” all the ashes. You knew what I meant, though . . .?