At Home in a Bungalow

We made it back safely from Missouri where we were able to see a lot of friends and family at a wedding reception in Columbia. It was a lot of fun to catch up with people we hadn’t seen for a long time.

I think come Christmas – when I have a bit of free time – I’m going to do some changes to this site and utilize it more as a newsy blog about us, but that’s going to have to come when I have a bit more free time! In the meantime, we’ll have just newsy updates – we hope. I’ve also set this blog to import into my Facebook notes, so if you’re on Facebook you don’t have to watch it too carefully!

Anyway, now that we’re married, I think Bungalow moves up in the queue of things to work on! As I’d mentioned before, it’s a 1921 Arts & Crafts style bungalow, i.e., basically the house of my dreams. It’s about 1500 livable square feet, nearly double that all told as there’s a basement that’s the same size, but the basement is not finished and as you will see later, there are very good reasons for that.

The electricity needed some work and we knew that coming into it – it was actually pretty obvious just looking UP in the unfinished basement.  Luckily, Rudy’s dad, like my Dad, is a hands-on project-y guy that’s built several houses and he’d agreed to help us with that so that project actually got started over Thanksgiving. He used the time we were away in Missouri to make some major changes and some major progress. The entirety of the living room is rewired with new outlets, and some of the other rooms as well. Of course in the process we discovered that the house is basically a ‘what not to do’ on the electric front, yikes. I feel much better knowing that at least some progress has been made there and that we’ll be working on some additional stuff over the next few months.

The other major current issue is the basement. Rudy’s taken to singing CSN’s ‘Our House’, which always made me smile despite the fact we only have ONE cat and not two (I don’t think Brina would take to two), but recently that verse has shifted into ‘our house is a very very very fine house with water in the basement’ sung with a tone.

Of course, we knew that was a problem coming in as well due to anything important in the basement being up on concrete blocks and the wood poles having water lines on them up to about an inch or two. And essentially since it started raining sometime in October, we’ve had water on a continual basis. It’s not huge amounts of water, and it does seem to stick to a particular path. It comes in under the stairs in the corner, and if unchecked, it winds its way through the middle of the room, under the water heater (up on concrete blocks) and furnace (same), out where it pools (ha!) under the pool table that we inherited (also on concrete blocks).  Fun, huh? So we’ve gotten a wet dry vac, and Rudy has made a daily ritual of vacuuming morning and night.

We do have a sump pump, and that should be helpful, except that it seems to be on the opposite side of the room from where the water actually comes in. So after some research, and some perusing of This old House’s website, we purchased the stuff to put in a sump pump in the actual corner where the water seems to come in and I think we’re going to try that first and see if it slows it down a bit.

And I think in favour of not making this post way too long, I’ll stop there and bring more bungalow thoughts later on.  Mostly though, I love this house. And I feel ridiculous cause sometimes it’s the little things that make me love it the most, but hey, there’s nothing wrong with loving original door handles and the one original brass outlet cover from the probably only original outlet in the living room, or real wood paneled doors, or crazy old heat vents, is there?