Our home back home. 🙂

We paid off our mortgage last week! It is officially all ours. What a great feeling. 🙂

It is a very old house with many issues but they are slowly being dealt with. We were living there full time until last year when hubby went active duty for the Army to finish out his time for retirement. He will have a total of 35 years in by Feb. with 20 years active time. We are planning on sticking around the area for awhile mostly because of job opportunities and so we can finish the remodel process on the house without having to live in it. We had been living in it for the entire last twelve years of remodeling and what a challenge that was.

Of course, when one problem happens another one is discovered when owning an old home. One year we had a water leak in the kitchen area which resulted in tearing up all the plumbing which then resulted in remodeling the kitchen, which still isn’t completely done. We actually lived for six months with our kitchen drain pouring into a large bucket we had to dump. 🙂 Life was interesting.

It does make for some fun and interesting stories. I have begun looking for those pictures and will post in another post later with all the progress. We do change our mind a lot on what we want a room to look like. 🙂 Luckily, we do a bit here and there before too much of it is finished. It is all with extra cash so no other loans out. I’m lucky hubby likes to do the work so money is saved there. Or is it? Just kidding. It is a learning experience.

One of the first projects was a total redo of the roof. It had not been replaced in a long time. When I moved in I rented the house from a sweet old man that lived across the alley behind it. After a few years, his health went downhill and he ended up passing on. The family lived elsewhere and didn’t want to deal with it. In fact, for a year I didn’t have to pay rent. They didn’t want any. In that year, the roof was majorly leaking, so I got a lawyer with the help of my current boss at the time, and we drafted a letter that listed all the needed repairs on the house and offered 5,000.00 for the house. They accepted the offer. It was mine. 🙂 Of course, I was young and had to have a loan, which the loan company put other debt into the loan and thus I had a mortgage debt. Not a major one, but enough for a single mom of two.

A year later, in waltzed my wonderful husband into my life, who just happened to like working on a challenge.  🙂 Me, him, several friends, and my dad fixed the roof from a generous gift given to me from my daughter’s grandparents. We tore off two layers of asphalt shingles which was attached to just the wood rafters. Underneath we saw the rafters were made out of anything and every size of wood imaginable. And talk about long nails used! We pulled so many nails out. The rafters are blue painted, pink painted and regular wood. I guess they used whatever they could way back when. (So far I have traced the house back to 1910)

Yes, we left the rafters as is and put the proper sheets of wood across the rafters to which the new tin roof was screwed down to. The tin was so much easier than all those asphalt shingles. That was in the year of 2000.

Over the last thirteen years we have had to deal with a small leak over the kitchen when the wind would blow just right it would get up under the roof line. We tried flashing and everything we could think of. Glad it was just an occasional leak. Now, this Fall my hubby decided enough was enough and set to fix the problem for good. A whole new roof line with a better roof pitch! And this is what we got. 🙂

 Fall 2013

It is another bedroom and finally a second bathroom. I don’t know how we raised a teenage daughter with one bathroom plus me and four males. I guess now when hubby completely retires down the road and we move back to live full time he can have his bathroom and I can have mine! LOL 🙂

I have officially named our house the Puzzle Castle. I always wanted to do that. Like you read in novels with estate homes. 🙂 I can’t afford a fancy castle so why not. It is a gigantic puzzle! It is our family home that we live in part time for now. So many wonderful memories. We hope to pass it down to the kids, but of course, completely finished. 🙂