Remodeling isn't for the faint of heart

When we bought an investment house in Englewood, Florida, last March, we knew it was part of "Old Englewood" - built in 1976 and nicely maintained for the most part, it had seen several years of neglect when it passed from one generation to the next and became a seasonal rental.  Our motive in buying in the teeth of a depressed real estate market was twofold - 1.  Use it ourselves now in the winters and work to bring it back up to speed, and 2. Be ready when the good markets return to hopefully make a profit on our investment.  


We really forgot to factor in that we are getting older and doing all the work ourselves was going to be more of a challenge.  However, we have been holding up so far.  We went out last week to "check out" carpets, and ended up buying new carpet for most of the house.


Of course, you can't pass up an opportunity to paint when it doesn't matter if you drip paint on the floors, so we have been painting the entire house for the past week.  Then we decided to tear up the old carpets.  YIKES!

My sister, Anne, says a carpet is like a giant sponge that sucks dirt in.  We were appalled at the grime under the old carpets.  I guess after 35 years we should have expected some dirt, but omg!

The terrazo floors were actually pretty nice once we had all the glue and crud scraped up and had scrubbed them with Simple Green.

The one bedroom that isn't getting new carpet is stuffed with most of the furniture from the entire house.

I have kind of a tunnel to my computer in the dining room.  We are getting really tired of camping out in the family room with one couch, a tv and one small table, so we checked yesterday to be sure we were still on schedule for installation of the new carpets on Thursday.  That is when we discovered that there was a mix up in our order and it wouldn't be in until December 24.  Fortunately, we don't own a gun or I might be tempted to shoot someone!  We solved the problem by choosing a slightly different color, and are now on schedule for Friday.  At least all the work is done to be ready, so today, we are taking the boat out!