Our House – A Phantom Menace

Welcome to my new blog.  Suffolk House is dedicated to documenting my efforts to repair my house and to invite others to ask questions and share advice.   There will be no shortage of material, as the house has quickly become my favorite hobby.  Because it’s fun?  No!  I’ve taken repair up as a hobby for two reasons.  First, the house needs to be made livable so my son is safe living in it and so my wife and I can remain sane.  Second, considering our mortgage and tax payments, doing small repair usually makes for a cheap weekend.

Here’s a sense of what we’ve dealt with since we moved in:

1) The cesspool backed up the day after we moved in, flowing feces and soap bubbles into the basement.

2) The contractor who replaced the cesspool turned out to be an unlicensed “pirate.”  Evidently, people with the know-how and equipment contract to replace cesspools in record time without getting licensed by the township.  They rush the work in order to avoid neighborhood people who legally provide this service.  The legal ones run around and report the pirates.  I hired a pirate, and my wife thought he was the hottest thing since Brad Pitt.

3) Our house stinks.  What it smells like depends on the room you are in.  And, there are no simple solutions to the stenches.  For instance, the back half of the house wreaked of cat urine.  That’s a really bad sign.  Luckily, we had our hardwood floors refinished before settling into the downstairs.  Still, the odor wasn’t abated.  Sitting out back, the car urine smell seemed to waft out of the house, spoiling our cookouts.  Oh, turns out it wasn’t cat urine.  It was the variety of decorative, yet overgrown, boxwoods growing in both the front and back yards.  Silly me; I thought it might be the busted cesspool.  I thought the smell would go away once it was replaced.  Nope – it was the trees!

Pipes leak, wood is rotted, trees overgrown, furnace needs replacing, hot water heater needs replacing, stove needs replacing, floors are uneven, addition isn’t insulated, windows are broken, basement smells, upstairs carpet is destroyed, phone wires shorted, too few circuits, no hand railings on stairs, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Essentially, everything has to be replaced.

For now, we’ve narrowed our tasks down to four:

1) Visitor comfort

2) Smell abatement

3) Acceptable public presentation

4) Winterization

So, check in soon after I tackle our next project.