House Stats

It occurs to me that we haven't given you the most basic details about the house yet, so here goes....

The house is in a Seattle neighborhood called Wallingford, about a mile west of the University of Washington, three quarters of a mile east of the Fremont neighborhood, a mile north of Lake Union and a mile south of Greenlake and Woodland Park. (According to MapMyRun.com, the house is just three quarters of a mile from my current apartment -- so it's not going to be a huge move.) We'll have access to plenty of bus routes, which run on both 45th Street and 40th Street (we're on 44th Street).

Wallingford's main attractions are Gas Works Park (on Lake Union) and the main drag on 45th Street, where there is food and drink aplenty (including at least five places to get sushi). Most of the houses there are WAY out of Sam and my price range. In fact, Sam and I didn't really figure we had a chance with The Bagley Project; although the listing price was in our range, we assumed that we would be outbid (as had happened a half dozen times already). The neighborhood blog, wallyhood.org, has even been lightheartedly poking fun at Wallingford's exhorbitant home prices by trying to find the cheapest Wallingford house on the market ($350K, last they checked).

As for The Bagley Project, it currently has two bedrooms and one bathroom on the main floor, and an additional bedroom and bathroom (and kitchen) in the basement. After the renovation, we will have two bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms and a finished bonus room upstairs, and two bedrooms/two bathrooms downstairs (still with a kitchen). We figure the finished square footage will be about 2400 sq ft. The house also has a decent backyard -- bigger than the yards at most of the surrounding houses -- and a large shed.

Okay, I have to run again, but will post again soon with pictures (this time I mean it) and another list of the interesting things we found during demo today (turns out the best place to hide things is in the ceiling).

Half the House It Used to Be

The demolition continues, and now there is definitely more sheetrock on the floor than on the walls. Ben decided that we should rent a dumpster after all (rather than taking the rubble out to the city dump truckload by truckload), so we're hoping to have all the demo done by the end of the weekend. The house is looking kind of scary right now ... basically each room is just studs and a pile of garbage. Once we're through with demo, the sub-contractors can come in and work on the electrical and plumbing. Ben says it'll be another month or so before the place even starts resembling a home again. Oof.

Here are some more things we found in drawers and walls throughout the house:
-- a marble and a spool of black thread, both in the wall of the master bedroom
-- a full set of silverware, tucked in one of the kitchen drawers
-- a packet of Ritz crackers, unopened
-- a box of Nilla wafers, opened
-- a huge pile of rat poop, in a basement wall (Ben was the lucky prospector for that one)

Again, I am promising pictures in a future post. It's getting late and, frankly, I'm exhausted.

A Life In Objects

So far, here are some of the left-behinds we've found (a peek into the lives of those who occupied the house before us):
-- Two plastic army men, behind the walls in the master bedroom
-- A Garfield air freshener, also behind those walls
-- A Garfield baking sheet still in its original packaging, on top of the kitchen cabinets
-- An arrow, shot into the ceiling in the basement
-- A picture of Jimi Hendrix, resting on a ledge in the basement

Sam and I are lying around my apartment right now, mustering the energy for what promises to be a busy day. Both Sam and I have some work we'd like to get done today (as in, for our real jobs), plus there are normal life chores that we must attend to (the most pressing of which is laundry). Sam's dad is also swinging through town on his way back from a business trip, so we'll probably see him and take him out to dinner in the evening. Besides that, I gather there are more walls to be torn down at the house. We may also take the base cabinets out of the upstairs kitchen; the top cabinets came down yesterday.

Finally, a little blog housekeeping. ... I'm new to Blogger and wasn't sure if this blog was syndicated. It turns out it is, so if you want to keep up with us via feed reader, you can find the subscription at the very bottom of the page.

A Picture to Satisfy Your Initial Curiosity

Okay, here's your first glimpse of the house. The windows have been unboarded now, and it's amazing what a difference that makes, both from the street and the inside.

The main entrance is up the stairs. There's a separate entrance for a mother-in-law apartment on the ground level. The front porch is a decent size. We'll probably have to build up a higher rail so that our tipsy friends don't ... tip ... but the view to the street should still be just fine. Eventually, we'll probably put a little table and some chairs out there. Or a hammock. Mimosas at sunrise, anyone?

For the record, I'm sitting on the steps in this picture. I'm not two feet tall. (Though at my last doctor's visit, I found out that I may be shrinking. Lost a half inch in the last year alone. Sam says one data point is not sufficient to indicate a trend, but I don't have much height to lose in the first place....)

We'll post pictures of the inside and backyard in subsequent posts.

And So It Begins

Sam and Ben made good progress today, unboarding most of the rest of the windows, ripping out the living room carpet and scraping off at least one layer of linoleum and tile in the main part of the house. They also painted part of the living room in colors we had considered the night before. It turns out that paint swatches do not necessarily translate well into bigger areas, so it's back to the drawing board on those. Who knew that two very different shades of green could both look like toothpaste when put up on a wall?

Unfortunately I couldn't take off work to pitch in, but the boys seem to be doing fine without me. Plus, Ben promises there's still lots of "fun stuff" left to be done over the weekend.

A lot of our new neighbors have been swinging by to see what's going on with the house. In fact, we met quite a few of them during inspections, before the house was even ours. From them, we got a little of the back story of the house: The previous owners lived there for over 40 years, and the husband/father made "improvements" to the house as time and money permitted. However, the family must have been borrowing against the house, as they faced foreclosure after the husband/father passed away last year. When they finally moved out, they could only find eight of their nine cats, which helps explain part of the house's stench. Our pest inspector confirmed this story when he found the remains of a cat under the porch; curiously, it seems that someone went and stole the cat's body sometime in the last few weeks. (Not that we're going to press charges or anything.)

After the family moved out, a vagrant friend of theirs decided to stay and conduct satanic rituals in the basement (as evidenced by the morbid Latin scrawlings adorning the basement walls). Eventually, he was evicted and the windows were boarded up, leaving the house -- dead cat, vomit-stained walls, oyster-filled sink and all -- to fester for months on end. We were the first happy house hunters to unlock that magic concoction.

Sam said he met a few more neighbors from the townhomes next door. It turns out that they actually built those townhomes, and had similar aspirations for our dear ole Bagley Project. Luckily, they weren't paying attention when our house went on the market. ... In any case, I think we're scoring plenty of points with the other neighbors just by promising not to tear the house down and build more townhomes.

Sadly, I have to push off posting pictures for another day. It's late again and, again, I have some work and sleep to catch up on. I would've checked in earlier, but just as I was coming home to my apartment my neighbor grabbed me to be an extra in his movie. I'm no actor, but it was pretty fun getting up into the camera like that. I'm sure I'll miss Fremont when I move, but I know Wallingford is full of characters and adventures as well.

Welcome

Hi folks, and welcome to The Bagley Project. The last few days have been a whirlwind, rushing to pull together last-minute loan documents, signing a ream of documents with a really-high-on-life escrow officer and, finally, getting the keys to our old-but-new-to-us home in Wallingford. Both Sam and I are really excited about the months to come; we're going to see the house through a complete transformation.

Sometime soon one of us will fill you in on our story to date, and will post pictures of the work in progress. For now, it's getting late and there are other aspects of life that need some attention (namely, work and sleep).

Stay tuned.