Florida stories: Fixing an ugly house

A recurring theme on this blog has been the renovation of this house. When we made the bubble-headed decision to move here, we thought we'd better have a house to move to. So we flew in and spent one day looking at property, picked two houses, made offers that were accepted and went back to San Diego. We did the rest of the process remotely. Silly us. We trusted the real estate agent in Clearwater, a $cientologist who was recommended by another $cientologist.

We knew that the house had some problems. We knew we were going to be doing some "remodeling." That was okay, we'd done plenty of that in San Diego. The inspection that was done didn't cause us any particular alarm, so we thought, "It's fine, just some paint, a little tile, no sweat." Well, we'd been in too much of a hurry and hadn't registered a lot of what was wrong. For instance, I'd completely forgotten that three rooms had been coated with thick plaster that had been "pulled" with a wet sponge, so the end result looked surprisingly like meringue (think of a lemon meringue pie, just like that). All that plaster had to be scraped off and the walls resurfaced. That was a lot of work.

We knew the colors weren't quite right and that we'd be painting, but we'd forgotten how weird the house really was -- low ceilings, odd spaces with no right angles, dark rooms, bizarre solutions to add-ons. So when we arrived and started living in this house, we were worried, to say the least. I can't possibly tell you or show you all that we did -- it's simply too much. But here are a few photos that will give you an idea:

So this is the house that we made beautiful and aesthetic and easy to care for and easy to live in. And this is the house we finally sold so that we can get out of Florida and go live in Oregon, where sane, intelligent, good people live (I know that all my friends who don't live in Oregon at the present, will certainly move there as soon as they possibly can).

Next stop, Portland. ROOOOOAD TRIIIIIIIIP!