The updated house photos

Our house is pretty much complete.  Here are some pictures since the fire and renovations.  We still need to hang up some of our pictures and get some blinds.
Its amazing how much damage fire fighters can do!  I know they prevented our house from catching on fire, but all our damage is from them.  It was our neighbors house that had the fire, but to prevent it from spreading, the fire fighters knocked out our windows, cut holes in our roof and soaked the place until there were several inches of water in our basement!

sunroom

dining room

Living room

That's a Bulgarian carpet, similar to a Turkish Kilim, from Chirprovtsi.

through the living room to the dining room

kitchen

Here are Polly and Micha trying to figure out what I am looking at.  The kitchen- only room not damaged in the fire.  Too bad, it was on our list to renovate when we bought the house.  Very late 1980s: tile counter tops, golden oak cabinets, etc. 

upstairs hallway

One good thing about the fire was that all the electrical had to be brought up to date.  The contractor put extra outlets in every room.  Before the fire, we had only one outlet in the office.  If you wanted to print, you had to unplug something else!  And some of the overhead lights didn't have switches, just pull cords.  You had to walk upstairs in the dark and search to pull the cord to turn the hall light on!

spare bedroom

Office

Got my Mac back!

I couldn't figure out how to take a picture that showed the whole room.  There is a new skylight, but it doesn't show in pictures. 

master bedroom

The good thing about the new bed is you can fit much more stuff underneath it.  This is good when you leave in an old house and have only one closet (and a tiny one at that) in the master bedroom.

That's where we are so far.  The basement is still a wreck, but I have a new, more secure basement door and the washer, dryer and laundry sink are all hooked up again. 

We have a new tenant, I didn't take pictures of her room, which would be the children's room.  Its a little smaller than our room and is painted a gray blue.  

Pretty nice!  We bought a fixer-upper and had made a priority list, but the fire took care of most of that.  We only need to update the kitchen, basement and backyard.  Everything else was taken care of by the fire fighters and insurance.  It took 5 months, but things are back and better than they were in time for the holidays.

moving forward

We have been out of our house since July 8th.  It has been a headache.  The insurance guy didn't return a phone call or e-mail for the first 5 weeks.  After that he would only communicate with my husband and only occasionally.  The people hired to pack out our belongings destroyed a lot of our stuff and left water and food lying around for months.  When the contractor was finally allowed to get started, he got a lot of work done only to have it destroyed by water coming in from the still unrepaired house next door.  We have to fight insurance for every penny, vet bills from smoke inhalation for the pets, having the closets painted, replacing our destroyed belongings, exterminators and a new cleaning service.  Finally, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The contractor is finished.  Nearly everything is new: walls, floors, wiring, boiler, windows, paint, floors, etc.  The company that packed out our house is supposed to return all our belongings Monday.  I doubt they will, from their track record.  But that means next week is unpacking, cleaning and cataloging what was destroyed or ruined by the cleaning service.  I can't wait to have my coat back, it is snowing today!  I can't wait to get our pets back, they have been living with my parents for nearly 5 months.
Unfortunately, as they tore the house apart, they found more things that needed to be repaired.  Insurance wouldn't cover it because it wasn't caused by the damage.  We have drained our adoption fund.  Time to start saving again.
Last weekend we picked up some furniture from my friend.  She is moving to Hawaii and it would actually be cheaper to buy the furniture all over again than to ship it.  There were a few inexpensive things like Ikea end tables, rugs and lamps, but she had some really nice things like a Crate and Barrel sofa bed and ottoman, dining table and bed.  All the stuff is relatively new.  We should be moving into our house next weekend or the one after that. 
We'll finally be ready to have our homestudy.  I am ready to put this all behind me. 

Not such good news

I posted a week or 2 ago about our failed attempt to get new windows.  We had a contractor out today to take a look.  He pulled back the drywall and behind it was poorly made- exterior wall framing needs to be a certain size lumber.  The aluminum siding needs to sealed up properly so that water cannot seep behind it.  We are going to need to shore it up with proper framing- up to code. 
The addition had originally been a screened in sleeping porch, and when the previous owners decided to close it in (themselves) they just tacked windows in the openings and hung sheet rock over the paneling and put aluminum siding outside.  No permits, no inspectors, nothing up to code.  We didn't know how bad it was until we tried to have new windows installed.   Why didn't this come up in our home inspection?
I was concerned about financing the adoption, but now I don't see how it will all get done.    This is going to postpone our homestudy, ugh.
I know it isn't as bad as houses on this show, the main part of the house is solid, but the addition...

So clearly not my house, but I wish Ty Pennington would come and fix it up for us! ;-)  Or that TV show where they come in and fix what bad contractors did.  Actually, that house doesn't look bad, I mean before they started tearing it down.