January 2012

The month started off with looking for a new place to live. Levi and I decided that the town house wasn't for us. So we searched and found an old, unkempt, dirty farm house. Sound fun? After we looked at it I told Levi "No way!" but we ended up signing the lease. We had to clean the whole place up, which took the whole month of January. The basement was full of rotting wood pallets, dirt, dead mice, spider webs and everything gross you can imagine. The main floor had dirty, old furniture left in the rooms and the floor was really uneven with an old ugly and dirty chip board floating wood floor that was missing in some sections. The fans had 1/2 inch of dirt caked on them and the walls were just as dirty. The whole place was disgusting. We convinced the owner to let us re-do the flooring in the living room, downstairs bedroom, entry way, and laundry room. As well as repaint the inside. Levis dad, Gary, decided he would like to help and we definitely needed it! So he flew out from Arizona. The same day he arrived we helped Logan and Amanda into their own apartment.
 We got to work with all the cleaning of the basement and ripping out the floating wood flooring. Then Levi and his dad leveled out the floor by doing an overlay of 1/2 inch plywood and shimming in places that needed it. When that was done we put peel and stick tiles down in the entry way and laundry room, and had carpet installed in the living room and bedroom. We repainted everything and put floor boards down. As well as deep cleaned everything.
  I didn't add a lot of "before" pictures because they don't give us justice to how much work we three did. In the basement there were mouse traps everywhere with dead mice in them, and a lot of bugs. Levi made his own mouse trap using a bucket, antifreeze, and peanut butter. He caught a mouse too!
 After all the TLC was completed the house actually turned out really cute and nice and cozy. We haven't caught any more mice or seen any signs of mice. There is the occasional moth or spider but that is pretty normal. We finally felt comfortable enough to move in about the second week of February. Before:
  The nicer pictures with furnishing are from when the "owners" lived in the house. The other pictures are 2years later after renting the place. After: