This farm needed a lot of work in every aspect - house, barn, all sheds, every field, every fence row - and none moreso than the other. We had been told by the real estate agent that the wife had left the husband 2 years before, the implication being that the entire farm had only been neglected for those 2 years. Later, neighbors told us that she had been gone for 5 years but the reality is that this place had been neglected ever since the husband's parents moved in - appro. 1975.
DH and 2 of our sons came up 1 week early before we moved in to take the wall down between the tiny kitchen/dining room and the main living room. DH needed to be in the basement quite a bit as there was hydro in the wall that needed to be looked after in the basement. When he got to the basement, he realized that he wasn't going to get anything done on that wall for a while - he couldn't get through the basement until he cleaned it up first. There was stuff down there that had been there we figure for at least 50 years. An old chair had rotted against the wall and piles of old lumber had to be removed, one piece at a time.
It had been so many years since wood had been burned down there (if ever) but there was firewood in one section. The only furnace was an oil furnace that was so old, it no longer worked and had to be removed. 2 old oil tanks that had been condemned also had to removed. There was no more room for any other furnace or wood stove so we're not sure as to why there was firewood but after all those years in the basement, that wood certainly was dry and made some great fires that first winter. Only problem was, these pieces were huge and each one had to be brought upstairs and chopped up.
There were live wires hanging everywhere down there (and all over the whole house) and outlets and light switches (downstairs as well as upstairs) that did not work. We're thinking that the owner fancied himself an electrician and we're shocked (no pun intended!) that we're all still here to tell the story. My son found 2 nails through live wires, 1 through the board and batten in the garage and the other through the upstairs bathroom where they're renovating now. He wasn't too happy about being shocked twice and I'm wondering how many cat lives he has left!
The strangest thing that DH found down there was what he found under the stairs - old boots, shoes and gloves. Some went way back through the years, some were fairly new. There were a large number of recent children's shoes that must have belonged to the owner's 2 sons who were about 13 and 15. There wasn't much to laugh about with the whole situation of supposedly respectable people leaving years and years of their junk behind but he did have to laugh when he realized that the children's shoes got smaller and smaller the further back they went. We figure now that even the children's mother (the ex-wife) was in on it. They must have taken each pair of shoes as the boys outgrew them, set them on the first step and kicked them backwards under the steps. How else could so many shoes end up under there in such perfect order of growing - and in full, matching sets? Why not give them to second-hand clothing shops?
When he started the job that first day, DH had no idea that it would take 3 days just to clean up under the stairs. That stuff under there went on forever and reached so far back that he needed a rake to reach it all. He brought huge garbage can after garbage can, packed to overflowing, up the stairs, time after time which I imagine is why the stuff was still down there - they didn't want to do all that work. I can't really blame them except if they hadn't put it all down there in the first place...
DH only had 5 days to work on the house because we were moving in then. 5 days seemed like a lot of time to get a lot done. It was a 2-hour drive each way and after they'd done that for 1 day, I told them to take the mattresses (they were going to take some furniture along anyway, might as well be mattresses), packed them food for a few days along with mousetraps and sent them on their way. At first they thought it a dumb idea - until that first night when they realized that they could work as late as they wanted, stop to eat whenever they wanted or not at all, didn't have that long drive home at night but best of all, didn't have to get cleaned up at the end of the day because there were no women around to tell them to. I think that they were pretty much in a man's heaven ---except for the basement. DH was serious about getting it done because of the mouse/rat problem (we weren't sure which it was at that point) and he didn't want to give them any extra hiding places in the basement. After everything, the basement never did get completely done because as soon as we moved in, there were, unfortunately, other pressing worries.
He ended up using the last 2 hours of the 5th day to take down the kitchen wall then drove the 2 hours home. We were all pretty deflated after that and we hadn't even moved in yet. We knew that this place had problems and we were used to farms with problems as we had always bought old farms with unfixed houses but this farm got us down before we even got started. We've been behind the 8 ball the whole 2.5 years that we've been here. I feel like we're a flock of Chicken Littles, running all over patching this problem before it breaks completely, fixing that problem so that we can keep using it. The next few years will prove interesting, just to see how many of our dozens of projects get done!
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