Every since I was a teenager I dreamed about owning my own home that was paid in full. After years of giving my money away for rent I was finally able to find a small 3 bedroom 1 bath brick house for sale for $20k on Facebook Marketplace. I messaged the poster and asked about a potential rent to own agreement and they agreed! To top it off they said they would also agree to $19k instead of $20k! I was so excited!!!
This couldn't have came at a better time because I was currently living in my grandmother's barn with 3 kids and my husband! After our home caught on fire, we were forced to evacuate and it was a really hard time in our life. Finally things were looking up and I was so happy to start renting to own a home of our very own!
A little back story on the house: The house was about to become condemned because the previous owner & family had to leave on a whim for unknown reasons. It was as if they were starting their day & left suddenly, leaving everything in its place, and it was like this for over 3 years.
We thought it was pretty strange but were glad we were able to save it and make it our very own. After we had it as clean as we could we started to really notice the amount of damage there was to the house but we were determined to fix it. We had to tear up the curled flooring in the kitchen and try our best to paint the entire house which was caked up with 50+ years of nicotine on the walls. I had never really painted that much before so I didn't have a clue as to what I was doing, but I continued on day by day. We figured it out as we went along and learned from our mistakes.
First mistake was we pulled the flooring up with out mask or anything because we couldn't afford them! Well there was mold and probably asbestos and maybe some rare unknown cancer causing dust everywhere! I'm praying that doesn't come back to bite me in 10 or 20 years!
The second mistake was that we wiped the walls down with some water after making repairs and spot sanding which we later that following summer found out was not good enough. The nicotine tar under the paint started to get very hot in the Alabama heat and started to run down the newly painted walls. I was so upset about it but after doing some research pinterest I found out I could use a hot water and vinegar combo to get the nicotine out of the walls for good. It seems to have past the test of a whole summer with no nicotine streams running down the walls! Yay!
They want me to stay!!!
Later on we decided we had to replace our kitchen floor because it was about to fall in so my husband and his brother tore up the floor piece by piece and after about 3 days they were able to completely replace the floor all on their own with 0 experience! They did accidentally break the built in cabinets I was trying to salvage but they replaced them with some brand new ones so I can't complain. It turns out there was so much water damage under the floors that some floor joist had to be replaced so the guys just added some new reinforcements, laid a layer of sub floor and then plywood. Last but not least we decided to put down some stone tile vinyl flooring and we were done! ...For now.
Adding more as I can...
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