The Housegleaners: A DIY Freestyle Fixerupper Remodel Blog Focused On Salvage, Reuse, and Upcycling

One good thing about waking up on your jobsite is there's no commute. The downside is dwelling in a dusty, drafty, deficient domicile. The biggest pain right now is lack of kitchen sink (we have almost everything but). Sarah rigged up a provisional kitchen in the living room with countertop, cutting board, coffee maker, and cabinet full of utensils, and the fridge is located conveniently only two rooms away, but cooking becomes less appealing when there's no simple way to do the dishes. Rigging up a temporary sanitation station outside is first on tomorrow's list while tonight's dinner residue soaks overnight in a metal washtub. It's also pretty cold, with today's weather in that bonechilling low 30's zone (1 degree Celsius) where the moist air really gets up in there. This house was built in 1960 and the aluminum windows appear to be original. Some have been switched out for mid grade vinyl (not great but an improvement) but most are single pane metal frame

  Today was moving day, and as usual with these things it came down to the wire, with added pressure of trying to make the 12:20 Bremerton Ferry on time. We spent all New Year's Eve packing and cleaning, went to bed at 11:55, fell asleep to fireworks and revelry in the streets. The cats woke us by walking on our heads right on schedule at 7:30 and the morning was the last sprint to the finish of what has been a months long marathon going back and forth between Kitsap and Seattle. It was a relief watching the city recede on a one-way ticket with no hard deadline for return. Departing by sea is the nicest way to leave Seattle. I packed the truck bed tight as grains in a salt shaker, and when the last stray boot and bag was compressed into place, I doublechecked that the canopy hatch would stay latched against the outward pressure. Then I stacked up the backseat like a bricklayer all the way to the ceiling, bucket seats scooched up a couple of clicks to make use of every inch. Strappe

When we bought this house, the seller's disclosure was a laugh--every box but one was checked "Don't know." The only one checked "Yes" pertained to flooding, which the seller noted in detail was a thing that happened in heavy rain. The day I introduced myself to our next door neighbor Dan, the first thing he said was, "You know it floods." Then he added helpfully, "And the roof leaks." Last week, when I took down the kitchen ceiling, I found that yes, yes indeed, there is a roof leak. And today, after days of heavy rains and snow melt, I came back to the house and found an impressive amount of water lapping at the foundation of the garage. Tempting to call it a lake, but it's only a few inches deep, and really it's more of a river, stretching all the way to the back of the lot in a graceful curve around the higher ground of the woodshop. We know the previous owners tried to address this. There's a cut filled with rock that st

I already partly started tearing up the kitchen floor, the oldest part of this 1960 house. Beneath delaminated linoleum and a waterdamaged layer of 3/4" plywood, there were 3/4" shiplap boards for a subfloor, rotted through in spots (I found out when I stepped through a few), consequence of water damage from when frozen pipes burst two owners ago. But at least the floor in the kitchen is roughly level. In the living room, the floor dives down at the front wall. Telltale saggy ceiling suggests the foundation is subsiding. I'm surprised the large aluminum windows haven't cracked yet. I had a sneaking suspicion there was a problem with drainage under the front deck because in today's rain I heard water gurgling in the downspout but none was coming out the 4" PVC pipe sticking out from under the front edge of the deck, where it should have been trickling runoff onto the lawn but wasn't. The downspout disappeared into a hole in the deck. The only way to assess