The crazy owner and more

So when we showed up the place looked good -- but it immediately had some problems.

The biggest one, by far, is the smell in the kitchen. It really, really smelled like dog. But the whole house was really dirty too -- dog hair everywhere, cobwebs, etc. We were a bit disappointed, to be honest, because it just didn't feel nice, like you'd hope a new house would. But it was clear that we could fix things up eventually, so happily it is a short-term problem.

We hired a cleaning crew to show up the next day, but they ended up doing a really poor job. So we had to go out and buy a new vacuum, and start trying to figure out how to get the dog smell out of the kitchen So far Alison's scrubbed down the floors once with a special pet product -- Nature's Miracle -- and I've scrubbed it down twice with bleach. We've also washed all of the walls. It now just smells a bit musty instead of intensely doggy (much worse than any place I've been to before that had dogs).

Why did it smell so bad and why didn't we notice it before? Well, that seems to have to do with the previous owner. When we were buying it, we were told that he was sick and so it could be hard for him to show the unit. It is now clear that he had a serious mental illness -- sounds like he was bipolar. Somewhat recently the cops broke down his door to pull him out of the condo and also somewhat recently he was suddenly hospitalized for a week. Evidently, he was hospitalized without warning and so his dog was trapped in the condo for several days -- which is, supposedly, when the "dog smell" became really bad. I am fairly sure that we are going to just need to replace the hardwood floors (which were beaten up anyway) -- hopefully that'll solve the smell problem.



We have also been finding dog hair everywhere in the condo. The air conditioning intake was just full of dust and hair. We pulled two vacuum canisters worth of hair out of the dryer-duct. It is just everywhere. But I think we have basically gotten rid of it all now.

We had plenty of time to clean before our stuff arrived, because the truck showed up with our stuff and couldn't fit in the alley behind our place, like they had planned. The cops came by and said they couldn't be in the street (no cars could pass), so they just had to leave. So our stuff showed up the following Wednesday instead of Saturday. One thing we did in our empty house is learn to paint and paint over the ugliest color in the house -- in the far back room, which Alison will use as a den. We have other painting we want to do too.




So anyway, those have been the basic trails and tribulations. Oh, and we can't pull our car into the garage because the slope is too steep and it scratches the bottom of the car. And one of the windows is broken. So we need to have concrete work done, a window installed, and new floors put in. So we are learning about home ownership quickly, but luckily we can put a lot of time into it over the summer and I think it'll be in good shape soon.

But anyway, our stuff is here and we've unpacked half of it and the place is starting to feel like a real home now. So it is good.



Next post I'll talk about how cool our new neighborhood is and some more positive stuff -- sorry if this came across as a big negative -- there's just been a string of problems we've been dealing with.