The Push to Front-Unit Victory

Man oh man... what's been going on in the world of the house?

Well, we've got the front unit officially ready for tenants, so that's exciting. The new (legal! functional! not deadly!) heater got installed just fine, the wall got plastered back up and painted, the moulding got reattached, and we are go.

Oh man, side-rant here: Whoever lived there before obviously thought that the living room was simply getting too much sun on the west side. And instead of getting, oh say, curtains, they decided to implement the most annoying solution possible and get a film of bright purple tinting attached to the three windows on the west side of the house. If you're not familiar with these, let me give you a quick rundown:

1.) They look terrible.
2.) They're a pain to remove.
3.) As you do remove them, they smell revolting.

We thought we'd restore some of the front unit's innate class and take these... what amount to these sticky sheets of purple cellophane... take them down, see? This ended up taking a good number of hours since the sheets were either a.) on the pane behind the screen, in which case they peeled off relatively easily, but left a thin layer of glue that we had to besiege with an acetone-soaked scour pad to remove, or b.) on the pane with no screen, in which case the direct sunlight had made them brittle and unpeelable, requiring us to break out the glass-scrapers.

It was a sticky, purple, toxic-smelling undertaking and I quietly curse whoever installed those, but all this is neither here nor there. The house is ready!

We celebrated by putting the official ad for the place up on Craigslist and fashioning up a rental application (and by eating dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and drinking beer). We used the rental application from our Landlording book as a base, added/removed a few things in line with a couple other applications we found online, and I got a chance to flex my atrophied graphic design muscles trying to fit everything we needed onto one page and still have it be readable and look good.

We'll be drafting up the actual rental agreement next (maybe tomorrow... it's a bit longer than the application, and I'm pretty tired tonight), and I personally want to write/copy every word myself, choosing bits and pieces from example agreement as opposed to just grabbing a random pre-made one and calling it a day. That way, not only will it be totally applicable/tailored to our place, but we'll know it inside and out.

Things are starting to move fast. We'll try to keep this thing updated a bit more.

-AKC

light fixtures

We finished our interior light fixtures over the weekend. The florescent overhead light in the kitchen in particular had been grating on me. It made this terrible buzzing sound, and the light was too blue. We took it down and we had to paint the ceiling that had been obstructed by it. We put it in a 3-bulb fixture and we bought some of those miniature 100W replacement CFLs (the ones that use 23 watts each) to put in it. It's really bright and it looks much much better.

So now we've replaced most of the interior fixtures, and everything looks the way we want it to. By the time I did the last one, I was feeling pretty competent at it. Too bad I won't get to use those skills again for a few years. I guess that's how it goes though!