Back a few years ago, my wife and I were looking to purchase a house. Nothing fancy, perhaps something that needed “some work” but was basically livable as is. I knew some basic home repair stuff, but was pretty ignorant regarding buying a house.

We had a real estate agent help us out. He would browes the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and would come up with several houses to go look at, which we dutifully did. Eventually we chose one, put in an offer, negotated and finally signed a contract. The real estate agent then recommended an attorney and a structural inspector. Everything is going along swimmingly.

We closed on February 3rd of 2004. A few days later, I began to do some basic clean up, removing wall paper old carpet and so on when I noticed the first problem. In one of the bedrooms there was a two inch gap between the floor and the wall. I proceeded to get a flash light and discovered I was looking at the ends of several termite damaged joists.

Things got worse. I spoke to the structural inspector, he stated that he could not find the access to the crawl space under the area in question so he had not looked at it. Now, at this point, I was pretty perturbed. I had paid $450.00 for the sturctural guy to come out and look things over, now it turns out his liability is only up to his fee.

I had a contractor friend of mine come out on the next Saturday, we created an access way through the basement of the house into the crawl space which was an addition. Now things were about as bad as they could get. Once inside we discovered the entire floor system of the 430 foot addition needed to be replaced due to termite damage. The previous owners had tried to repair it by nailing pressure treated lumber over the distroyed floor joists and the center girder. All the while the Property Disclosure Form, required by NY State law, showed there was no termite damage, nor any of the other problems that we later found.

Over the next few months, we gutted that addition, removed the floor, jacked up the outside shell of the house to replace the sill and the box, installed a new girder, new joists, and new sub floor. Then moved to a second smaller addition and did basically the same thing. So, we were now about $30,000 into the project, and no renovations had been comepleted. Here is were the story picks up.

Over the next several months I installed a kitchen, re-did all the plumbing, re-did the entire hydronic heating system, installed a wood stove, re-wired the electric in the additions, install a second bathroom, installed bathroom fans, re-finished the hard wood floors and painted. We finally moved in on June 30th 2004. Since then it has been one project after another. I will attempt to discribe each of the projects.

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