Every house I've ever lived in (rented or houses that my parents had bought) has been clean when we moved in. Maybe not perfect- but clean enough for you to feel comfortable moving your things into.
So we never thought to put a requirement into our contract to have the house professionally cleaned. Let me just say that unless we have a home built, we will never buy another home without requiring the house be professionally cleaned.
We had our walk through at 5 pm the night before closing and I was mostly looking to see that the sellers had fixed the things we'd asked them to take care of after our inspection. I never thought to look closely at the baseboards, the edges of the carpet, the ceiling fans, and checked every cabinet so it's partly my fault.
We went to the house the day after we closed to start painting, but instead spent the next 2 days literally cleaning the house from top to bottom. The sellers I'm sure are wonderful people, but in the 2 or 3 years they lived in the house I can tell you they never once dusted, washed the windows, or used the extension on their vacuum. I'm not even sure they owned a vacuum. We've discovered many half-hearted DIY projects which is why we'll just call the previous owners the "Sloppy Sally's."
So after the scrubbing, vacuuming, windexing, hole patching, dusting the dust blankets off the ceiling fans, and chair rail removing (which were cut all at the same angle so they looked like two arrows pointing at each other at every corner) -we began priming and painting, and removing and replacing broken outlet covers, blinds and broken closet doors.
In one week we were able to clean and prep the house, get the paint and several improvements done and unload the PODS container. Had we not had some major help it would have taken the two of us a year to do all that since our nugget can't hang out in her pack n' play while we are working (she plays for 5 minutes then whine/fake cries/real cries til we get her out).
My family is nothing short of incredible. My dad and mom spent hours and hours cleaning, spackling, sanding, removing doors, making trips to Lowe's with me, priming, painting and watching Brooklyn so Daniel and I could work on the house. My brother and sister-in-law spent their entire weekend watching Brooklyn and helping us move all of our furniture and boxes in from the storage container. Had my sister and her fam lived closer they would have been there too (actually, when we packed in Oregon- they drove down and helped us pack up our house!).
We had some work done on our fireplace and had new carpet put in the living room and hallways since it was beyond nasty. As of today we have most everything unpacked but still need to hang pictures and such.
There are still things to do - all of our lights are builder basic from the mid 90's so I'd like to change those, and somewhere down the line there will be renovations to both bathrooms and the kitchen. This weekend we are going to tackle the garage and try to get the sea of leaves out of our dog decimated backyard (that badly needs some TLC). I'll post all the pre-move in pics next week- promise! For now I'm going to work on B's one year post, break down some more boxes and dream of a day when I can finally get that post renovation manicure!
Love,
Why did we buy a house again??
P.S. Anyone wanna come help be paint all the trim and doors? .......Anyone??? ......Bueller????
I feel your pain! When we moved into our house there was dust caked on the walls where the curtains hung! I discolored the walls but I never thought to look under the curtains when we were going through the house, and don't even get me started on the window seals and back door! :)
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