Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Myrtle House Before pics and video

 Here is our house in Myrtle before we bought it. We bought it sight unseen, but we did have my sister and her husband (who is a contractor) walk through it and make sure it was structurally sound. The house was a forclosure and had been through the ringer. We bought it AS IS for $32,000! 1600 sq ft 3bed 1bath. It came with six acres of land, a barn, well, fully fenced and garden area. It was pretty much the cheapest house in the nation that we could find with everything on our check list. Now before you start romancing the idea let me explain that this place was in rough shape!
  • It had 3 broken out window, and broken out sliding glass door, and back door
  • No water was running to the house, the well was and still is not functioning, we are currently on city water.
  • There was no A/C and only wall heaters which did not sufficiently heat the house (they also ran our energy bill up to $400 in Dec. 
  • The house reeked of cigarettes!
  • Nasty orange shag carpet (they had several dogs that also lived in the house)
  • Ceiling tiles (which were gold in color because of the smoking) 
  • Wood paneling thru-out
  • The kitchen was so dark you could not see in the corners 
  • It had the scariest bathroom I have ever seen! 
  • I will not going to go into detail but there was a mouse problem and we did find a snake skin in the attack. 
  • The siding is rotting out in places
  • Very under insulated (we froze our tails off! it was the coldest winter of my life)
  • The roof was and still is leaking slightly in the dining room
For the first two weeks we literally worked ourselves to exhaustion getting this place livable (my sister let us crash on her couch, the poor thing was in her first trimester and super sick) then we moved in and slept on mattresses on the floors for a while till we got painting and flooring done in most room. 
Are we done fixing it up? No not at all, I haven't even started on the laundry room but we have made significant progress and hope in the next two years it will get there. I didn't take very many pics before because honestly I was super consumed with just working on it but here are a few I do have along with a video walk through my sister did for us.


front of house



north side of house

This is were some sort of furnace was that the previous tenant saw fit to take with them
Back of house facing the East



 Patio in the back was rotting and fell down with a couple pulls (we plan to build a new big one that attaches to an above ground pool!)


 Brother in law Mario (the contractor) super talented guy

The barn(on left) the previous tenant took the wiring so there is no electricity out there and the well house(on right)

 they were nice enough to a deer leg hanging in the barn for us


the over grown orchard
throughout the 6 acres we have these awesome thorn trees, they are covered in thorns like 3-4in long with some kind of poison on them so if you get poked or scratched it burns.f

 There was also a huge trash pile that we ended up just burning


Let me just say this has been such a fun exciting adventure for our family, its way more work than I thought it would be, but I would do it again. 

Here is a link to another movie of the inside of the house