Finally Cooking!

So it has officially been one year since we moved out of our old house and in with my parents. On July 9th, it will be one year since we purchased this house.  Almost done, but we still have a lot to do. But there has been great progress made, so wanted to share a bit of that here...


The kitchen is well on it's way. We have assembled all of the cabinets and have to put in a few filler pieces and the baseboard around the bottom before it's complete, but it is usable and functional and I am grateful. There have been several mishaps along the way...

 Not ordering enough countertop was one.  We bought butcher block intending to use it as shelving. For our kitchen countertops I had grand ideas of Joe building polished concrete ones from scratch. That takes a lot of time and expertise, so in the interest of getting into our house this year, we decided to use the purchased butcher block for our countertops until we had a little time and freedom to do what we wanted.  The problem is, we didn't buy enough, as you can see in the picture on the left. So we will head off to Ikea soon to get another piece. Until then, we have easy access to the drawer underneath!

 Also we discovered that our large farmhouse sink had a crack in it right out of the box.  Thankfully, Joe's grandpa hopped up to Ikea for us and painlessly exchanged it. While we waited for a sink, Joe got the backsplash taken care of.  It went a lot more quickly than the shower, and this will be the last subway tile we install for awhile. It's small and tedious.

 When we did get the sink exchanged, the drawer meant to be installed underneath suddenly didn't fit. It banged against the bottom of the sink.  We tried lowering it, to no avail. Joe decided to raise the entire countertop slightly, since the sink rested on that. Success! But now we have a bit of a gap in between in the cabinets and the bottom of the counter so we have to get creative with covering that up.

 Once the sink was in place, I sanded down the counters and oiled them.  This looked nice for a little bit, but I think it's more maintenance than I'd like, and may seal them.  If you have any pointers on that, I would love to hear.
 We also got the stove hooked up.  It is interesting cooking completely with gas, but so far I can't complain!  I'm so glad I went with the extra wide stove. When we host things, it will come in handy!

 We have not installed lights in the kitchen yet, so we have the lovely work lights (see left) plugged in help us in the dark.  We have the range hood above the stove screwed in, but have not installed the pipe that leads the smoke/steam outside so for now it's just our work light so that we can see what we are cooking.

A few weeks ago, some friends came into town for the sole purpose of helping us get the house ready.  The guys were able to put up most of the baseboard trim around the house and begin working on the windows.  These are the things I didn't think about when we were gutting the walls and redoing floors. There are TONS of minor details to take care of. We installed baseboard throughout. Then you have to go back and install quarter round moulding on that, followed by caulking the seams and painting everything.  When you have a whole house to do, this is quite daunting!  Thankfully, we're on the tail end of it. Everything is now installed, most of it caulked, getting started painting. We've been blessed with selfless family who have come alongside us on these simple, but incredibly time consuming, tasks.  Shout out to Joe's dad, Michael and grandfather, Poppy and my dad, Phil! Window trim means that I finally get the window sill of my dreams in the kitchen.  Look at how wide that is.  Love it and can't wait to grow some more cute plants.

Since Joe redid all the plumbing in the house himself, I asked if it would be possible to have a pot filler. Joe came through, but we've had a hole in the tile waiting for a bit now. We hadn't had an opportunity to install it, trying to work on other parts of the house.  Some dear friends came into town and decided to help us tackle a few tasks, including installing that beauty!! The kids love it, and are very excited about water coming out of a weird place in the wall. I wonder if they make child locks for those things...




All in all, it's coming along. Lots of finishing touches to be done, but it will come.  We are very excited to welcome Joe's step dad, Buddy, who is coming into town just to help us finish up.  No words. I am just grateful.  Until next time..

Status update

Hello ladies and gents! This is a long, rambling blog so bear with me...

I have fallen behind in the blogging lately, much in part thanks to our fun new addition who is now almost 2 months old!!  We are a family of 6 and I love it! It hasn't been as much of an adjustment going to 4 kids as it was to 3, so I am thankful for that. The baby is super easy and it is wonderful to see his siblings love him well.

We have been slowly, slowly trucking along on the house. In our last update, we were prepping for dry wall to be installed throughout the house. If we thought the prep time was taking awhile, the actual installation took way longer... In retrospect, we should have ripped all of the existing sheet rock and dry wall out of the house and started from scratch. Instead, we patch worked a lot of the places which added a lot of time to the project. But with a TON of help from our family and friends, we finally got it done.

 See the patchwork sheetrocking in the picture to the right?  So tedious... I'm sorry to everyone that helped with this.. This house has definitely been a learning project every step of the way, and next time we will just start from scratch!  Also you'll see the floors that Joe just finished had to be covered in plastic to protect them from the insane amounts of dust produced when sanding the mud in between dry wall sheets.

 Seriously, dust for MILES. The plastic under Joe's feet used to be clear. If we do anything like this again, apparently they make a vacuum attachment that will suck up the dust as you sand. It would be a worthy investment for sure.

 One good thing is that our master bathtub arrived!  I spent a good bit of time researching a soaking tub that also would not be too high up to step in for a shower and came across this gem that had good reviews and was the right price compared to the $1000+ tubs I was coveting. Our master bathroom still looks like this, but when we get around to finishing it, I'm so excited to use this baby.

Once all the walls were sanded and even, it was FINALLY time to paint!! Some gracious friends loaned us their paint sprayer and we were able to prime the entire house super fast.  I wanted separate colors for the rest of the house, so recruited some friends and we had a ladies night paint party. It was

 so fun and got done really quickly with everyone working together. I was really glad to actually get to DO something since most of time I am with the kids instead of working on the house. The times when I try to do both are hit or miss, for obvious reasons.  So the house is now painted and so we got to remove all of the plastic off of the floors and windows. I can't tell you how glad I was to do that, because of the Dexter vibe that all the plastic was giving off. When we removed the plastic, we cleaned the floor really well and decided that it needed one more coat of polyurethane so that we would be be confident that it was protected and would last awhile with our 4 kids and a dog.  We went with Bona Traffic HD in Satin.  Bona is a water based polyurethane which is different than the oil-based we originally used. Water based dries much more quickly and we wanted to be able to continue working on the house soon after applying it.  So far it has been perfect. I will share some pictures on the next update.

After painting was done, I could finally start to set up the kitchen!! All of our cabinets are DIY assembly so I got to work on that as soon as I could.  All of the bases are assembled and now we have to install them or attach them to the walls before we add doors, kickboard, drawers, etc.

         
 You get a glimpse of our ceiling in this picture, which I am stoked about. I wish I could convince Joe to add it throughout the house, but alas... I will be satisfied with the kitchen since that's where we'll spend the bulk of our time.

  My stove also is in it's place (although not functional yet) and it is a beaut. It is gas, which I've never cooked with, but imagine I'll learn quickly.  I went for a 36in (standard is 30in) 5 burners, stainless steel gorgeousness.  The things I get excited about now... my 20 year old self would be in shock.

Rambling aside, what you really wanted to know was where we are in the renovation process...

To move in we need :

• Functional kitchen 
• At least one functional bathroom
• Baseboard installed (not necessary but I really want it done before I try to set up furniture)

Where we are with that list:

• Kitchen is pictured above, so we are halfway there.
• Bathroom is *almost* done but not quite. We do have a toilet and the shower is halfway tiled thanks to Joe's mom and my dad. The sink is functional and here's a sneak peak of it to the right. 

I'm still trying to work out small details like backsplash and hiding the plumbing underneath. But I like how this turned out and will share details of how it was put together on a future blog.

• Baseboard was delivered to the house yesterday and Joe will probably get to work installing that this weekend.  

So we are very close, but not quite there. Once again, shout out to all of the wonderful friends and family (framily?) that have helped us throughout this process. We totally could not have done it alone!  

Guest Bathroom and Dry Wall Update! (alternately: We finally have a place to pee)

Disclaimer: There are no awesome before/after shots in this post... Someone asked me why I wasn't keeping up with the blog and I said "There hasn't been any photo-worthy progress lately."  I think my dear husband may have been a little (or a lot) offended, so in the interest of showing that things ARE progressing... here we go:


One of the many unknown issues we have ran into was that the plumbing was on it's way out. Like, "replace it now for cheaper or replace it later for way more money because something might burst in a wall somewhere", out. Because the Great Water Management Project (GWMP for short) and all of the tiny projects that entailed (french drain, new floors, dry well, etc) drained our budget significantly, this was a project Joe decided to take on himself.  He has a basic knowledge of plumbing, and our city has to approve any plumbing plan, so with a lot of preparation and a little YouTube, set to it.

Joe's plumbing diagram. The man is thorough!

 Because all of the old plumbing had to be ripped out, we didn't have a toilet for quite awhile.  We aren't living in the house yet, so it's not THAT big of a deal.  It does, however, get kind of tiring since when I am at the house I usually have 3 tiny bladders in tow along with a baby kicking mine, so we have become very familiar with the local restaurants and stores. (My bad, Walgreens.  You were totally being used for your potty, not your pharmacy.)  But I am excited to report that Joe got the plumbing done, which means that (drum roll please...)

We can use the bathroom in our house again!!!!  

Here is the guest bathroom before:

Guest bathroom before

Bath before

This bathroom is original to the house, but had been "updated" a little here and there along the way. The house sat empty for 6 months so mildew creeped up on a few things, like the toilet.  The subway type tile on the walls was actually a cheap plastic veneer, and chipping off badly.  There was no shower. It was only a bathtub. To complete the look, in it's very best 1970s fashion, was a carpeted floor. Nothing says luxury like carpet in the bathroom!! (Kidding....)



The bathroom was also a Jack-n-Jill style, meaning it was accessible from 2 doors, usually between 2 bedrooms.  This was the case here, but since we turned one of the bedrooms into our kitchen, we decided it wasn't SUPER practical (or sanitary) to have a bathroom directly beside the kitchen, and so it was an easy decision to close the door up.

The first step was to gut the bathroom completely, right down to the studs.  Sometimes you can save dry wall underneath the tile but apparently I'm a bit heavy handed when it comes to prying tiles off and after all the holes created by my crowbar skills, we decided to just take all the dry wall out.  I am glad we did.  Apparently a squirrel had stored acorns behind the sink at some point in the life of the house. We also discovered an active roof leak behind a wall.  Again, let me reiterate the importance of a good inspector.... Underneath the carpet were a few layers of linoleum along with some icky looking sub-floor. My dad and I (okay, mostly my dad, but I definitely helped) patched the subfloor and then installed cement board as a base for the tile.  You CAN install tile directly on sub-floor, but it is highly likely that someone at some point will want to change the flooring, and if you install tile directly on it, they will also have to rip out the sub-flooring to install something new, which is a giant hassle. Plus, like in the case of our 60 year old sub-flooring, it is 2x6 boards that may or may not be even. With tile, it is imperative your floor is even, or tile will be crooked and crack.   With cement board installed and a tile saw in hand, I set to work tiling the floor.

With that and grout complete, Joe could finally install the toilet!! There is nothing else done in the bathroom, other than a few sheets of dry wall for some privacy, but without further adieu, here is our first new toilet in the house...There is dust all over the floor and the grout still needs a good scrubbing, but we finally have a bathroom!  This does my pregnant heart (and bladder) a lot of good! We will continue to work on the bathroom and I can't wait to show you the final product! I'm ready for the picture in my head to have some life!

Now our update on getting walls... apparently City inspectors care a lot about that and how it's done and what's behind it, so it has taken awhile to get it to where it passed inspection and we are able to begin putting sheet rock on the interior perimeter of the house.

Spray foam insulation

Joe and a few awesome friends have worked through the last week or 2 trying to get the house ready for dry wall, which means insulating like crazy. We had to, per inspector, use expensive spray foam insulation on parts of the walls where the outside brick was exposed and on the rest of it, cut small rectangles of insulation to fit between the studs. Thank you to all that got fiberglass all over their being to help us!! We now have the "okay" from the city to start putting up the dry wall, so Joe has been working on that for the last couple of days. It's a slow process, but as soon as walls are up and mudded, we can start priming and painting and are THAT much closer to moving in!

Kids hanging out while we work 

 We are seriously so grateful for everyone that has helped us out so far!  Everyone should have a village, y'all... For real.

Stay tuned!  It can only get more exciting from here:)

Hardwood Mix Party Part 2

Let's start with the positives...                                        

 Hardwoods are done and they are looking great!

Joe sanded everything down, first with drum sander and then an edger (Shout out to Jon for helping edge!). It's a long process... you have to start out with a very rough grit sandpaper and then work your way up to a smaller grit. We did 20, 36, 60, 80, & 100 grits. There were some rough spots, especially where the old wood blended with the new.

The edges were not quite even.

Going over it with 20 grit sandpaper tears up the wood a bit, BUT you have to dig deep to make sure everything is the same level. That's why you keep going over it with higher grit because the higher, the smoother things will end up. After everything was sanded down (and vacuumed and wiped and vacuumed and wiped again), Joe and my dad began the staining process.  We chose a blend of stains because I couldn't decide on a color, and so after a lot of Pinteresting (is that a word? I propose we make it one, pronto) ended up with a 50/50 blend of Minwax Provincial and Dark Walnut. Staining is a fairly easy process (so I'm told, I get out of all the smelly chemical jobs being pregnant and all) and it took them a few hours.  It's basically: Wipe the stain on, wipe the stain off. You have to let it sit for awhile to make sure it's completely dry before you put the protective coats of polyurethane on it, but I snuck by the next day to check out how it turned out and took a picture from the front door. 

After stain, before polyurethane

I was super happy with how it turned out!  I love the look of dark wood, and Dark Walnut stain was definitely my favorite, but we have 3 (almost 4) kids and a hairy dog, and I didn't want to notice every single speck of dirt on the floor, which tends to happen when the floors are darker. 

After everything dried, Joe put a few thin coats of polyurethane on it and here are a few pictures of where we ended up.

 This is the bedroom where we reused all of the old hardwoods.  I don't think the picture does it justice but it looks so good! It's hard to believe they were once beat up old floorboards.

kitchen/dining area

Since it has been so rainy and dreary every time I stop by to take photos, it's hard to appreciate how good everything looks. The last picture above with my stylish shoe protectors is the exact spot where the old and new hardwoods were mixed.  It's amazing what a little sanding and staining can do!  

We may put a coat or 2 more of polyurethane down before it's all said and done, because we want maximum protection, but we took a break to wait until the HVAC was done. Polyurethane doesn't like cold temperatures, and took foooooorrrreeevvveerr (to be read Sandlot style) to dry. The awesome flooring guys who sold it to us recommended we wait until we had some air flow, because the floors stay so cold.  So far, though, love it!  

Now for the negatives....

We have an ongoing electrical saga, where we are trying to figure out some issues with our electrician. It's a bit of a trial.  Meanwhile, we are trying to get ready for the Rough-In inspection so that we can actually put dry wall up throughout the house. The inspectors have to see all the wires in the walls so we have a lot of this going on. 

We are hoping to get that completed within the next few weeks because dry wall is a HUGE step in finally getting moved in.  

Also, although our HVAC system was working well, the ductwork was a giant mess, being that every time it rained, the house flooded in the crawlspace, so we ripped it all out and are finally getting new ductwork put in.  When our HVAC guy went to get his permit and his business license, they wanted him to buy 2 licenses, one for 2015 and the other for 2016.  Not wanting to buy a license that would last a grand total of 1 week, he will return to work when the new year begins. I was hoping to get that done and completed, but alas, it is what it is. So we have all of his supplies hanging out in the kitchen until next year (ha).   

Also, we have kitchen cabinets!! Oh, by that I mean, they are in our possession, somewhat useless at the moment...

I'm so ready to get my hands on those things and assemble them!  Again, waiting on dry wall before we cross that bridge... 

That's the update for now!  Hopefully next time you tune in, we will have wonderful news about inspections passing and having a great big dry wall party.  

Will leave you with a simple pic from A Day in the Life... I get the pleasure of hanging out with my kids all day since we are homeschooling, and so when we need supplies for the house, I usually pick them up with my crew in tow and drop them off so that Joe has them when he gets off of work and heads to work on the house.  

I think our 4 year old is pouting here about something, can't remember what. After lots of comments from lots of people about hands being full (pretty normal occurrence around here), we got through Lowes!

Thanks for reading!! Until next time... 

Hardwood Mix Party! Part One

We have some hardwoods! Woo hoo!  

I know flooring isn't the most exciting topic ever, but if you've ever wondered about laying hardwoods/refinishing hardwoods/had-a-weird-floor-fetish-and-just-like-reading-about-hardwoods, these next posts will be for you!

If you've been following along, you know that 2 of the back rooms in our house had to have new floor joists and sub-floors installed.

Beauty parlor/Master bedroom while there were no floors. We like the sunken in look around here.

In the room that used to be the beauty parlor, there was icky linoleum down so we knew we already had to take that up. In the opposite room, however, there already were hardwoods down that were begging to be sanded and refinished into their former glory. Instead they, also, had to be ripped up.  Our contractor saved as much as he could (i.e. didn't split the wood into a bunch of pieces tearing it up), but we were left with this pile:

Our pile of hardwood complete with finishing nails

If you think reclaimed lumber is a really neat idea but balk at the price, here is some insight. While most of the flooring was salvageable, it was going to take some work to be usable.  So with some help from our dads and Poppy (Joe's grandpa), Joe set to work prying each nail out of the wood.  200ish boards later, we were done!  It was a very tedious process, and took probably 5 hours total. And this was JUST to get nails out of the old wood. Reclaimed lumber is definitely worth a few extra bucks.  While prying the nails out, we had more than 1 person suggest purchasing new wood to save ourselves the trouble, but we're stubborn. And also spendthrifts. So we pried away.

Now comes the fun part:  Putting it all back! 

Laying hardwoods is sort of like Tetris with more rules. Each end can be no more than 6 inches from another end.  It actually looks kind of cool all back in, in a rustic sort of way.  This is just a rough set up because we will have to go back and nail each row down.  

While that was going on in the bedroom, we were also having fun (heh) doing puzzles in the kitchen.  We decided to take out all the walls surrounding the kitchen.  So instead of a separate kitchen, living room, and bedroom we now have a large L-shaped space to use as kitchen/dining/living area.  We had existing hardwoods in the bedroom and living room already, but not in the kitchen, which is right in the middle of the "L".  Also when walls are removed, you have to fix the area where the wall was since it's just sub-flooring underneath.  Here's an incredibly blurry cell phone picture that shows the transition before we started on the floors.

 This picture is taken from the living room area. Kitchen is to the left and the now open bedroom is on the top right. There were a few defunct floor vents as well as the opening where the furnace used to be. all of that had to be included in the hardwood piecing.  So we set to work.  Piecing in new hardwoods is quite the tedious process because you can't just start where the old line separating the rooms is.  You want it to look natural, so you have to take some of the existing hardwoods out so that it will be cohesive. 

When the floors are sanded, it should all look like the light colored hardwood on the bottom and we will be able to stain it all the same color so that you could never tell they were different. I'm excited to see if we can pull it off!  60+ year old wood and brand new wood looking the same will be a fun challenge. 

Our bedroom/beauty parlor is almost done as well!  We've had to do everything in pieces here and there because we are trying to only rent the nail gun so many days at a time (ahem, like I said, spendthrifts).  Once everything is laid down, we can get to work refinishing it all. Those are our big Thanksgiving plans (while hopefully eating delicious food in between).  We have a huge delivery coming from Ikea on the 4th of Dec so we have until then to get these floors done and settled so that things can be put on top of them. No pressure....

Also here's a sneak peak of a beautiful maple slab that I have big plans for.. excited to get to work on that project soon!

I've never worked with wood before other than cutting a piece here and there that Joe needs for his projects, but I am taking control of this one, and feel confident (and a little scared) that it will turn out okay.  Can't wait to share!

Stick around!  

That point in the process where you just want to quit

There was about a month in our home renovation journey when I couldn't step foot in the house without feeling panic, nausea, and wanting to say Screw it.

The thing is, I know that it happens to every homeowner undergoing an extensive remodel. I've watched tons of episodes of HGTV shows, and if you watch closely, every homeowner goes through this range of emotions similar to the grieving process.
Denial "There's no way that floor needs to be ripped out. I stepped on it yesterday and it was FINE.  It may have been a little bouncy, but it was STILL HERE."
Anger  "What the *$@* do you mean it's going to cost THAT much to fix this basic issue?! Don't you understand the budget??!!
Bargaining "Look, we can live with no HVAC/one bathroom/a George Foreman grill as a stove for a long time and be just fine. No need to spend any more money, please?"
Depression  "This house will never, ever be done. I will go crawl under a blanket for awhile now, thanks."
Acceptance "We are going to be over budget and our house looks like a disaster zone. It will be okay.  It is what it is."

To add to our extremely tight budget, we knew that the city would probably make us rewire the house since it desperately needed an upgrade.  We found a cheap electrician by word of mouth and hired him. Joe was focused on the outside of the house and dealing with the water issues (GWMP) and our contractor was discovering the issues inside and removing floors.  Meanwhile, the electrician we hired was busy rewiring in possibly the messiest way known to man.

Here's 25 second clip showing how our home looked:

This is the house at it's very worst. 

THIS is the part where you see people on TV want to give up.  You lose sight of the vision for a bit because how could something this terrible ever be beautiful and homey and comfortable?  I don't know about you, but I still feel a tightness in my chest when I see that video. That is the way my HOME looked for about a month.  We knew that it was going to be a bit of extra clean up work for us hiring a cheaper electrician, but didn't expect that. Our contractor let us know that this was not normal, the mess happening during rewiring, so Joe talked to the electrician about respecting property a little bit more.  In the video you can also see a pile of junk in what will be Emmy's room from tearing out the floors (which my awesome contractor cleaned up really quickly) as well as our hall bathroom with it's brand new flooring joists (oh, did I mention that floor was rotted as well!?).  There's a secret to not falling apart, wanting to throw in the towel.  And it sounds super cheesy but...

Never lose sight of the vision.

When we first bought the house I went through, deciding which walls had to go, which floors were staying, what the bathroom would eventually look like once I tore all the terrible brown tiles out...and I was excited. You  simply can't lose sight of that, because it's going to get really, really ugly in the middle.  When I saw my house in that condition and wanted to quit, I had to choose to see the good. Like, look at how open the front room looks at the end of the video. We decided to open up the kitchen wall into one of the bedrooms and make it a large kitchen/dining area.  It looks so much bigger!  Also, right after that video was taken, my dad went through and cut all of the ragged drywall holes into neat little rectangles that will eventually be patched after our plumbing and electrical inspections. Just doing that made everything seem so much neater.  I clung to Pinterest, and it's wonderful array of before and after pictures that show how things can be made beautiful out of the mess. (Still talking about the house here, although this experience certainly has been edifying).

Very soon, I hope to share some GOOD photos with you guys. Photos that show things being made new again.  I'm so excited for that!  Stick around!

Fixer Upper Woes

I want to begin by saying that it IS normal for you to run into issues when you buy an old house. When walls (or floors) are opened up that haven't been in 60 years, you find things.

Sometimes icky things. 

With that being said, a good, thorough home inspector is your friend.  We used one recommended by the Realtor since our preferred one wasn't available. DO NOT DO THAT!!  Learn from us!  When the Realtor and home inspector are buddies, the home inspector sometimes wants to help the Realtor out by getting the house sold.  While a lot of the issues with our home were brought up by the home inspector, he downplayed all of them, giving us confidence that it was something we could handle.

We were a WEE bit overwhelmed when we learned the truth.

Everyone who is renovating/remodeling a home hopes that the issues will be mostly aesthetics.  Paint, floors, new hardware, freshen up the kitchen and bathroom.  We were hoping that too!  But we quickly learned that our home had water issues.  When I say water issues, I mean the crawl space flooded every single time it rained a little bit.  When that happens, the integrity of the wood in the crawl space starts to disintegrate.  We didn't realize when we purchased the house that the 2 back bedrooms floors were a bit...bouncy.  Since it was a structural issue, we hired a contractor to repair the sill under the house (basically the frame that holds the house up around the exterior walls).  When he went under there he said most of the floor joists were rotted and he would try and salvage what he could.  This is what we ended up with:  

Our entire bedroom floor had to be removed, as well as the floor in the opposite bedroom.  They were too rotted underneath to be saved.  

You can see here the French Drain that Joe started to dig just inside the walls of the house. There was a sump pump under the house when we moved in, but water wasn't able to get to it because of the weird levels of dirt so Joe decided to give it a pathway to travel so that it could make it to the pump, digging by hand a trench all the way around.  He's a rock star.  It was a grueling job, and one that took about a month off the renovation timeline.  

We also dug one on the outside of the house, some by hand and some using a massive excavator. 

Woo hoo, big power equipment! 

A French Drain is basically an underground pipe that carries water away from places you do not want it.  There are a few different methods, and I never thought that I would know as much as I do now about yard drainage.  We also dug 2 dry wells with the help of our excavator rental and installed an exterior sump pump.  A dry well is a large hole filled with gravel or a canister that collects water and then allows it to seep back into the earth slowly.  Side note, so glad we did the dry wells when we did because we got 17 inches of rain right after we dug the initial pits. Because we had huge holes in our yard to collect water, it saved the crawlspace of our house from getting it!  Here is what one of the pits looked like after the rainfall: 

 Slam full of rain water. The trench you see leading to it is part of the exterior French Drain.  We are so thankful we got this done before the rain hit! The picture above is not the finished product. We filled the hole with gravel and landscape fabric and then dirt goes back on top.  I don't have a picture of the finished product yet, because it looks like a patchy mess but we plan on putting sod or grass seed on top to cover the telltale dirt trail.  

So the water issues were a little bit of a costly blow, but we are happy to have it done and are now working happily on the interior of the home.  Moral of the story, get a home inspector that will not downplay things.  You want someone who is going to tell you EVERY SINGLE THING wrong with the home and ideally spend about 4+ hours checking out your home.   

Next time, I hope to share some pictures of the goings-on inside our house! I'm so excited to share the progress so stick around!