What's next?

After addressing the worst of the odor issues, the next quandry literally became, "what do we do next?"

The thing about this house was that we built it for someone else. We chose flooring, kitchen cabinets and counters, bathroom faucets and fixtures all with my mother-in-law's taste in mind. There were some things we never got around to finishing when we first built it and there were areas where we chose a budget option that didn't stand up to 8 years of use and needed to be replaced. Plus let's not forget about the floors, doors, walls, etc., damaged by the animals.

It seemed like every project was pulling a thread causing 6 more projects to unravel. The kitchen cabinets were filthy. Beyond gross. Should I bother washing them, though, or should we just replace them? Several had damage: the bottom of the sink cabinet looked rotted, a narrow cabinet door was busted off its hinges, potatoes or something had rotted inside a drawer and permanently stained it. Was it worth trying to clean them when I didn't like the pickled oak finish anyway? If we replaced them we'd have a chance to rework a very tiny kitchen layout, turning the kitchen & dining room into one larger, more functional eat-in kitchen space.

Cleaning = $7 for a box of TSP and 4 pack of sponges from the dollar store.
Painting = $100 for primer, paint, glaze, finishing wax, sandpaper and cheesecloth.
Replacing = $5000-12,000 depending on how many, style, etc.

Replacing was the preferred choice but was out of the question until we sold our house and had the means to afford it. We turned instead to the staircase.

The house looks very traditional cape cod on the outside. Inside, it is a bunch of odd angles. Unique and cute, but unusual. When we built the house we were on a tight budget made even tighter by a contractor who mis-quoted. Seemed he realized half-way into the building that he forgot the cost of the trusses in his bid. This is why you never take the low quote... but I digress.

The staircase is a focal point of the front entry and could have been something beautiful, but in a hurry, exhausted, frustrated, not thinking clearly, we chose to drywall the room side about 40" high and cap the top of that with a nice oak board. Which was ok, but then we were forced to add a handrail by the building inspector anyway. So it looked a little boxy and dull. It really needs to be replaced with an open rail and banister. My husband wondered if we shouldn't knock out that wall completely and have a rail that overlooked the stairs going to the basement below the stairs going up. This would have been gorgeous on a home like the one we are in now, where there is a beautiful walkout basement flooded with natural light. But this basement won't ever be that way. Even once it is finished and we have the family room down there, it will never be the kind of basement you want completely open to the upstairs.

Unsure about exactly what to do with the stairs we looked to the floor. The narrow oak hardwood planks would need to be sanded and refinished if we were going to keep them. There was a huge black water damage stain in the dining room a foot in front of the french doors that led to the deck. We believed this was due to the pets' water bowl being placed on a rug in front of the doors and that over the years when it spilled it was left to dry on the rug, ruining the floor underneath. We weren't sure if we could sand it out. The flooring was laid on an angle so replacing that one area would mean ripping out half the dining room floor. Plus there was another issue- the kitchen was tiled but if we were replacing the floor we'd want to put the new hardwood or laminiate into the kitchen. The cabinets were set in place on top of the floor. To replace the floor we needed to decide what to do with the cabinets. In the living room we had a similar dilemma. To replace the flooring we needed to decide whether we were ripping down the entire stairway wall and installing rails or leaving the bottom portion of the stair wall. Essentially, flooring required too many other decisions- postpone that one.

The laundry area needed addressing, but since it was non-essential it seemed silly to start there.

Master bedroom - carpet or hardwood? If hardwood, we'd want to carry what we replaced the rest of the main floor with right on through. So other than painting, not much we could do there. Master bath would need to be gutted, requiring funds that we didn't have yet.

Every single project we needed to do came up against reasons why it shouldn't be first. Finally in our exhaustion my husband realized that if we were to sell our house- what we refer to as H1- promptly what we'd need most is a place to sleep and a bathroom. The rest we could work around, but we'd need to clean out the basement and garage to store all our stuff and we'd need two bedrooms and a bathroom at the very least.

The upstairs became our focus then, kind of by default. It wasn't the most thrilling project, but it was one that we needed to get done and for what it was worth, it would be among the easier things we would tackle.