This is our house

	Here it is, both with and without a covering of snow.

We bought the house from HUD, which stands for Housing and Urban Development. Basically, HUD took over the house when the previous owners didn't pay the mortage. HUD are then supposed to make the house habitable, but as we shall see, their idea of habitable was a little bit different than ours. Read on.

Before	During	After
		Picture to come soon...
Here is a before, during and after view of the kitchen, looking towards where the sink is. In the before shot, you can probably make out that the counter top on the right hand side isn't fixed to either than wall or the rest of the counter top. Less obvious was the fact that the sink wasn't plumbed in, the resulting fountain when the water was turned on would have flooded the kitchen and the basement if we weren't there to turn it off.

		Picture to come soon...
Here is a view of where the range (cooker) should have been. Just look at the greasy stains on that floor. The gas inspector gave us some blanking plugs to put in the pipe while we sorted out a range. Note the wall sockets, we replaced these with new ones, they were only a few dollars for a box of ten.

		Picture to come soon...
Here is the view of where the refrigerator would eventually go. The molding around the wall would eventually get thrown out. Toni wanted to keep it, but Lee accidentally pulled off a large section of it and chopped it up with an axe. OK, maybe it wasn't such an accident.


To make way for the new kitchen cabinets, the old ones were ripped out. The blue tinge to the wall was some blue paint we tried but didn't like.	When we ripped up the old floor, a large amount of staples were left, which Toni is seen here hammering down.	Here Lee has a piece of the old floor. This came up surprisingly easy with a hammer and a pry bar.


Juanita (Toni's mom) helped us a great deal with the painting and papering in the kitchen.	Laying down the mortar before screwing down the cement backer board for the floor tiles.	Toni painting, wearing her best decorating pants (she wouldn't let me use the picture with the big rip in them).


The floor, completely covered with cement backerboard. This view facing towards the laundry room.	More mortar, this time to hold the ceramic tiles onto the backboard.	Taking out the little spacers between the tiles.

		The pictures of the finished laundry room are a bit dark, so watch this space...
And here is a closeup of the finished floor.	Here is the laundry room, off the kitchen, before we worked on it.