7 Plagues Conclusion

I hope you haven’t found the last handful of blogs too stressful as you have read about some of the misfortune we have had throughout this last year. There were quite a handful of hurdles to cross in the first year of owning our house, and still some are evolving now, even as I write this conclusion to the “7 Plagues Series”, I wonder if perhaps there should be an 8th added. But for now, we look at the big obstacles that we faced, but still carried on.

Austin and I love this house so much, and we have just kept pushing through it, even with each obstacle we face. We stand together through it all and know that we have dealt with almost everything in the book and are still in it for the long haul.

We bought our house with a mission. To use it to the glory of God. Our house is on the corner of a street, and we believe that God will use it as a beacon. It has been vacant for many years, the history of the house is uncertain, and the people in the neighbored struggle. We know that there is a spiritual battle as well as the physical, so every small or big thing that comes up with our house, is a fight that the devil wants us to lose.

So, we face each obstacle with the strength of Christ and with each other, to carry on and never give up.

To God be the Glory and to all the obstacles in our path we say ““Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.”

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

The Fleas

The last of the “7 Plagues Series”, is probably the more, “plague like” one. It involves fleas. Gross, right?

Well, it all started when we found an old school-mate of Austin’s was getting rid of kittens. So, we went and picked out two kittens and took them to our house to make a home for them. They lived in one of the bedrooms upstairs, it was a huge room, perfect for two little kittens.

We were aware when we got them that they had fleas, because they were farm cats. So, the first day we got them some medicine to help fight the fleas. Well, days went on and we didn’t necessarily keep track of how often we treated our cats or to see whether they were flea free. One day, we were at the house and I noticed a small bug on one of Tember’s dolls. Moments later I saw one in her hair. Suddenly, I realized they were everywhere!

I guess that’s how it works with these things, you can have a handle on them and then suddenly it’s out of control! The bites were excruciating and Austin and I were both at all loss. We didn’t want to have to be dealing with fleas now. We took about a week feeling at a loss, not sure what to do, when finally we decided we needed to just take action. So, we came up with a flea fight plan!

Our brother-in-law shared an article with us from a man who had a severe flea infestation and what he did to get rid on them-diatomaceous earth. It is toxic to insects, but non lethal to humans and animals. In this gentlemen’s article, he said it was the only thing that worked. We needed we had to treat the cats with something stronger than what we had used originally. We got frontline and treated the cats and sent them lose around the house. (which by the way they loved, and ended up deciding they owned the place)

So, the fleas that bite the cats, got killed by frontline. Then we scattered diatomaceous earth throughout the upstairs, especially in the cats room. We took action, and also prayed. The next day, I barely got any bites and was finding dead fleas everywhere. Sorry, so gross. We had also decided to sand and refinished the floors, so sanding them down would suck up any of the remaining fleas.

We did the floors a little out of order because we needed to deal  with the flea situation. After putting our  minds to it, we were completely flea free in less than a week.

The griffith’s win, 1 to 0 against the fleas!

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects.

The Ventilation

So, you buy a house. First you find out that you need to get ALL the plumbing redone. Next you find out that you can’t get mail delivered to your house, because you don’t have a legitimate address? Then a crazy lady steals your mail, breaks in through your window, claims its herself and you need Police intervention. After that you realize the whole house needs insulation. At this point, you must be thinking, we’ve been hit with everything, haven’t we?

Well, can I give you a suggestion? Don’t ask if that’s all. I guarantee, once you ask, something else will come up!

Sure enough, that happened with us.

Winter was fast approaching and we had a goal of getting most the insulation in before winter arrived. We were pretty much done with insulation on the top level and though we weren’t able to get to the main floor by the first snow fall, we weren’t too worried about it. We would just turn our heat on and have some higher gas bills this year, and try to get the rest of the house insulated by next Christmas. (The main level has double walls, exterior barn wood, and then another layer of barn wood on the interior. So, we need to blow in insulation on that level.)

So, Austin called the gas company and set up a date for them to turn our gas on. Well, they came to turn it on, only to turn around and tell us that there was no venting from our heater to vent out the excess gas. Were we surprised? At this point, no.

We gathered some information on what we needed in order to get the gas turned on. We went a head and gathered what we need and got the vent hooked up and figured we were set to go!

The gas guys came back to turn the gas on, but the seal we used for the vent wasn’t fire proof, so we needed to go back to home depot, get fire proof seal and try again. We did that. FINALLY, we were set to have the gas set up.

They set up the gas. The next day Austin and I went over to work on the house, and could smell gas outside. I say to Austin, “Do you smell that? It’s gas isn’t it?” Sure enough, our outside meter had a gas leak. The emergency response came out to check our meter and find out if it was a hazard or not. They turned off our gas in order to get us a new gas meter.

Got our gas turned back on. No leak. check. Properly vented. Check. That hold up was solved, the house was warm and we were on our way again!

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

The Insulation (or lack there of it)

Phew. So after that crazy story. Let’s just take a little breather here, and hear about a less dramatic situation. Here, we have the 4th “plague”, the insulation.

It was a beautiful summer day and Tember and I were out mowing the lawn. Usually, I would do outside work with Tember in her carrier, while Austin worked inside. Since, she’s an infant and we didn’t want to expose her to any dangerous dust or fumes from paints or what have you, her and I worked outside often.

I had just finished mowing the lawn and transferred her to play in her bouncer while I pulled some weeds, when Austin came out the side door.

“Hey, Devina, I need to talk to you for a second.” I knew he didn’t have great news.
“So, looks like none of our exterior walls have insulation in them.” Right, of course not! “I think we are going to want to take down all the exterior walls and then put insulation in. But that means, we have a lot more work to do.” At this point, the plumbing was all removed, and a lot of the demolition was done, so to add this to the list, would set us back A LOT! “I know it’s a lot of extra work, but it’ll save us money in the long run, and it should help with the moisture problem in the basement.” I knew Austin was right, but all I wanted to say was “no”. It seemed like a huge task we would have to take on.

I said “Can you just give me a minute.” I needed to breath and think about it. I felt like we were in a real life HGTV show where they keep meeting with the couple and telling them that they found another issue, so they need to choose between fixing it or losing another thing off their wish list.

After a moment of accepting this new hurdle, I agreed to it. And so, the next round of demolition began.

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

The Thief in the Day (Part 1)

Alright blog readers, you may want to fasten your seat belts for this one, because you are in for a crazy story. If you haven’t had a chance to read Monday’s blog, I will give you a moment to go back and read it now, it is important for you to know some details before continuing reading.

Well, it had been a few months since I had started getting mail delivered to our house, so we figured that that situation had kind of resolved itself and we hadn’t revisited it again.

We were now into July, and had made some pretty great progress on our house. A lot of different friends and family had come to help us with things here and there, and a few of them we hid keys for, so they could go over and help when we weren’t there. It was pretty common to have someone at our house working on something, even if we weren’t there. Austin and I had also recently welcomed two pretty little kittens into our lives and their home was at the house. We would go over and feed them daily and play with them at the house. Our apartment was just a block away, so it was a regular practice to walk over to the house after work and spend some time there with the cats and renovating. When I had days off, Tember and I would walk over there to play with the cats.

And so that is how this beautiful day in July started. Tember and I had gone over to the house in the early afternoon, fed the cats and spent some time playing with them. When it was getting close to supper, we returned to the apartment to start dinner. This week at the house we had spent a lot of time doing demolition, so we had a big dumpster that was going to be picked up that day, but it was still there in the early afternoon. Austin arrived home around 6pm and had noticed that by now the dumpster had been picked up. Still, nothing out of the ordinary.

After dinner, we walked back over to the house. As we were getting closer to the house, we noticed a sweater hanging in the front window. I thought at first it was our Pastor’s sweater. He had come over to our house a few times to help, and a couple of those times he had come alone and just let himself in with the key. But as we got closer, it became apparent that it wasn’t his sweater. Well, maybe it was one of our other friends? At this point, we were really confused. We got up to the house and the side window was open. Now, that was odd. Austin walked up to the window and saw a girl we did not recognize standing on our stairs. Austin quickly ran around the house to the back door, as he reached for the handle, she met him at the door.

There a stranger was standing in front of us, at our front door. She had a dust mask on her forehead and covering her mouth. Her hair was buzzed and she had a bandanna headband on. She was smaller in stature and had tattoos on her neck. She was holding our broom.

Austin stormed into the house, pointed outside and yelled to her “Get out of our house! Right now!”

To Be Continued…

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

The Mail Fiasco

Well, here we are on plague #4 “The Mail Fiasco”. Ok, so maybe not exactly a plague, but a big hurdle that resulted in a much stranger scenario, (which you will read about on Friday’s blog)

As most of you should know by now, if you read our blog, “Over a Century of History. ” that our house was vacant for a number of years before we bought it. Which could explain some of the problems we had currently faced, example, the stolen pipes. Apparently it had been vacant so long that the mail carrier actually “shut off” mail delivery to that address.

Unfortunately, nobody informed ME that the mail had been cut off and I went ahead and did what any law abiding citizen does, immediately changed my address.

Though, it wasn’t as easy as it should be, because every time I tried to change my address on different things an error message popped up that said “no such address found.” I quickly went back to our closing papers to make sure I was putting in the right address. The first paper had a zip code that ended in 01 and the paper under it had a zip code that ended in 03. So, I went ahead and tried it both ways-again the error message popped up. I decided to go onto the US postal service website and request a mail transfer instead, since I couldn’t individually change my address in any of my other sites. Such as the Department of Immigration, and the DMV. Well, with the US postal service, the same error message popped up but there was an option to click “continue anyway”, so I clicked it. That was that, my address was changed and my mail would transfer to my house, so I thought.

Well, a few weeks went by and I hadn’t gotten any mail and I started to wonder what was going on. Since, we had an issue with my mail transfer, I decided not to transfer Austin’s or Tember’s, so anything that was in their name, arrived at my in-laws. I started getting suspicious that my mail wasn’t arriving, so I went online and cancelled the mail transfer, hoping my mail would show up at my in-laws again. It didn’t. I went to the post office and asked them if they knew what was going on. No one at the local office seemed to know and they even told me the address we gave them wasn’t in the system at all. As if the house didn’t even exist. I tried explaining to them that the house is not new, it has been sitting on that same corner lot for over 100 years! The post office told me to go to the city planner’s office because they would probably know, and maybe it was because we had recently bought the house. Well, I went to the city planners, and they told me to go back to the post office. I went back to the post office and they told me to go to the city planners. Okay! Come On! Someone has to know something, right?

So finally, I called the headquarters for the United States Postal Services and they put in an official investigation as to what had happened to my mail and why our house wasn’t showing up on any database. Meanwhile, the delivery man who delivers to my in-laws neighborhood, asked my sister in law whether we still lived there, because he was being told to transfer my mail, but had no idea where it was going. It was a complete mess!

Finally, one day in June, I received a letter in our mailbox, then I received a few more that week. My mail was being delivered to our house! As for the mail I never received, I just assumed that it was lost somewhere in mail limbo. And so we thought the mail fiasco was behind us…but maybe not solved?

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

P.s. we couldn’t even get pizza delivered to our house, because domino’s didn’t recognize it as a real address. *face palm*

The Moisture Plague

As you read in our previous blog, The Plague of The Pipes, we had a bit of a torrential rainfall in our basement, so you may think the moisture plague is spawned off of that. Well, they are actually unrelated, other than being in the same house!

Let’s go back again to that day of Cleaning & Moving , a great day of help from friends and family. We brought all our stuff over to the house, most of it packed in cardboard boxes, which is, as we all know, the perfect kind of moving box! Things that didn’t fit in boxes were brought over as well, and everything for the most part was set into our living room or dining room. The plan was to work around the house and when we got to those rooms, we would move the stuff and then work on them. (Clearly, our plan has since changed, if you have been following our Instagram or facebook pages!)

Well, since we got all too excited about demolition, we started knocking down walls before covering the majority of our furniture or boxes. This resulted in them getting a good layer of plaster dust on them. So, we decided we should move all our stuff down into the basement, so it would be out of the way! Great idea, right?! Well, essentially, yes, BUT we hadn’t done a moisture check in our basement.

A few weeks after moving the majority of our stuff down into the basement, I went downstairs and found a bulletin board and the backside was completely covered in mold. Then Austin did a little more investigating to see the condition of everything else, sure enough, everything was moldy. From paintings, to shoes. From a rocking chair to a bookshelf. Aside from our couches and heavier items that were too heavy to go downstairs, everything of ours was ruined by mold. The mold was a result of severe humidity down in our basement,

So, the moisture plague essentially wiped out everything we had gathered in two years of marriage-I guess there is no better excuse to buy new stuff right?!

“Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them [& Mold], and where thieves break in and steal.” -Matthew 6:19

Well, this verse has quickly become a theme verse in our journey with this house.

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

The Plague of The Pipes

The plague of the pipes is the start of our 7 plague series. This series will likely be one of the more nail biting of the blog series you’ll read from us. It’ll focus on some of the hurdles we needed to jump, as well as some crazy situations that have occurred throughout this journey.

If you read our Cleaning & Moving Day! blog, you’ll remember that the day after closing on our house we had a group of people come help us. The day went very smoothly. We got the majority of our stuff moved over from our apartment and we were also able to clean up a lot of the grime around our house. Everything seemed to be going very smoothly, until Austin turned on the water.

Suddenly, it was like we lived in a water park! From every different side of the basement there was water dripping,no, not dripping-falling. It was like a rainfall in all different angles. So, suddenly Austin’s attention was on the water. He was running from one bathroom to another looking to see if he could find the causes of the leaks. With little to no success on finding the leaks, Austin’s dad took a hammer to one of our walls that he assumed pipes must be going through.

This of course happened without my knowledge and I walked into the hallway and said “Hey! You’re hitting holes into my walls!” We laugh now, because that wall has been completely gutted, and also there was not plumbing in that wall either.

Well, it certainly wasn’t just one leak, or one faulty pipe, or even two! No, after some more investigation we found quite a bit.

For starters, there was a sink in one of the bathrooms that was mounted, but if you followed it down the drain, it just ended. It was just a big hole going into the basement. So, of course, if the water ran from that sink, it just poured straight into the basement.

Another drain fell apart with one hit by the hammer. It just crumbled into a million pieces. The water lines connected to one of the bath tubs had cracks in it that was causing a constant leak. Most of the water lines were completely corroded and many copper pipes had actually been stolen. We found out from a neighbor, that about a year prior a group of kids had been arrested off of the property for breaking in and stealing copper.

When we had first seen the house, it was clear that it had had water damage in the past. We also knew from our inspection that there would be plumbing issues, but since the majority of the problems were hidden within the walls and the water was turned off, we didn’t know the extent until we turned it back on.

From all the pipe disarray, the only solution was to completely gut it and start fresh.  So, from day one, was our first plague. The plague of the pipes.

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects

 

The 7 Plagues

Austin and I joke that we have had 7 plagues of our house within the first year of owning it. Something that would test us and try us, but we persevered throughout the “plague” The next series in our blog will be the plagues!

The 7 Plagues of our house:

1. Plague of the Pipes
2. The Moisture Plague
3. The Mail Fiasco
4. The Thief in the Day (Part 1 & 2)
5. The Insulation (or lack thereof it)
6. The Fleas
7. The Ventilation

These were some major things that have taken place that we needed to overcome. Follow the next 7 blogs to hear about each one.

Keep the Reno’s Comin’
Austin & Devina Griffith
Griffith House Projects