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 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