Adventures In Home Ownership Part 1: Welcome To The Jungle

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind. We have finally got keys, and the former owners have moved out. So JB and I went over there on Tuesday night to start the prep for painting / new carpet. After finding a note from the power company (in the dark), hunting through the garage for our main breaker and turning it on, we could see - for the first time - our condo not crowded with other people's stuff.

Instead, it was layered with other people's dirt. Granted, they had moved out in the middle of Los Angeles' most massive rainstorm in - well, they said "record breaking" so I'm going to assume it hasn't rained like that in LA recorded history. Regardless, it was a little alarming to walk in and be overwhelmed with the sight of the previously decent-even-if-we-wanted-to-replace-it-because-they-had-dogs carpet looking like it had been used as a wrestling mat for a couple of muddy bears.

Not to be daunted by a little debris, James and I dropped our stuff down in the middle of the carpet and wandered around literally for 45 minutes trying to decide where to begin. When we had decided, I went to pick up my bag and discovered that when I had dropped it in the middle of the carpet, I had dropped it smack dab in the middle of an Ant Gold Rush. Someone had dropped some kind of food item on the middle of our carpet and the Ants (probably driven in by our record breaking rain) had discovered it. Then told all their Ant friends. Who, in turn, had been camouflaged by the previously-mentioned debris-cloaked carpet. I will admit I had a moment of "BUGS! BUGS!" panic, but JB pointed out both the food and the rain and we have decided to believe this is just one of those fluke things, and we will not be plagued with Ants for our entire stay in The Condo.

Still unwilling to let our spirits flag, we began washing the walls with a TSP alternative you don't have to rinse. Wow. I don't generally think about how dirty walls can get. I mean, they looked okay. Suffice it to say, when we had finished scrubbing the walls 3 hours later (minus 15 minutes of panic after I got TSP in my eye and had to hold it under running water as per the instructions on the bottle) we were exhausted, the walls looked cleaner, and the TSP water was almost black.

We called it quits for the night and went home, broke out the Riesling we'd been saving for the getting-into-the-condo occasion, and fell asleep almost immediately. At which point my carpal-tunnel-wrist, which was if not aggravated then irritated by the TSPing, decided to wake me up 3 times over the course of the night.

So really it was all in all a very exciting first 24 hours of home ownership. Stay tuned for Adventures In Home Ownership Part 2: What do you mean you never noticed that before?