The Yeller Feller

When life’s given us opportunities we’ve taken them, including the risks and work involved! The good Lord made our latest adventure a no brainer, we bought another house to make into a rental. It’s just across the street from us and had been the home of our friend and neighbor, Mac who passed away last year. For us to get the house is nothing but fate and we are honored to be the ones to bring this little 1930’s home back to life.

Our first order of business after purchasing the house was to change that color. Thankfully Mitch and I seem to usually agree on colors and we already planned on painting it yellow, now it’s just a matter of which yellow.

Mitch had mentioned getting a paint sprayer and I said, “I don’t think we’ll need one, it’s not that big of a house, it won’t take us too long.”

I called Mitch and said, “Tell me again why you don’t want to rent a paint sprayer?” he laughed at my way of telling him he was right, and said, “right!” Mitch rented one that night from Home Depot.

Side note:

If you rent one yourself and are using a 5 gallon bucket please do yourself a favor and rent the “heavy duty” sprayer and not the “medium duty” one. The Heavy duty sprayer will stand on it’s own and fit into a 5 gallon bucket.  It just makes life so much easier.

Next order of business was to get a new roof! The previous roof was not only old, it had been put on wrong! Thankfully we already knew who to call, Mark from Premier Roofing.

He’d done our big house a few years back and impressed us with his hard work ethic, knowledge and skills of roofing.

There is still so much to tackle outside and we are trying to get it all done before it gets too cold, but we are also doing projects inside, and underneath.

Feisty hasn’t been the only one staying in the house, there’s also a family of skunks. Not to mention a strong musty damp dirt smell though out the house. Wow do we have our work cut out for us.

To make things right we’re going to start from the ground up, beginning with digging out a lot of this dirt to make an actual crawl space. There was more than Feisty and skunks in this house, there’s huge spiders!

One day while Mitch was at work I decide to take on the underbelly of ol’ yeller and clear it out. The plan was to crawl from the living room under the kitchen and beyond pushing dirt out and sucking up spiderwebs with the shop vac. I wasn’t going to dare venture below without the proper spider, skunk poop protective gear.

As usual, it was much more challenging than anticipated. Everywhere I turned a shiny scary spider was crawling, I’d brought spider spray down with me but it didn’t kill instantly and I would begin to panic and try to squish them. I tried to shovel out dirt from under the house as I lay on my belly, shop vac in one hand, spider spray nearby and a little hand held rake to push the dirt out from under the kitchen.This task just got to be overwhelming and my steam ran out, then I realized my white overalls had a huge tear in the inner thigh area and spiders could be crawling on me! In frustration and determination I crawl back out from under the house, found Mitch’s overalls, shook off the fear like a dog that just got out of a lake and back under I went with a vengeance. Come on spiders, skunk poo, feisty poo, whatever’s under here, it’s showtime. I dig, I scoop, I push the dirt, then I look to the left of me…eeeeks a spider,

I look to the right of me….eeeks another spider. Ugh. seriously! I look straight ahead and staring back at me was a frog. This frog must be a sign from my mom that she’s with me under this house, she loves me and knows what a hard time I am having. Why a frog you ask, well days before my mom passed we’d talked about how hard it will be for me not to see her and how much I would miss her. She said, ” Don’t worry, I’ll be with you, if you see a mountain that you love, I’m there, if it’s a butterfly or even a frog, if you think of me I’ll be there.” The day of her funeral, it rained frogs in Oklahoma, literally frogs! Everything is going to be ok now, I stare this frog, loving the special moment of peace I’m experiencing when I realize that I could actually pick up this frog right now and not freak out because I am completely safe with all my gear on (yes I know frogs don’t bite, but they still scare me a little). I also wanted to move the frog because I realized there was another spider behind it that I wanted to spray.  I put one hand under the frog and lift it up onto the palm of my hand.  So special is this moment that I can hold this frog and think of my mom….EEEEEKS.  Right towards my face this little fella jumps.  I pull my head up as fast as I can, in turn bumping my head of the floor joists.  Really life??? ever so comical it is, I’m frazzled beyond return and get myself out from under as quickly as I can, throwing in the towel for the day.

After such an experience Mitch put bug bomb on both ends of the house and he promised to help me finish up the job.

When the weekend came Mitch and I, along with the help of a friend got 7 wheel barrels full of dirt, tons of dead spiders sucked up in the shop vac, a few shovels full of feces, brick, concrete chunks and kitty poo to, out from under that house.  I would like to think the worst is now over. (Yet amongst our digging we found that the main water line running to the house as well as the sewer line exiting the house have both rusted away) Amazing the things you find when you do a little digging. More about those adventures later.

We have a long way to go and a short time to get there.  I will be posting more as we finish our house projects, lets just hope the weather cooperates with us!