FHA Requirements

This is going to be a big first post... I signed the purchase agreement for my house 8/24... spent about a month waiting for the short sale to go through and then was told it'd move things along faster if I went ahead and got my FHA Appraisal. So, the things that must be changed before FHA approval can happen are:

Paint all peeling and cracking stucco on the exterior
Paint all peeling and cracking paint on exterior railing to upstairs unit, and back door/step
Paint all cracking paint inside the garage walls
Put up a railing or fence barrier so that people don't have access to the garage roof

After waiting a few weeks to see if the bank or seller would pay to fix these items (it's a short sale so neither are budging) I decided to forge ahead and get working on them.

Last weekend I went to the house to peel off a few bits of the stucco so I could get a paint sample done. Surprisingly, Home Depot did an AMAZING job of color matching and even though the bits we're not painting are weathered, you can barely tell we're only spot painting the exterior. Looks great so far!

This past weekend, we got to work on sanding and chipping away the paint inside the garage

The top layer (gray) chipped away easily in most places, revealing a 50's mint green.

I don't think this is actually paint. I think it's plaster or something. It's a thick layer of stuff, and in most places just flaked off under our paint scrapers. Eventually we fired up my $30 Ryobi orbital sander and that helped smooth out areas that didn't want to chip away.

Mandi with the orbital. The current tenants refused to remove their car, so it's covered in paint dust.

A nice, mostly cleared patch

 3 people worked on this 26ft wall almost all day and it's still not all cleared. Hopefully this week we'll finish scraping and paint it nice and clean white.

We also worked on drilling/digging holes and putting in fence posts on either side of the garage. On Friday, I drove over to midwest fence to pick up my order and haul it over to the house, and thankfully they helped me tie it down on top.

This is a poor photo, but I had fence pole coming off the front and back of my Forester. Thankfully I had a friend to help me get it in the garage for safe keeping until Sunday.

I rented an auger at Home Depot, it's a pretty fun toy... and I had expected it to make my life super easy and make all the hard work and manual labor disappear.... NOT THE CASE!

Some intelligent being decided it'd be a great idea to just throw a huge lump of concrete in the lawn next to the garage. We found this under just 2" of dirt. It's not a pipe or buried cable... just a weird, large lump of concrete. So we ended up digging by hand for the first post and most of the second. 

The next few holes went much easier though, and eventually we threw in the quikcrete. I used 300lbs of the fast setting stuff, which we mixed right in the hole and made sure was level before and after pouring concrete (thus the wonky, deceiving, uncentered pole in progress).

Made sure to leave my mark on one of them.

Then when the concrete had set, we covered it with the upheaved soil and it's like a real-life fence post! The fence hardware and material will be added later, when we've for certain painted all the chipping stucco in that area.

The poles setting in the east side of the garage. Kind of hard to photograph... but there they are. 

I forgot to take pictures of peeling stucco, and the amazing color match home depot did. I'll be sure to get that in the next post.