So... wanna buy a house?

For sale: one recently renovated, 3-bedroom, two-bath house with detached garage, fully-fenced private yard, and eat-in kitchen. New gas furnace; all electrical upgraded and completely rewired; all new plumbing; and, a brand-new master bedroom with en suite. Won't last long - make an offer today!

"But wait, Don," you say. "What's that about a fully-fenced yard?"

Then, of course, you do a spit-take and shout, "What the jesus?! Why in the name of great Caesar's ghost are you SELLING?"

That, my friends, requires pictures.

Keep in mind, as you peruse the evidence before you, that once the house actually goes on the market, I might be taking down some of these pictures. Just in case, you know, someone out there actually reads this crap. Or does a Google search for "great Caesar's ghost" AND happens to be in the market for a 65-year old bungalow in Victoria.

What? It could happen!

Anyway, it was a few short weeks ago that I came home from work one fine Friday, and saw activity in the long-abandoned house next door (the green one, not the pink house with the neighbours that helped us build the fence). Turns out the landlord finally got off his lazy ass and went looking to rent it out again. He (finally) had the decency to come up to us as we puttered about and introduce himself (we've only been living here for five years), and we shot the breeze for a few minutes, mostly taking advantage of the situation to point out the holes in his soffits (where the squirrels, birds, and rats were getting in) the crack in his foundation, and the tree that overhangs the driveway that we desperately wanted to prune back so it wasn't in quite as much danger of falling on our house. He used the time to assure us that he was renting to a single mother of two daughters who was into gardening and "interested in working around the house and cleaning it up a bit". Once he had gone (and we'd cleaned up the trail of slime he left behind), we started talking and quickly came to the conclusion that we just weren't ready to deal with the whole shared driveway experience again, and that maybe it was time to take advantage of the recovering market and low interest rates to hie ourselves off to a better neighbourhood all together.

And that was before the people had even moved in.

The very next day, the new tenant showed up, and went absolutely apeshit on the flower beds and planting areas around the house. She was pulling dead branches out, and raking up the fallen leaves and dead flowers, and totally going to town. Of course, she left all of the stuff in a big pile in the middle of the driveway, and only when I looked rather askance at the mound of crap in the exact spot at which I wanted to leave my car did she bother to ask if I happened to know the next time the city was scheduled to come by and pick up the brush piles. (About the middle of next March, actually.) Not the most auspicious beginning, but we figured she was just excited about moving to a new house and eager to get the place set up before moving in.

We were wrong, of course, but then you probably already figured that out.

Our first task was to draw up a list of all the things we would have to do before we could put the house on the market. The list has about fifty tasks on it, but among the most prominent (read: most effort required) were to redo the drywall in the upstairs bathroom (that we'd screwed up while renovating back when we first bought the house and which Leonard the plumbing god had subsequently put a whopping great hole in), patch the bloody pit of death in the driveway (oh, boy, asphalt!), and put in another fence behind the garage (so we could put "fully-fenced" on the listing, and to complete the privacy of the backyard).

The bathroom will have to wait until we get back from a trip to Toronto in the middle of August, but in the meantime, we've been working hard at the rest of the list.

The first notable thing we did was to build a box out of left-over cedar fencing to cover the trio of pipes in the front flower bed:

We still intend to plant some flowers and whatnot around it, and top it with a potted plant or two, but it does a nice job of concealing the pipes while still allowing easy access:



As it turns out, one of the reasons I took that picture is because I wanted to get a few pictures of our new neighbours. You see, they had sort of started to move in while we were still puttering about making lists and meeting with mortgage brokers and real estate agents. What we'd seen so far did not exactly fill our hearts with joy, as you'll soon see...

This first picture is of the front of their house - yes, the view you see when driving down the street towards our place (sorry about the blurriness, I was trying to be inconspicuous):



At first, I thought they were just using it as a staging area for their furniture before they moved it all inside, and then I realized that no, that's their outdoor smoking area! Joy! Also, if you look carefully, you can see a broken (as in, shattered) mirrored closet door tucked under the fir tree on the left. That's been there ever since they first started moving in (almost three weeks now) and they have two small dogs (one of which they let run loose all over the place) and a very young toddler (who is walking).

I also took a couple of pictures of the stuff they had left in the driveway, as it had already been sitting out there for a couple of days (through one decent rainfall, actually) and I wanted to capture the essence before we left on our annual three-day baseball pilgrimage to Seattle. You know, just in case they cleaned it up while we were away. Ha!





(Barely visible on the right side is PART of the pile of branches she pulled out of the beds on the first day, and which I had to kick to the side in order to actually use our driveway.)

Turns out we need not have worried too much - when we came back three days later, they had only built on what was already there:



And kept building the next day:



Aaaand the next:





Lest you think we were just passive witnesses to this, rest assured that we had talked to them several times, and even mentioned that we were planning on putting the house on the market soon. I had even pointed out that we have an easement on both sides of the driveway, and that they were not actually allowed to store or build anything within that easement. Each time, we were assured that it was only temporary, she was cleaning it up, her daughter's boyfriend was coming to help, her ex-husband was going to drop by and pick it all up, etc, etc, etc.

All a load of shit, of course, but you knew that, right? We sure as hell did.

Not wanting to delay any further, we drafted my buddy Clamb into helping us wrestle the two-man auger again, and got started on the back fence. Here's what the spot looked like after two trips to Ellice with loads of brush, pruned branches, and old grass clippings from the "compost" heap we were uh.. storing there. Yeah.



And after a late night of raking and pruning, another load of brush to Ellice, and a couple of hours with the post-hole digger and some concrete mixing:



That was also the weekend the neighbours were busy... dropping off yet more shit:





Yeah. It was at this point that we kinda started to lose it about the whole situation. I mean, it's one thing to make a bit of a mess when you're busy moving, but she didn't do a damn thing about it all weekend except spread it around into the driveway and her back yard.

Anyway, we had to wait a day to get our fence panels (oh, there's a story there, but I want to get this posted tonight), so we picked up some asphalt patching and turned our attention to the hole in the driveway. We had already filled it with gravel before going to Seattle, and let it settle:



We took out the excess, tamped down what remained and covered it all up with four bags of asphalt repair:



It was pretty damn straightforward, actually, which makes me wonder why I had been dreading and postponing that particular chore for so long.

The next day (after tipping the delivery guy five bucks because he had to carry the panels down the driveway, thanks to the neighbour's crap all over the place) we put up the rest of the fence. We had to do a little surgery to the panel on the right to get it to fit, but it wasn't too hard:



And that was that. Looks pretty damn good, though the War Department put her back out again helping me jimmy the panels into place.

So, yeah. House for sale in Mayfair area of Victoria. Central location, with a lovely view of Langford.

MORNING UPDATE!
I was out washing the side of the house last night (in preparation for painting it), and she was out there smoking (of course), so I took the opportunity to remind her that we were putting the house on the market and that our real estate agent would be bringing some prospective buyers around to look at it. (Not exactly a lie - our mortgage broker wants some pictures to send to one of his clients who might be interested, but those folks MIGHT drive by, right?) Anyway, I said the buyers would be coming by sometime this week, and she said something about waiting for her ex to come by and pick up her daughter's stuff. (Man, I could do a whole post about the whacked out family history or whatever, but this IS a renovation blog, at least nominally, so I won't. But trust me - it's like a whole season's worth of Jerry Springer.)

Anyway, she spent the whole evening bustling around out there -- and accomplished sweet f-all. This is what I saw when I left the house for work this morning:





Seriously. This is what she thinks is "cleaning up all this crap".