The Renovations Begin

There isn’t a spot on my body that isn’t hurting! On Friday afternoon Joey (the cute husband) and I took possession of our ‘new’ 106 year-old house. Like our grand Queen Anne Victorian home we had grand ambitions and after a very cold first night of margaritas at the new abode decided to start sanding floors the next day.

Unfortunately, the previous home hadn’t quite finished moving out and gifted us with a huge amount of stuff and junk. In every room there was furniture and cupboards loaded with items that should have left but stayed. Vases, clothing, books, teapots, trash, chairs, artwork, dog toys – you name it, we inherited it. There was also a house length pile of trash in our front yard and in the back alley. So day one was spent sorting stuff and deciding which few relics would stay and where on earth we could put the stuff that had to go. We had quite an audience in front of our house, waiting to see what new stuff we would bring out each load.

By 8pm on Saturday night, Joey and I were completely spent and decided to spend the last bit of our evening enjoying the best Italian food in Los Angeles at Angeli on Melrose. It is melt in your mouth authentic Italian and every delicious mouthful is a slice of heaven. The owner just happens to be our next door neighbour from our last house and we had NO idea when we first went there how amazing her food is. No wonder they fly her to Italy to cook for special events! She also hosts her own cooking show on radio. We love her and I cannot do justice describing the food at Angeli. It is a café so not expensive and it is without a question – my favourite foodie place in LA!

Today I woke up at 8am and jumped out of bed to discover agony in my calf muscles. Apparently those stairs in my house caught up with me. No time to complain though, so after a serve on pancakes, off we headed to the store to buy putty for wood and some tools to put it on with. I threw in a pair of rubber gloves to clean our new ‘old’ Wolf stove complete with rust and leaves and to the house we headed.

For the next 8 or so hours we filled cracks, gaps and bits of our floors and while my fingers started to hurt, so did my knee’s, neck and entire right arm. We finished after dark, and while Joey went out to add a lock to our back gate, I put together a nice little house plaque with our house number on it (at our margarita’s night we discovered there was no numbers when our friends couldn’t find the place). I then decided to start cleaning our rusty stove, so put my facemask on and started scrubbing! Not much rust comes off but my arm is now officially killing! I forget, we also pulled up carpet somewhere in between from an old converted porch which we are converting back to a porch! This involved some interesting tools, a bunch of muscles that I don’t remember having and a lot of dust.

So day two in, and I am officially beaten! It is now 10pm and after a long soak in the bath, Joey and I are about to eat. Bliss – I am STARVING!

And to think, we start it all again tomorrow….