We’re Bryan and Jen Lovely, and we’re buying our first house, a gablefront cottage in West Seattle. It’s a fixer-upper to say the least, and by god we’re going to blog about it.

It’s a, well, quirky house. It was built in 1930, and people have been poking it with a stick ever since. An addition was put on some time (we think) in the ’40s. The basement was partially refinished at some point. There are five (5) outside doors, including a non-weatherstripped dutch door and a door directly into the second bedroom (which was probably rented to a tenant at some point). There used to be a gazebo in the (really large for West Seattle) yard. There’s all sorts of crap thrown helter-skelter in the side yard, now completely hidden underneath the rampant morning glory.

It looks like every previous owner has done their own “upgrades” to the house, but unfortunately it also looks like almost every one of those was done wrong: the electrical box has basically every kind of wiring that’s existed since 1930 coming out of it (except for safe, modern 3-wire romex); the drywall in the addition has visible tape seams; the basement walls are furred with 2x4s with no bottom or top plate; electrical boxes are askew, at weird heights, and/or open; the bathroom shower pipes weren’t attached to anything and the tub was repaired with duct tape; the vinyl siding isn’t correctly overlapped everywhere; et cetera, et cetera.

On the other hand, it has a nice layout upstairs, the kitchen upgrade was decently done, the original hardwood floors are in pretty good shape, it’s got gas heat and cooking, it’s got lots of storage/work space in its two detached garages, and it’s got a huge yard. And there’s nothing structurally wrong with it.

We had the inspection yesterday (photos are here). The inspector’s opinion was basically “what you see is what you get,” and our real estate agent sort of gave me an are-you-sure look when I said we’d sign off on the contingency. Now comes the appraisal, and then the closing date should be sometime September 1-10. After which we walk in with crowbars and have at it.