About 3 years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. We looked at alot of houses. I don’t like the suburbs. Having grown up in the country, I wanted to be as close to the city and downtown as possible. We looked in Grandview, Clintonville, and finally German Village. We ended up getting our first home just outside of German Village in Shumacher place.

We like to call it “ghetto adjacent”. But we are downtown, we have a yard the size of a yoga mat, and we have 2000 square feet in a lovely victorian brick home.  Upon moving in, we discovered several things.

1. None of the floors are level. They slope and curve as the house has settled. You may say, “So what.” This however, has several implications. First, a line of bookcases along the wall do not sit evenly. Each one of them needs to be shimmed at different levels. This makes the bookcases, at best, precarious and at worst, dangerous. The last bookcase, we got at a different time because we couldn’t fit them all in the car. The repercussions of this is that we couldn’t bolt it to the rest. Below is the result. Also, that’s right. Those are my Minnie ears. And you know what? They’re not my only pair!

2. There is no subfloor. This means that if the light is on in the basement, you can see it through the slats above in the dining room. HA!

3. The walls are not flat…any of them. They are plaster and who ever did it must have been cross-eyed to the point of double vision. This means that hanging pictures or, really anything else is difficult. Let’s be honest, impossible.

So, we took this house on, understanding that there were some updates that needed to be done. So far, we’ve replaced about half of the windows (we couldn’t afford to do all of them), replaced some plumbing in the downstairs bathroom (it was galvanized pipe and wouldn’t fit any of the shower fixtures we bought), we’ve redone the kitchen (during that process we discovered one wall didn’t have studs – just two sheets of dry wall and then brick), and now its time for the garage.

The shenanigans have already begun. We’ve had to replace the door since we “accidentally” broke the window in the entry door. Glass is at this moment precariously situated in the door with painters tape holding it together as we wait for Lowe’s to come and install a new door. Although, its not like the thing was keeping out intruders or robbers before the glass got broken. Next, the garage roof which hasn’t been replaced in…oh, I don’t know – since the house was built in 1880. See all the up turned shingles…Yeah, that should be fun.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Adventures in the Slanty Shanty!