I wanted to post more pictures of the house. These include the current state of the outside as well as what I found when I went by to check on it after Christmas. What a shocker!!

Front of house - lots of dead trees and limbs to clean up from the bad winter storm last year.

Front of house

Laundry room. The hot water heater was in the corner. The breaker box and all of the breakers were taken too (you can see the hole in the wall).

This is the kitchen as we found it. I had previously removed the cabinet tops and painted the cabinets when I lived there before. The thieves took the microwave vent hood and it looks like they were about to take off with the oven. They used the sleeping bag to cover the windows so no one would see activity inside the house. Thankfully, I took the fridge with me when I moved or it would probably be gone too!

The Living Room after the wallpaper and popcorn ceiling removal. The walls had to be textured because the wallpaper did not come off cleanly. I ended up really liking the outcome but I already have plans to repaint again when I get there.

 

This is the Master Bedroom. I love this color an may not change it at all - at least for a while. I'm not entirely sure how a king sized bed is going to fit in here but I'm going to give it my best shot!

 

The left is the bathroom as my folks left it. The right is after the vandalism. You can see the hole where the old toilet was and the missing cabinet. I had planned to replace the toilet eventually but they pushed my time table up a bit!

Before and after in the kitchen.

Now the fun begins!!! Stay Tuned!

At the end of this month I will be moving to my new house and starting my new life adventure. There have been several challenges that have popped up along the way. First of all, the house has been empty for 3 years and that alone seems to produce problems. I don't know what it is about an empty house but it sure does seem to get depressed and start falling down.

The house is 5 hours away from where I currently live in McKinney, Texas so I don't get to go by it very often. I made plans to move there about November/December of 2011. So, just after Christmas I decided to go by the house and check on things. What I found was a big shock! Someone(s) had totally stripped the house of ALL wiring, stolen the hot water tank, the microwave vent hood, the copper from the air conditioner and - believe it or not - the 2 old toilets -WHY??? I can see that the rest of the items could probably be sold for a few bucks here or there but old toilets??? My folks were quite old and feeble so the toilets were the higher handicapped ones and even had rust on the sides where the safety bar had been. Oh well, go figure...

It seems they had intended to take the oven too because it was in the middle of the kitchen floor but for some reason they didn't take that. They also took the bathroom cabinets that were over the toilets and the mirror from the Master Bedroom which is again a mystery because it was a cheap basic mirror.

So, I have no electricity, no hot water tank, no toilets and no wiring in the house. I haven't even mentioned the fact that there was a water break in the bitter cold last winter so there is no water either. Is anyone asking what the heck I'm thinking by going through with this plan?? Believe me, you wouldn't be the first to ask.

The bright spot in all of this is that my brother is a professional electrician and lives just 45 minutes away from the house so he is re-wiring the whole house for me for just the cost of the wire. He said this job would cost about $8K but I'm able to get it done for about $1800. Whew... Thank you, James!

I'm moving towards the end of February to this home in the small town of Muldrow, OK which is located in NE Oklahoma near Fort Smith, AR. I know I'm going to cry when I drive out of Texas because I absolutely love it here but I'm working on a 5 - 10 year financial plan and this is the first step of that plan. Oh, I also forgot to mention the best thing of all! I'm only going to be 90 minutes from my grandbabies! Texas is 5 hours from them. I can't wait!!!

I'm going to post pics of the house as it looked in 2008.  This will be the second time I have lived at this home. I lived there once before for about 4 months and made a few changes.  Below are pictures of the house as I recieved it after my folks passed away.

This is the kitchen as it was after my parents passed away.

This is the front bathroom. You can see the handicap rails on the toilet. These left big rust stains when they were removed so why, oh why, would someone steal this toilet???

This is the Master Bath. As you can see, the mirror looks like a $10 Dollar Store Mirror. Again, why would you steal this??

This is the other side of the kitchen as my folks left it. I couldn't count the number of dominoe games played at that table!

The first upgrade to the house was removing the wallpaper, the popcorn ceiling in the hall and living room and repainting both. Sorry, Erica - I know you would prefer a better pic!

Still removing wallpaper!

This used to be my dad's shed that met up with a tornado and you can see who won! It was just a big pile of rubble. You can't even see any remains of the shed except the floor.