I wish you had come here with your plan before doing it. What you did went against the suggestions you were given here. Tilling will come back to haunt you in a year or so. As your soil settles it settles based on the surface of the soil underneath the tilled soil. If/when you left that "bumpy," the fluffy soil on top will settle bumpy. Also steer manure stinks. If you have any of that left over, keep it in the bag until fall when you can start to compost it. Dump it on the ground somewhere hidden and cover it with leaves you've collected from around the neighborhood. The leaves completely absorb the smell of the manure and allow it to compost in peace. The grasses you picked will not fill in the bare spots. Spot fertilizing bare soil is a waste of money. If you have seen good KBG in the neighborhood, that grass will be the solution to every problem you encounter from now on. You can still make that work for you by seeding it in. Look for the Elite Kentucky bluegrass cultivars. Buy the best seed you can afford. Elite KBG is not available at Walmart. Seed it in the fall after the summer heat breaks. It will get better and better for three years and then, "over night," it will be the best lawn anywhere on the planet. The grass you planted will require more seed every fall. Once the KBG gets established, it will not. Mow your current grass at the mower's highest setting for the best results. Once the grass is in as much as it can be, water every week but not every day. Expect it all to die in July. You simply seeded too late for the grass to establish good roots. If some of it does not die, then just enjoy it and treat it like it was the best lawn on the block. The time to fix it (again) is in the fall. Your house looks just like the "big houses" in my old neighborhood in Hawthorne. My house was one of the 2-bedroom small houses. Only the corner lots got the 3-br houses. Here is a picture of a friend's KBG lawn in Huntington Beach for motivation. It is not one of the Elite varieties because the color is not dark enough. All he uses on it is free coffee grounds from Starbucks.

We gutted to the studs and joists and spent a total of about $25k, evenly split between materials and labor. I very carefully shopped the materials and utilized every discount I could find spending HOURS shopping online. I was maintaining a spreadsheet of what I saved vs. just ordering it from the plumbing supply store and it was approaching the 50% mark. Our bathroom is huge (compared to this modest 1900 sf house that is) and I did indulge in a few splurges here and there while trying to balance the budget by cheaping out elsewhere. It's approximately 10x11, we moved plumbing around including adding a second sink where there was none. We spent about $4k on the plumber (including running brand new supply lines from the basement and cutting old galvanized pipe out of the loop - that was about 1/4 of the price), $3k on the tile guy and $6k on the "everything else from demo to reconstruction" guy (ostensibly the carpenter but I call him the GC since he really has stepped up to do whatever needs to be done). My BIL is an electrician and did all of the electrical for us. All of those numbers are rounded up to the nearest thousand and are a few hundred below what I quoted. I was planning to do the tile myself but then I went and got myself knocked up so that's an "over budget" item. I wouldn't say that our bathroom is high end but being so large, there is just a lot of everything. There are some things that are high end but others are not. All in all an odd mix if you know the price of things.

Yes, it is my first house, and my rent went up in April to an outrageous amount. So... we qualify for FHA, which I think is really good. It was great seeing the other houses in other parts of the country in my price range - I liked them all - even the one that Pam didn't! It just had horrible decor, but that could be fixed. I can't believe anyone lives with vertical blinds inside their house!! Susie, Kevin and I also watched the House Hunters where the couple bought a house in Venice. That house today would be twice what they paid for it, and Kevin and I couldn't believe that they didn't want to live in Venice, but then we prefer Venice to Santa Monica. Right now we live on Abbot Kinney, and so it's a very walkable neighborhood, but there's also a lot of traffic. In Westchester, the neighborhood is extremely quiet, and we could ride our bikes comfortably in the residential neighborhood. I'm a bit tired of the beach bike paths because I have too many accidents on them - there are always too many pedestrian tourists getting in my way walking on paths that are clearly marked "BIKES ONLY"! There was another bid on the house, and today both of us got counters from the sellers asking us to name our best offer, and so we will be making that offer tomorrow. Whoever bids higher will win, and we should know by Friday. We had already bid about as much as we could at the beginning, and so we asked our sister if she could help us. She said she could lend us up to $25,000, but I don't think we will need more than $15,000 for what we plan to offer. We're going to drop the $15,000 back for closing costs. We'll get $8,000 back on a tax credit, and that can go a long way to paying our sister back. I think she really wants us to get this house, and if we do, we will have a nice guest room for her and her husband when they come to visit! I've searched the rest of Westchester, and I can't find anything comparable for anywhere near the price, and so I'm not completely surprised that the price is going up. If we do get it, I expect it to increase in value quite a bit in the next couple of years. Thanks for all your positive thoughts! I really do think we have a good chance, and I checked my transits, and they are excellent!! I told the real estate agent about this, and she told me that her sister is an astrologer, and both of them follow this as well. I only hope that my transits are stronger than the transits of the other buyer. P.S. I'm extremely nervous now and am on pins and needles! I was almost sick at my stomach at work trying to figure things out, but I've relaxed a lot more now that I'm home. We have to meet with the agent first thing in the morning to sign more papers, but her office is between here and where I work, and so it's not out of the way for me, although it is for Kevin. Lee, I'm sorry to say that we will be postponing our trip to Denver if we get this house, and I was so looking forward to seeing you, but we will definitely book another trip there in the near future. Our cousin there is going to have heart surgery (not as drastic as yours, I think) in the next couple of weeks, and so it might be best to wait to visit her as well. Lars

Late night ramblings: Oh, good grief! Did I never show you the 95.5% finished work? Yes, you know it's not 100%! MrHunzi still hasn't put in the counter and the sink for the coffee bar. He has a good excuse, by the time we were ready to do it, the stupid virus was upon us and we couldn't invite his work buddy over to help, and then the next shiny object took over... the BIG RENO - The BIG RENO is all the super necessary and completely unsexy stuff we've put off doing for a decade or two or three. So far, we have spent 3 yrs sucking all the 100yr old insulation out of the attic, spray foaming the roof deck, upgrading the electrical panel, burying the service lines, trenched and burying the roof runoff system, fixing a bit of masonry, cleaning up a few thousand feet of wiring, installing a 1100sqft of plywood flooring in the attic during the height of the pandemic (I could have floored it in gold bullion and had it be cheaper), putting in a pulldown sliding attic staircase, tearing out a few tons of lath and plaster (3.25tons to be precise) from the upper and lower halls, cleaning and adding meeting rail locks/latches to 16 huge double-hung windows and installing interior storm windows to tighten up the envelope, and pouring a concrete utility pad for the reason we've been doing all this work - getting HVAC installed in this 140yr Shrine To Our Lady of Perpetual Renovation! (cue angelic singing). Yes folks, in a few weeks' time, the window air units will be no more! (Well, except for the converted side porch office, that's a whole other problem for another time.) And we're getting a whole house generator to boot, because, go big or go home. Anyway, I promise as soon as all the piles of stuff that have nowhere to go right now are gone, I'll take some lovely photos and show y'all the BabeCave. I'm about to reopen it to clients after all the hot mess of 2020/2021 is done. (I am about to have a breakdown over this part of the reno- the absolute CHAOS of everything everywhere. This is the part that breaks a lot of DIYers, and I know we'll get through it, but it's tempting to say eff it and start over with something that's "turn-key". With all the other projects we've done, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, LR, DR, Library, they have been easy to compartmentalize and keep the mess to that location. Y'all! There is no part of the house that isn't getting touched and there is no refuge from piles of tools, stuff that has been moved out of the way for something and has nowhere to go, oh and there are literally 17 giant bales of insulation stacked in my dining room and it's 2 weeks till Thanksgiving. No turkeys will be sacrificing their lives for us this year! Oh, only 5 of those bales have immediate use after the ducts go in, 4 more are holding for when we do the bathroom because MrHunzi is worried we might damage them somehow when demoing that ceiling if we put them up now, and the rest...there was somehow a mad rounding-up error on how much was required, so yay, I'm going to have the privilege of dragging them down into the basement, putting it up in the boiler room ceiling, and crawling up into the 2ft high crawlspace ledges and scootching around on my back to insulating them with Rockwool, because waste not, want not, and I have 8 bales to spare.) It's all good - the goal in this house is always to stuff every possible accessible space with Rockwool because fire is the one thing that is super scary in an old house like this - if you've ever tossed a stick of lath into a fire and watched it go WOOSH and contemplated, my whole house is made of that stuff, you too would be willing to backcrawl in dirty, dead mouse filled crawlspace ledges with the goal of not making your house fireproof, but to at least buying you an extra minute or two to make it out. And this is the one time that MrHunzi gets off easy - he can't work in quarters that tight, and while I'm no skinny mini, I can, so yay for that. But I know it will get better. As soon as the ductwork (and insulation for the hall) is installed, I'm planning to call in my fabulous assistant and we are going to organize and PURGE like mad, then I'm going to call in the Stanley steamer guys to clean every floor in the house, and beg my housekeeper to come back to work. I'd really like to do it now before the contractors descend on us right after T-Day because I'm actually horrified to ask anyone to come work in this house in this condition - I'm not sure they won't think we're hoarders. Isn't there a DIY show on TV like this right now? Where the DIY got out of control and the homeowners are a full hot mess and need to be rescued? I feel like someone could nominate us for that show. We are currently the poster children of why not to live in the renovation. Contractors will take photos to scare their future clients out of ever attempting DIY with tales of our woe. Oh and for extra fun, Thanksgiving weekend, the Mini-Mes are coming to stay with Nana for several weeks, because it's not chaotic enough without throwing two small children, 4yr (girl) & 8mon (boy), into the mix between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think I was fine until I realized there will be a point while the HVAC guys (arriving Monday after thanksgiving) are working here for 2 weeks where I will need to remove ALL THE FURNITURE from the nursery and ROLL UP THE CARPET, so we can put the ductwork in for the DR below, while I have infants/preschoolers who need to sleep in that room because the other guest room is 6ft deep in all the crap from every other place and will have the nursery room furniture piled in there to boot. Everyone be sure to say your prayers and light your candles to Our Lady of Perpetual Renovation for us. We're going to need them! ;-) Once the HVAC is done, a brief interlude for celebrating Christmas, and the purge and cleaning have commenced, it's drywall, paint, add more fancy applied moldings on a huge staircase wall, and we'll pour a concrete driveway big enough to land a 747 (well, maybe not quite that big but at least a 7/11 parking lot) and that will probably mushroom into more landscaping. And then maybe by this time next year, we can declare victory. For five minutes at least. And then, we'll see if there's anything left in the tank to work on that truly evil old converted porch/office reno - that thing is going to mushroom like a nuclear cloud. And then there will only be some minor drywalling, install a window and pocket doors for the dining room, the 2nd-floor bath (only bathroom on the 2nd floor shared by 3 bedrooms so making it master-bath nice is the plan), and the kitchen to do, you know, nothing major.... But I promise - photos soon.