How the cool kids spend their weekend mornings!

I remember back in the day when I used to be a person who did brunch. That feels like an alternate reality now. Here's how we spend a typical Saturday morning now:

You don't build a slum empire eating brunch; we'll eat brunch after the slums are full of peasants, I mean tenants.

But it's not all weekend morning parties at the house; we also get down on Friday nights!

Gray hair!

All this slumlording is giving me gray hair.... or maybe I just need to make sure I put on a hat before I start painting. It is truly incredible what a coat of paint can do for a room. I've been painting the smoke-stained ceilings, and the contrast between old and new is stark.

Think I might need two coats.

I'm pretty excited about the difference a few coats of paint can make. This bedroom looks completely unremarkable now. Which is the point. Wait until we get carpet, and you'll never know that this used to be a disaster zone.

And I'm not exaggerating when I call it a disaster zone. This is how the former occupants used their windowsills.

Eww.

Horrible jobs

Being a not-slumlord is hard work. We could just buy a filthy house, shampoo the carpets, spray on a coat of white paint and call it good. But that's not how we roll.

Here's bedroom #1. Notice the wallpaper border (which is barely attached), sagging closet shelf, hideous wall color, and painfully awful carpet. I spent a good afternoon removing wallpaper, scrubbing walls, sweeping the cobwebs off the ceiling, and spackling. I spackled 131 holes in this tiny bedroom. What are people doing to put 131 holes in a single room? They must have had an extensive collection of fine art.

This is job number 1. It's going to be nice to have at least one room in the house that's completely free of horribleness, because right now there is not a single room that is pleasant to be in.

Also on the list of horrible jobs: dead mouse removal. I did one, but then I got the heebie-jeebies and my sweet husband removed the next two. Strong, empowered women can do anything they want to. But every so often they just don't feel like being strong or brave. Especially if someone else will do the horrible job for them.

Three houses!!!!!

Our not-a-slumlord plan was going so smoothly that we decided to add to the collection of non-slums! This one, however, is going to take a little bit of work to arrive at our standards. Take a look at house number three:

It's a charming little cottage on 1.5 lots in the Victory neighborhood, which is the fanciest part of North. It's a block from the fancy restaurant Victory 44, as well as Emily's diner, which is my favorite greasy spoon on the North side.

And then you get to the front door, and you see this.

The front door is currently secured by only a padlock, because it was kicked in at some point in the past few months.

Ouch. This poor little house has been treated very poorly for a while. It kills me to see a cute little house so beaten down. So, naturally, I decided I had to have it!

And then I told my husband that we had to have it. He agreed, sight unseen. And then he got to go inside two days before closing. And his first thought was to question my sanity. Which is what I thought it might be. But he trusts the vision (or is starting to become the same kind of crazy I am), so we went ahead and got it.

It needs a little work. Or maybe a lot of work.

And every time we look a little closer, we're amazed at the shoddy work that has been done in this house. Don't worry, cute little house. We'll do it better! It would be impossible to do worse.