An abused house

So, exactly how rough was this house when we bought it? Well.... the foundation was literally broken, something that was quite obvious to anyone standing out in front and looking at it. That's what caused it to be affordable, so that was fine with us. Some other things surprised us to varying degrees.

On the first Saturday after we moved in, we needed to do a lot of laundry. I looked at the washer and realized that it had undergone some abuse in our Sunnyvale garage (think sawdust). I scrubbed the inside and ran a few cycles through including one with bleach. Finally, I put the first load of clothes in with soap and walked outside for a break. When I walked around the corner, this is what I saw.

For an unknown period of time, the laundry water had been dumping from the clean-out onto the driveway. Yes, all the soap, bleach and other miscellaneous unknown substances from the wash have been draining onto the ground instead of draining to the sewer. Our own environmental nightmare. We got this problem fixed right away, but it still merits a head shaking.

 And then, since we are in California, there are the termites. This is what the front face of the house looked like when we peeled away the stucco. Those little troublemakers chewed and chewed and really did some damage. We expected to see this during demo, though, since we saw the same thing when we took down the original garage. Only two of the the posts holding up the garage's four corners were touching the ground -- termites had eaten away the base of the posts. Instead of worrying about the damage they did, we prefer to think of all the help they provided for an easier demolition.