I’m finally sharing some new projects I’ve been working on! 

1 year ago today, my husband and I became official homeowners.

Of course, we had to do things our way, and purchased a foreclosure in serious need of repair.

You know it’s bad when the actual real estate listing says so:

It took so much to bring this house back to life.’'

We kind of happened upon this house by accident.  Sure, it was in our hometown, but neither one of us was really interested in it.  We were working with a realtor and I had just emailed her a list of things we were looking for in a home and absolutely none of those things are this house.  Usually, I’m all over foreclosures and want to immediately look at them, but I waited probably 2 weeks before I talked my husband into driving us over to take a look.  We peeked in the side door, which was the only area you could see the house.  Because our house sits up so high from the ground, that one door was the only view we had of the entire house. 

And what a view it was.

We scheduled a showing because you couldn’t see much of the house from that one door!  Because our house is a “special” foreclosure, certain measures were taken to secure the home and contractors were called out to look over the issues.  When we got in contact with our realtor to schedule a showing, there was already a stack of paperwork showcasing some of the problems and repair cost quotes.  After looking over the property, we decided to put in a low offer and honestly wasn’t expecting much.  If we got it, great.  If not, then it became someone else’s problem!

So spoiler alert: after a slight counteroffer that we also thought they wouldn’t accept, the bank accepted our offer!  Now that we had this house with soooo many problems, what were we going to do?

We were going to wait until closing.  Now, I’ll never win any awards for being the most patient person ever, so that wait was atrocious.  Because the home was not technically ours yet, we couldn’t begin work or even clean up.  We weren’t even supposed to be on the property.  Talk about buzzkill!  The only time we entered the property with our realtor before closing was when we were allowed to get rid of some water that accumulated in basement from the sump pump being turned off.

When closing day finally came and we entered the house on the first night, I had one of those “what have I done?!” moments.  Sadly, that was the first of many.  The road to rehabbing a house is not an easy or pretty one.  Because my husband and I both work full time, it was extremely difficult to find the time to work on the house.  My parents helped out a lot too, but my dad also works insane overtime, so no one was available to dedicate 24/7 to this project. It was nights and nights of getting off work at 7pm and rolling over to work on little stuff for a few hours and all day on weekends when we weren’t working.  It was about 100 trips to the home improvement store and truckloads upon truckloads of materials.  When you don’t do this as an occupation, it can get kind of intimidating.  Luckily, my husband had remodeled houses in his previous job, but working with a small, part time crew is tough!  I wouldn’t recommend such an intense remodel for a primary residence!

Because we didn’t move in until the renovations were officially completed, I have to also mention the two sets of utilities we paid to keep both residences afloat.  Paying two electric bills is tough, especially paying for electric at a place you don’t even live at! Power tools aren’t the most energy efficient, so our electric bill wasn’t super low, either.  Luckily, our house insurance was split up enough where we paid at different times on both places and we received a credit for the old place once we were moved out.

After all of that real talk, I will say that remodeling this house was definitely worth it.  We ended up hiring a few things out, like the roof and countertop, but the majority of it was done ourselves.  It’s true, we did save an insane amount of money by cutting corners and doing the work ourselves.  If we had to hire every single thing out, it wouldn’t have been worth it…but the house would have been done a lot sooner!

Even though this house is something I didn’t think I wanted, I have such a pride of ownership.  I can look back and remember the day my husband and I spent on the ground, sanding our upstairs bedroom floor.  I remember the hundreds of times I spent sweeping the floor and cleaning up construction debris.  The day my husband said he was going to his job and I found him over there laying the floor and yelling at it every step of the way!  He still refuses to lay any more click together flooring. He even threw his floor tool away! 

It has definitely been quite the learning/growing experience.  There’s still a lot more to do, but the house has come such a long way in the year that we’ve had it.

Aaand we have a staircase! This project was actually completed in December but I just never posted it.

Here are the progress pictures:

How the stairs looked when we took possession:



Still there after we removed the drywall:


The spiral staircase is finally gone! When we removed it we found out it was only secured by two tiny bolts!:


Getting ready for the new staircase. We also flipped the basement stairs so they lead down from the kitchen instead of by the door:


The plan was to bring the stairs down the wall as far as we could and then add a landing to bring them out the rest of the way. We quickly found out that we didn't have enough space to bring them down the wall. Between the door on the side of the house and the door behind the basement, adding stairs there would have been impossible. So we did the only thing we could do:


We built a staircase in the middle of the room. You should have been there for that conversation! The truth is, everyone hates that the stairs had to be in the center of the living room, but that was the only way it could have been done.  At least it's a pretty staircase:




This was one of those things that didn't quite turn out as we hoped, but we made the best of a bad situation.

Also, can we talk about how the broom keeps photobombing?!

I've briefly mentioned our patio door before, but here's a more in depth look:



The door glass is broken, so that's why there's plywood over it. The door is also badly scratched and really doesn't open properly. We were thinking about installing new glass in the door or just replacing it with another wooden door so we headed to our nearest home improvement store and inquired about new wooden doors.


Wood doors aren't cheap and since our door was a custom size, it made matters slightly worse. The cost to replace our door with a wood duplicate would have been something like $5,400! We decided to just buy an in stock vinyl door and fit it into our door opening. The cost of a vinyl door was about $450. Sure, our house is going to look super weird having a white vinyl door, but any time I can save $5000 is a good day! Also, it will be so nice to have a functional door again!  I hate fighting with the existing door for it to open.

Raising The Floor
We knew we wanted to raise the floor in the living room back up to be level with the rest of the house. We could tell the floor was lowered sometime after the house was built and thought that bringing it back up wouldn't be that difficult. We were just going to cut the supports in the basement and actually raise the floor back to where it used to be. Then we realized the floor was glued down and wouldn't come back up in one piece. We would have spent more time ripping the floor apart where the easier solution was to just buy some boards and build on top of the existing floor.


Electrical
The problem with bringing the floor back up was that all of the electrical outlets for the entire living room were placed in the sides of that floor. Raising it back up means getting rid of those outlets.


Painting The Sub Floor
In trying to cut down the smell of the house, we painted the sub floor. Also, remember those hard woods that I was hoping for? Plywoods were more like it! At least the plywood wasn't in awful condition, although there are some weak spots. It doesn't really matter in the living room, though, because a new floor is going on top of this.  I'll talk more about this in another house update.


Fireplace & Mantel
While the beam on the fireplace is extremely solid, it's also extremely damaged. There's a huge hole right in the middle of the beam. We thought about flipping the beam to expose a better side of it, but there wasn't a better side! It looks like it might have been flipped before. We're planning on adding some boards around the old beam to make it more visually appealing. We're also going to add a mantel around the entire fireplace.

Flooring
I'm still not totally sure on what flooring we're going to use on this room. We found a flooring style we really loved but it's really expensive. It's supposed to be 100% waterproof and scratch proof, which is really appealing to us because we have pets, but we're still hung up on the price.