03/3/11

dining room

I never did take “after” pictures of our dining room. Since we had guests for dinner last night, I cleaned it up and this morning I decided to snap some pictures before it got messy again. :-) It hasn’t changed that much, which is another reason I never bothered with “after” pictures.

First, the “before”:

And now for the “after” pictures, taken yesterday while Savannah was eating breakfast:

It didn’t change all that much, so here is a list of the things we did:
* We removed the curtains (we still need to patch up the holes from there!). The curtains were dirty, but were actually really thick, so we used them as drop cloths for painting. They were excellent drop cloths!
* Removed the borderprint, and then painted all the walls a light yellow. We also painted the ceiling white.
* Refinished the hardwood floor.
* Last summer we removed the add-on sunporch from the back. That made a tremendous difference in the light! The room (and the whole main level of the house) is SO much brighter.
* Put up vertical blinds for privacy once the sunporch was gone.
* Replaced the side door that headed to the carport. This was a hollow wooden interior door that locked with a variety of little locks that any determined person could pop open. Actually, those locks were a little crooked so in order to lock them we couldn’t shut the door completely. We put in a steel door with a deadbolt.

Here’s a better picture of the side door:

This picture isn’t great, but here’s a closeup of the ugly chandelier, which we hope to replace someday:

As I said, this room hasn’t changed that much since we bought the house.

03/2/11

step back to 1960

Our house is 51 years old. Ever since moving here, I have been very interested in knowing what life was like in the 60s, so I could better understand what sort of life the original owners lived when they moved here. What did their kitchen look like? How did they put their living room furniture? How did they decorate, and did they like the dark paneling in the bedrooms? In some ways, I think it will help me decorate our house to compliment the features (especially because our house hasn’t been updated much from how it looked originally).

Today I was playing around with Photoshop, and I liked how this picture turned out. I took it yesterday, but it looks like it was taken in the 60s (minus the car!). Maybe when we finish painting the front I’ll take another one and be sure to move the car to the street first. :-)

(Someday I want to make this picture into a header for this blog.)

02/28/11

retractable clothesline

I finally bought a retractable clothesline to hang over my washer and dryer for the diaper covers that have to be air-dried. I used it for the first time tonight, and I really like it!

02/27/11

curb appeal!

One of the things I want to focus on while we save our money for the foundation is small things we can do to spruce up the curb appeal for our house. Both the outside and the yard need a little attention. I want to focus right now on the outside of our house. Here is the most recent picture I have, taken last Christmas:

We obviously need to touch up the paint around the front door! We don’t want to spend the money right now to paint the whole house, so we thought we’d find the closest color and try to patch up that front area so it doesn’t look quite so bad. :-)

I also have been looking at the other houses in our neighborhood, and I’ve noticed that usually the shutters are a different color than the window frames. Also, the shutters tend to match the front door. I am thinking of painting our shutters, then, as a more inexpensive way to update the outside. What do you think? And, what color do you think I should paint them? I am leaning towards black. Should we also paint the front door, or leave it white? I’d like to leave it white because we can’t change the color of the storm door (or can we? I guess we could paint that too).

Thoughts/feedback/advice would be helpful. :-) I’m so glad it’s warm enough to paint! (Although everyone thinks it’s going to get cold again before it becomes summer for real.)

02/20/11

cleaning up

Paul and his brother spent some time in the backyard this week, cleaning up all the debris. I wish I had a before picture, but it looks so much better. There was a huge pile of sticks, and it’s much smaller now. Also, 5 bags of pine straw are now sitting at the curb waiting to be picked up by the city tomorrow.

There is a lot of debris behind the shed, like an old tire, a gas canister, and a bunch of trash. It’s going to take a little bit to get the yard looking completely better, but this is a start.

02/15/11

update

I haven’t been writing in here recently because there hasn’t been much to update. Projects have come to a standstill while we start saving money to fix the foundation. I am hoping to save it in a year, so that 2012 can be focused on projects like the kitchen and bathroom. Originally, we were planning on getting the backyard fixed right now, but I am not sure about that either. If they’re going to be bringing in bobcats and digging holes to fix the foundation, I kinda don’t want them to do that over new grass, you know what I mean? However, the question remains how bad is the lack of drainage? Can we wait another year to fix it? How much worse is the foundation going to be if we wait?

We’d like to spend this spring working on making our yard look nice, manual labor. I still need to redeem my Groupon. I tried to redeem it at the end of the summer, but I think they got overwhelmed and when I tried to make my appointment they said they weren’t redeeming any more Groupons through the end of October, and then it was winter and seemed silly to have someone come cut my grass. I’m thinking in a month or two will be a great time to redeem it!

One project I have for the spring is I’d like to paint the shutters. I’ve been thinking about it a while, and will write a separate blog post about it later. Exciting! :-)

02/5/11

magazine subscription

For my birthday, I gave myself a subscription to the magazine This Old House. I hope it gives me some ideas this upcoming year! I love flipping through magazines, too.

I got my first issue this week. It was fun to read, but I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me. I did see a few things that I’d like to save for future reference. I have heard of people keeping binders of clippings from magazines about home or craft projects… perhaps I should do the same? I have many, many old issues of Southern Living and Better Homes & Gardens that would probably be more inspirational in a binder instead of complete issues sitting on the shelves.

Another project to add to my list… we’ll see. :-)

01/1/11

goals for 2011

Well, it’s the new year, and it’s time to think about resolutions and whatnot! I’m not making resolutions, per se, but I wanted to take some time to talk a little about our house goals for this year. Not sure what we’ll actually be able to accomplish before 2012, but here is a try.

1) Fix the backyard – February/March. This is important for water drainage issues, as well as bug problems. Also, I want to put up a clothesline to dry our clothes outside this summer.

2) Save up for the foundation repairs. The quotes we got ranged from $10,000 to $18,000. We have about $5k saved right now. The cheapest price is from a company that I hesitate to trust, as it was their botched estimate that convinced us to get this house to begin with – we wouldn’t have bought had we known the full extent of the damage. The most expensive price is unfortunately the price we think would actually fix everything, and fix it right. So, we need to look over the quotes again and decide which price we want to save up for. Our decision about that will affect how long it takes to save up the money, and whether we’re able to do it in 2011 or not.

3) Fix the kitchen. My reward for saving up for the foundation is to tackle the kitchen! Even though it might not make the most sense compared to all the other problems, it does make sense to have a nice kitchen for resale value, and it also affects my daily life probably the greatest. And it’s the most exciting for me. :-) As I work hard at saving money this year, I hope to brainstorm some wonderful plans to make the best use of the space. I’ll also need to come up with a realistic budget!

In between, we hope to tackle some little things in 2011. We want to replace all the light switches and electrical outlets so that they will all match. Also, I want to replace the blinds in the bedrooms. And if I can, I’d like to get new baseboards for the main level of our house. And last but not least, we need to either clean or replace the carpet in the den because the cats have pretty much destroyed it. Not sure what exactly to do about that, but I’d love to get that room back!

Right now I’m feeling positive about everything; we’ll see how long this lasts!

12/23/10

fixing our house to sell it?

There are two plans of attack when it comes to long-term house repairs… fixing it up to live in it, and fixing it up to sell it. With the former, you focus on repairs that are important to you and your standard of living. You are planning to live in the house for the long term, so you aren’t as much focused on resale value. Ideally, your fixes will add to the value of the house. The other is making project decisions knowing you are going to be selling the house. Your focus will be on resale value, and on aesthetic appeal.

I think we are leaning to the latter. Ideally, we’d hope to get as much money out of the house when we sell it, but at this point I think our primary objective is to get it to a point where we *could* sell it without having to set the price too low, or have it sit on the market too long. As we decide where to put our money, I think we should keep that in mind.

I was googling fixing up older homes – I’m hoping to find a blog or forum where I could get a chance to dialogue with other people about these issues (like Young House Love). I wasn’t successful, but I did come across this thread on an unrelated forum that I thought had a lot of good information.

After reading several sites, I decided that I don’t think we can get around fixing our foundation. Sigh. That was the money I was trying not to spend, but I don’t know what else to do. However, I do think it’s something that could wait to be fixed right before we sell. It’s important, and I don’t want it to get worse, but to be honest I am used to the back half of my downstairs being at a slant. It doesn’t necessarily affect my daily life.

Other things that would probably be important to fix, other than general cleaning/touching up paint: (in no particular order)
– Curb appeal. There isn’t much that needs to be done to the front yard, but the backyard needs an overhaul. We have plans to do this in the spring so we can seed instead of having to get sod.
– Kitchen. They say kitchens are very important to selling a house. This affects my daily life, so I have a lot of interest in seeing it fixed up sooner than later. I am fine with doing something very basic – stock cabinets, peel & stick tile on the floor, etc. I will need to price things to figure out a realistic budget. Fortunately, we don’t have to get new appliances, so that will save us some.
– Bathroom. The other important selling feature. This might be as simple as lightly sanding the walls and paint, or as complicated as putting up drywall. We’ll have no idea until we can take down the mirrors and faux tile to see what’s underneath. If we can afford it, I really want to replace the tub & tiles, but it might not be worth it in the long run.
– What other issues affect the resale value? I should probably take a look at our inspector’s report and focus on the things he flagged. Also, I would need to keep in mind the concerns that were told to us as we were trying to get financing and insurance. Some of them we have fixed already – like the fuse box. Others, I don’t think we’ll fix unless we stay here longer than 3 years – like the roof. (Or maybe the roof would be more important than the kitchen/bathroom?)

Stuff I have to think about. Really, I just like the idea of getting some aesthetic things taken care of. Maybe then I won’t hate this house so much. :-)

12/22/10

is our house a money pit?

Recently, we’ve been talking about our priorities and what we are thinking about our house in a long-term way. We’ve also been talking about where we want to spend our money, how tightly we want to squeeze our belts, and what sacrifices we are willing to make. It’s one thing to scrimp and save for a time, but for it to be a lifestyle – well that’s harder. We realized one thing: we don’t want to sacrifice everything for this house. It was an interesting observation, and one thing I wish we’d realized a year and a half ago. But then, we had no idea the amount of work it would take to get this house going.

I’ve talked a lot about the different house projects we have. Major projects. If someone handed me $40,000 right now, I would have it spent in no time and I wouldn’t even be touching the “fun” projects like redoing the kitchen! And that’s not even accounting all the major projects that we anticipate becoming issues in the next 5-10 years (like, needing a new roof).

The question is, where do we draw the line? When do we decide that this house needs too much work? When do we walk away, poorer but wiser?

We have no idea, but we’ve started talking about regrets. We know that all houses have issues, and that with any house there will be a never-ending list of projects and improvements. The thing is, we are struggling under the burden of our list. I was reading on a forum of some complaints by other moms who are renting their houses. The things they were complaining about were all things we are living with, and to be honest are all far down on our list of priorities. A friend came over to visit, and we were talking about the things we could do with our house. She would start with an idea, and then it would just snowball. And then she would stop and shake her head. It was almost too much.

We have to be in this house until August 31, 2012, or we will have to pay back the $8,000. So at that point, what should we do? Could we sell the house without fixing anything? We would most likely have to list it at the price we paid, and be prepared for it to be on the market for a long time. Or we could take out a loan, fix the problems, and then sell it and hopefully make enough to pay off the mortgage and the loan. A possibility, but that’s assuming the housing market is better in 2 years. And it still might take a long time to sell, and we’re stuck with mortgage + loan payments in the meantime. And, to be honest if we can fix everything I would rather stay here. Or we can just live as we have been, trying to save and just praying that nothing major happens because we definitely don’t have the budget.

We obviously won’t make any decisions about this until after we pass the three year mark. However, we have been thinking about what it would take to sell it in the condition it’s in now. There are things I’d want to do, which don’t cost any (or much) money, and would make the house more attractive. Most of them involve paint and heavy duty cleaning.

Selling sooner than later would also encourage us to pursue more projects to make the house more attractive. Expensive projects like the foundation would probably be left undone, and we will definitely be penalized for that. But perhaps if we can make the rest of the house look nice, we’ll attract a buyer.

I’m probably fooling myself into thinking we *could* sell this house. To be honest, I am not sure we would be able to without fixing the foundation which is really the chunk of change that is weighing us down. Sigh. Oh well. Let’s just hope we don’t ever *have* to move, or we will be really stuck!

From Hovel to Home

Our journey fixing up our 56 year old house

Author Archives: Ashley