About 6.5 years ago, we bought our first home – a fixer-upper at a great price. We approached the challenge with stars in our eyes and an adventurous spirit. We quickly learned two things: 1) even when you DIY, repairs can be expensive, and 2) we aren’t DIY people. The latter was an unfortunate lesson, and we now know for any future house purchases not to bite off more than we can chew.

Our optimism started wavering when we got the quotes for our foundation a year after purchase, and realized just how expensive fixer-uppers can be. Three years ago, we poured out a bunch of money we didn’t have to get rid of a rat infestation, and at the same time were notified that they had redrawn the lines and our house was now in a flood plain. We were now required to purchase flood insurance, raising our mortgage about $100 a month. And to just rub salt in the wound, we came home one day to find our house broken into and trashed.

I hated this house. We bought low, but prices had sunk even lower, and because of the foundation problem we couldn’t even sell it. We tried to walk away – just foreclose, take the loss on our credit, and rent for a while. The mortgage company (Bank of America) refused to give us the time of day – we spent hours on the phone over a period of several days, trying to figure out our options. (We were attempting a deed-in-lieu or a short sale.) We were so discouraged and unsure about what to do.

We ended up staying. Honestly, those were dark days and I don’t care to revisit them long enough to figure out what our reasons were at the time. We stayed in this house with all its problems, and honestly I felt miserable here. I stopped inviting anyone over. I struggled to find the motivation to clean it, and I dreaded cooking in our small kitchen that was so closed off.

I stopped writing in the blog because we stopped making improvements. We no longer put money into anything except repairing broken things. We treated it like a rental house.

But, time was on our side. We bought right after the housing bubble burst, so we just needed to ride it out until the market improved. And, finally, it improved. I kept a close eye on home sales in our neighborhood and when prices were high enough that we could break even, we decided to sell. We contacted a few real estate agents, namely trying to figure out what our options were as far as selling without fixing the foundation. We actually had an investor make an offer, but the sale ended up falling through.

Around this time, we started looking at rental houses since we were frankly over home ownership and we were unlikely to make enough profit on the sale to afford a down payment. After visiting a few, I quickly realized that we were looking at renting a house that was smaller than the one we owned, with a rent significantly higher than our mortgage. And with 3 kids and homeschooling, space was a big consideration. We began to wonder if selling was the best idea after all.

Several years ago, a friend of mine (Kacie) had told me about an FHA renovation loan called a 203(k) loan. I’m going to go into more detail about it in a future blog post, but it was our best chance at getting the funds to fix the foundation. We began to talk – what would it take to make this house worth staying in for the forseeable future? I gave Paul my list:
– foundation repaired
– new double-paned windows
– roof replaced
– new HVAC unit
– replace all the pipes
– major kitchen overhaul

The next part of the story involves a lot of paperwork, phone calls, bids, and appraisals, but in the end we were able to secure the funds to do all of those things.

We started renovations in August 2015 and they finally finished in early December. The conditions of the loan required us to hire a general contractor, so no chance of DIY, but we cannot be more happy with the finished product. It feels like a different house.

It’s been a long time coming. I’m so grateful that we were able to do this. There’s been a major improvement in our quality of life living here, and I’m finally inspired and excited to really put those small touches that make a house a home.

I chronicled the renovation process with many pictures, so I’ll be collecting those and getting descriptions typed up in the next few weeks. I still need to take official “after” pictures (I was waiting for the Christmas decorations to come down), but I’m really excited for the big reveal! So, stay tuned!

Almost a year of silence on this blog. Many of you noticed that it disappeared for a while… A lot has happened in the past year and I wasn’t sure what the future of this blog was, so I was hesitant to invest any time into it. However, I think this blog is good for me to chronicle just how far we’ve come in regards to this house.

I am going to try to update with some of the projects we’ve done in the past year. They have mostly been decor-related and not anything major.

Over the past year, we have tossed around the idea of selling this house and buying another that needed less work. We did a lot of number crunching and options investigating. We have tossed around a lot of ideas, talked about our dreams and goals, and did some soul searching. We’ve been uncertain for a long time. We contacted real estate agents and talked to our neighbors to get a feel for the current market. However, it came down to the fact that we need major foundation work and the market just hasn’t risen enough to support that. So, we have decided to stay put for the time being.

When we were talking about selling, I made a list of all the little things we could do to help make the house more attractive. I was surprised at how many little and inexpensive items there were… it made me wonder why I hadn’t bothered to do them yet. I have really struggled with my feelings towards this house, and I think a lot of these little details would go a long way in helping me feel more positive.

So, I decided to resurrect this blog. I am hoping to continue to chronicle our adventures, but I also want the reminder to be positive. I’ve been updating the before & after photos pages (I’m about half done at this point), and I always forget what this house originally looked like, and how much better it is now. I think I just focus on the imperfections. Going forward, I hope to:

• Not focus too much on the future. It’s fun to brainstorm, but I think I will reserve that for private off-line. If we’re actively planning a project, I’ll share that, but if it’s just hopeful “someday” dreams… I’m going to try to avoid doing too much of that.
• Not talk in depth about the problems of this house. For one, it gets me down. I want to explain issues that we run into, but I don’t want post after post listing all the reasons why this house is a fixer-upper.
• Be positive and use this blog to motivate me to take care of the small things. I might resurrect the Project Tuesday or whatever I called it. Or maybe I’ll find my own pace.

And as always, I’m a busy mom of two little children. If weeks (or months!) go by without a post, I’m not going to feel guilty. Sometimes I’m not actively doing things to our house – I’m just trying to maintain the current state!

I finally changed the name of this blog! I suspect this will also affect those reading via RSS subscriptions so hopefully I don’t lose anyone with this change.

From hovel to home…

A hovel is “a small, wretched, and often dirty house”. It’s also another name for a shed or something similarly simple. Now certainly our house doesn’t fit the strictest meaning of the word, but the idea is similar. Hopefully we’ll be able to turn this house into a beautiful home that is a pleasant place for all who enter! (We’re not there yet!)

Next up is a redesign – I’d like to find a nice theme that includes a picture of the house in the header. I am also working on my before/after pages so you can better see the evolution of each room. And someday I’d like to make an earnest effort To have a Project Tuesday feature, but I suspect that now (when I’m 6 months pregnant) is not the time to start!

I’m sorry for disappearing from this blog. A few things have been happening. First of all, sometime around Christmas my camera battery died. And when I went to look for the charger, I couldn’t find it. So, I have not been able to take any pictures of our new backyard. I need to either buy a new one or look harder… I’m excited to share our grass, which we had put in around the beginning of November!!

I also repainted a dresser for my daughters’s room, which turned out pretty awesome. I took all the “before” pictures but again, need the camera for the after pictures.

I want to change the name of this blog but I’m stumped for a good name. But once I do, I’d like to be pretty regular about posting here. You know, the project Tuesday I originally intended to do. We’ve lived here almost 2.5 years now and I still have yet to hang anything on the walls. I really should get on that!

With a new arrival expected this summer, I haven’t had any energy to do anything other than basic household chores. I am hoping that changes, because I really want to use this blog to keep myself motivated to provide a nice home for our family. Anyway, that’s what’s going on here.

I am so excited about this! I worked hard all last week on raking, painting, and other miscellaneous things to improve the curb appeal of our house. My in-laws, who were visiting, also helped a lot. I have been waiting for a cloudy day to take the “after” picture, but I forgot on Sunday and we have had lots of sun since, so I decided to go ahead and post the picture with the shadows from the trees. (Watch it be cloudy tomorrow!)

Here is a picture I took of the house two months before we bought it. It was taken in July, so the green stuff was at its peak. I wish I had a picture of it the day we closed!! The weeds were taller than Paul in places.

This picture was taken a few months ago. We had taken off the shutters from around the front door because I thought they looked weird, only to discover that it was the house’s original color underneath (yellow). It remained like that for the next 18 months because after a while, you don’t even notice the flaws anymore.

Over the winter, I started noticing the shutter colors in other houses in the neighborhood, and I realized that very few houses had the same color for the shutters and the window frames. I thought two different colors would really help set the windows apart – before they just looked weird, in my opinion. After taking a careful survey of house colors in my neighborhood (especially the houses that caught my eye) and consulting with many people, I decided to go with black shutters. I also needed to touch up the paint around the front door. Here is the result:

What we did:
* Painted the shutters and the railing by the front door black.
* Painted the entire front section of the main level of the house. I was just going to paint around the door, but the paint was so slightly off in color that it looked better to paint all the way across. It really brightens up the house!
* Painted the front stoop to match the house.

I noticed a few things about the house when I was up close, painting. For one, the color used to be yellow. The shutters used to be teal green. I am pretty sure the brick section was the original brick color until the previous owners painted the house green in 2006. (I’m currently researching ways to get paint off brick – I’d love to return it to that original state, since I love, love the look of brick on a house.) I think at one point, brown was an accent color, since it is the color of one of the stoops in the carport and the stoop outside the sliding glass door in the back. I am also looking into getting a paint sprayer, because after looking at what needs to be done in the back and also the shed, I think a paint sprayer would be worth the money. That project will come later, though; maybe this summer? Depending on how the budget runs.

And I meant to get a picture of the 14 bags of leaves, pine straw, and pinecones sitting by the curb, waiting to be picked up last Monday. I am happy to report that I did my 30 minutes a day, and it was wonderful to force myself outside and also so satisfying to see the leaves in the bags and not on the ground.

Trust me, it looks soooo much better. Paul got the lawn mower working and cut all the grass/weeds – they were getting pretty tall and made the yard look so ragged! Overall, the yard looks much better than it has, but overall not much different from when we bought the house – we didn’t really do much yardwork last summer.

Next on the horizon is the backyard, which we are currently collecting quotes about that.

I am thinking of changing this blog name, since I just ripped off an existing title, and now that’s starting to bother me. I am terrible at coming up with names, though. Anyone have ideas?