For Sale!

That’s a wrap people! The show is over. The work is done. Let’s pack it up and put this baby on the market!

Well…I guess it is not completely over. The house has to sell first before we are all completely done. However, the house is 98% ready to be handed over to a new owner. The house was staged today by Rita Lopez with Tarragona Design. It looks gorgeous! I could not be happier with the work Rita and her team have done.

My parents have done a beautiful job with the landscaping and my dad with his unbelievably cool mailbox!

Ready for a new owner to love and cherish this home.

Reminder of the house before we started the work.

Living room staged and ready for the professional photographer.

The dining room, light and bright, ready to entertain.

The dining space closed off before the work had begun.

A tired kitchen looking for a face lift.

Comfy office space in the kitchen with a tranquil view of the backyard.

Back deck ready for a cookout or enjoying a quiet morning’s coffee.

Sweet hall bathroom ready to impress the guests.

Closed in cave-like bathroom before the remodel.

Reminder of the master bathroom that once was but is no more.

Jack thinks this room is perfect for a nursery.

One more final picture of the beautiful home.

So the next chapter is selling. We will list the property for $395,900. We have checked the comps in the area and we are not the highest priced house and not the lowest. Other houses in the area that were remodeled and staged similar to ours sold for a similar price. Our fingers are crossed that this beautiful home will find a new loving family.

Coming Soon!

We are in the home stretch people! This past weekend Mom, Dad, my husband and I have been at the flip house nonstop (except for trips to Home Depot). We stained the back deck, installed transitions pieces for the flooring, touched up painted in every room, swept, mopped, hung doors, weeded flower beds, hauled gravel, mowed, power washed, dug holes, filled holes, and more. The house is looking so fresh and new. The old ugly concrete in the front is gone and replaced with beautiful gravel and limestone steps.

The backyard has gotten some updates with a fresh new deck stain and some gravel along the back of the house as well.

Two of the bedrooms are completely done. That feels so good to say!

The master bedroom is very close to completion. The doors have all been installed. The master bathroom is getting very close to being complete. The only thing we have left is to hang the towel hooks and reconfigure the drawer to the sink vanity. But take a look at the beautiful new shower and sink.

We added sliding doors for the master bedroom closet and bathroom. The hope is to give the house a little charm and character.

On Wednesday we are hosting a preview open house for friends and family. We want to show off our work and begin to spread the word about this beautiful home for sale in the hot South Austin market. This house is in a great location and is turn-key ready!

We hope to have a for sale sign in the front yard by the end of the week! Fingers crossed we get asking price in the first week on the market!

It’s In The Details

As we round the corner to the home stretch of finishing our first flip house, the little details are now piling on and overwhelming me. My to do list seems to only grow and every task seems easy on paper but ends up amounted to hours of physical labor.

In effects to keep the costs down, Mom and I continue to work on these little details with the great help from Dad and my husband. Last weekend Mom and Dad installed ship lap in the kitchen. It looks great! They did a fabulous job!

However, now the detailed work on filling all of the nail holes, caulking the top and edges, and sanding, then painting is left to do.

We also finished the flooring and the contractor has been in to install all baseboards and trim around the doors.

Now we are left with filling nail holes in the trim and baseboard, sanding, taping the floor and the wall in order to then paint all the trim. Not to also mention trying to fix my amateur mistakes on the flooring in some areas.

I have been visiting the house everyday, slowly chipping away at these little task that are left to do. We still have not yet touched the outside landscape which still needs to be done.

The countertop installers were back today to install the bathroom countertops. Then the plumbers will return to finish installing all faucets and toilets. It will be so nice to have inside running water again.

Also left for the contractor to take care of will be the installation of the appliances and the drywall repairs in the garage. The garage walls were in bad shape and they had to make additional holes when moving some electrical and plumbing around for the kitchen. So the walls in the garage will be the last item on the contractor’s list to repair. Soon his work will be done, they will move out, and the small details will be left for us to complete.

Additional small details to work out is the idea of staging and realtor for the sale. I know staged houses sell faster and for more money. However, we just need to finalize our budget to see how much money we have to spend on staging. Also I know having a good realtor is very important, however they require a 6% commission which on a house selling for $385,000 is around $23,100! That could very well be my entire profit! So then what??

So many more details to figure out, finish up, and finalize before we put a for sale sign in the yard. I will continue to stop by the house to work on the small projects that matter. We hopefully will finish the trim this weekend and maybe even hang the barn sliding doors in the master. Then we are left with landscaping the final weekend before we list the house. Fingers crossed we have not spent too much and can sell it fast!

Painting and Tile Work

The house is really coming together! This is the exciting and fun work where we get to see the design take shape and the house become beautiful once again. Mom, my aunt, and I have been painting the interior ourselves (mostly Mom). She has been working at the house almost everyday painting each room, closet, wall, and ceiling by hand. She has been rolling, brushing, and spraying paint in the bathrooms, bedrooms, hallway, living and dining room. She is amazing!

Last Friday my aunt and I helped her finish the walls in every room. The house is now a clean, modern grey/white color. The bathrooms are a calming, reflective blue/green and the kitchen has a modern distinct black ore accent wall.

Master bathroom with Reflecting Pool paint job.

Kitchen with Iron Ore accent wall and new recess lighting!

Besides getting painting done in the house, the tile was installed in both bathrooms. The crew worked very hard and did a beautiful job.

We are very pleased with our tile section and the subtle tile design in the master shower. It is hard to see in the photos but along the back wall of the shower, the subway tile is vertical in rows instead of horizontal brick pattern. Along the side walls and in the niche it is horizontal brick pattern.

Also this week, the new windows were installed by Travis Roofing company. They did beautiful work as well and we are so pleased with the investment.

This weekend on our list of things to do is to finish painting the ceilings and then begin to lay the flooring! Big changes are coming soon.

The cabinets will also be delivered this week and installed next week along with the painting of the exterior of the house (done by professionals, of course).

We are so pleased with how the project is coming along. We still have a long list of little jobs to get done but so far we are still on our timeline for completion by early August.

I still have some shopping to do. I need to purchase the vanity sinks for the bathrooms and a barn door for the master bathroom.

After the interior is shaping up, we do plan to move outside to clean up the yard and add landscaping for more curb appeal. Stay tuned!

Making Real Progress

I am shocked at how much progress as been made at the flip house this month. After the foundation work was complete the projects have just been coming along at a great rate.

The foundation need minor adjustments because the house had already undergone major foundation repair years earlier. Olshan Foundation was the company we went with because they had done the initial work on the house and was the best price for the additional work that needed to be done.

Next the bathroom conversion started to pick up pace. My contractor hired the plumbers to come out and move the toilet and shower over in the hall bathroom in order to add a standing shower in the master bathroom.

The bathroom on the left is the master, while on the right is the hall bathroom. The sheet rock was finished today along with new texture to the walls. We will be able to begin painting the bathrooms this week and then tile will go in next weekend.

The kitchen area is also coming along nicely. The garage door has been relocated to the side wall, opening to the dinning/living room instead of opening to the small kitchen. This now gives us space to relocate the frig to where the door used to be and add a peninsula off of that wall to give more counter and cabinet space. Cabinets will hopefully be coming the week after next. We hope to paint the kitchen next week so that we don’t have to paint around the cabinets.

The hallway ceiling was raised to the regular 8 foot height. The ceiling in the hallway had been dropped to accommodate the duct work for the HVAC unit. We have relocated the HVAC to the attic and rerouted the duct work through the entire house.

The electrician has also been at the house adding recessed lighting in the hallway, living room, kitchen, and bathrooms. He also up-dated switches and plugs throughout the house. We will also have to up-date the breaker boxes to the house as well, a not so glamorous expense.

Living room before
Living room now

You can see in the photo on the left the wall between the living and dining room. The wall is now gone and the house has a much bigger, open, and brighter feel to it. The sheet rock needed to be repaired in every room. The crew finished re-texturing the walls and ceiling today. I can’t wait to get in there and start painting!

Mom, daughter, and I worked hard today refinishing the doors to the house. To save a few dollars, we have spray painted the handles black and cleaned up the hinges which will also be sprayed black. We repainted the doors a nice bright white to make everything look fresh and new again.

The house is really coming along and things are looking great! I am excited to start to see paint and tile happen. Then windows and cabinets will be next!

Demo is done man!

That is it! I can’t scrap any more floors, pull up any more tile, sweep up any more debris. I am done and so is my husband and my mom. We have worked like champions this past week. We were over at the house almost every night after our normal 9 to 5 jobs. Then over there again all day Saturday to finish the demo job. My husband chipped away at the tile and the filler with the jack hammer like a boss! Mom pulled down plastic shower wall liner, chiseled out mortar from the base of the wall, and hauled out trash to the dumpster like Wonder Women! I can’t tell you how many wheelbarrow loads of busted up tile I carted out to the dumpster. It feels like a thousand! Or how many scraps with a heavy duty razor blade I made across the concrete floor to get every spec of glue and filler off of the floor.

I realize HGTV does movie magic and those home owners really do not do the demo work themselves. It is one thing to break apart a cabinet or two, bust a wall with a sledge, it is a whole other thing to clear a whole house that was tiled wall to wall of every spec of tile fragment there is. And honestly, we could not even remove all of the tile in the house. The master bathroom’s sink is busted, we can’t shut the water off below the sink so we can’t remove it at this time or finish removing the tile under the sink. But really, that is okay. I removed enough tile for one house and if I have to pay our contractor to finish removing the last 10 tiles in that bathroom, I can live with that.

We have saved around $2,600 of demo costs by doing the job ourselves. Of course we paid that money and then some in sweat and muscle ache but that is all part of the job. If you are not willing to get dirty, and I mean really dirty, then this is not the endeavor for you.

The house after demo work has been wrapped up. You can see the one bathroom with leftover tile and sink.

This week I will meet with more contractors to continue to collect bids on the work. I am continuing to try to get the cost of the remodel down to a lower price. I am meeting with a plumber, cabinet salesperson, and foundation repair company this week. All of these will be second or third bids for each of these projects. Fingers crossed someone will have good news for us.

My next blog I promise to begin to share costs and budget. You may be wondering now how much did we purchase the house for, how much is our remodeling budget, what other costs have sneaked into the equation. Trust me there has been plenty of extra costs so far and I happy to share that with you in my next post. Stayed tuned!

Closing today (we hope)

So after the drama of Rocket Mortgage dropping us like a lead balloon we scrambled to find a new lender and continue on with the purchase of the house. We went with a local lender our realtor suggested and now we are all set to close today (hopefully!). I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed because so many things have already fallen in on us regarding this investment that I just can’t assume anything will fall right into place.

However, I am getting excited and already have purchased a few items to go in the house. I am looking to marry vintage feel with modern design as many designers are doing these days. I would like to make the house look very appealing to many people but at the same time add charm and character. As a buyer, that is what I would want.

I am also needing to keep a very close eye on the budget and try to save money every where I can on this project. Our contractor’s bid come back much higher than I was hoping and it did not even include all the “fixes” I had in mind for the house. I plan to do some more shopping around for some of the work to help cut some of the costs. For example, my general contractor has included paint and windows in his bid but maybe I could find someone to do it for less. I also plan to get started on the demo work ourselves to help save money. We may end up painting the interior ourselves to save on the budget.

We had the final walk-through the house two days ago and all looks to be in order. I will take pictures of the interior next time I visit the house, hopefully today, so I can share some before shots.