Do's and Don'ts of Home Remodeling

In the last six years of remodeling our now almost perfect and hard to leave house, we've learned some lessons that we'll be able to apply to our next bigger & better project.

Here's the short list.

Do:

• Use grout the color of dirt for tiles. It never looks dirty.
• Install recessed lighting on dimmer switches. Simple, modern, moody or bright, makes stuff look good.
  
• Invest in good lighting. Brings a space to life and makes it much more usable.
• Invest in attic insulation. Easy, cheap, saves energy right away.
• Invest in a new furnace. This isn't cheap. But our furnace was from the 1940s. We got a huge boost in monthly savings from the new furnace, and it will make a difference for resale.
• Invest in gutters and regrading. We completely dried out our occasionally wet basement.
• Design smart storage solutions. Ikea has great inexpensive systems for storing just about everything.
  

Don't

• Get a glass shower door in the bathroom. Looks nice, but gets dirty so fast.
• Fix up 1920s windows. We spent a lot of time painting the interior and exterior of our old 1920s windows, and they still look old, and waste a lot of energy.
• Buy an LG over the range microwave with a vent hood. The microwave works fine, but the fan is really loud and weak.
  

Viva la house projects!

New House. No Kidding.

People, we're doing it.

We're buying a new house. I mean, new to us. It's old. 1920s old.

Seriously. We mean it. Ok, so we haven't closed yet, but we're gonna do it. We had the inspection and everything. There's no turning back without losing a pile of cash. I even turned off my automatic real estate searches. All 26 of them.

Here it is:


But don't get too excited. It's kind of in shambles. Not just kind of. Seriously. VERY.

You are going to think we're nuts. I think we're nuts. We're going to move from our lovely, nice, finished house to a smelly, ugly, catastrophe. (Seriously. Our nickname for it is "the old shitter." Chad said to me - "but I don't want to move into the old shitter", and it just stuck.)

But why, you ask?

Because it's got tons of POSSIBILITIES. Possibilities that we can actually afford to complete in the very near future.

We decided that we didn't want to wait until we were 40 to get the house we wanted. We wanted to find a way to make it happen now, while we are young, but on a budget. How could we do it? We went round and round. We almost bought tons of other houses. We stressed. We looked. It's not easy having champagne tastes on a PBR budget.

The option that finally made sense to us was to buy a run down house, for cheap, with good bones, good space, in a good neighborhood, that needs all new interior work, but no space additions. We found it. We bought it. Whew. All it took was a little over 2 years.

It's going to take some work. LOTS of work. TONS of work. But we get to make it our own. We get to make it 20 times better than the house we have now. Well, at least 4 x better, since it is twice as large, and since we now have some experience with this renovation stuff, hopeful we are twice as good at it. So that buys us four multipliers of improvement. We hope.

So, instead of going on a awesome tropical vacation, we get to go on a awesome home renovation adventure. Hmmm... wishing I could have both....

It's a duplex now, but we plan to convert to single family. Renters live in both floors, so we have some time until their lease is up to plan for the new adventure.

We're working with an architect friend to draft up the plans.. and also working through the logistics of being landlords.

Working to prepare for a new adventure ... but still dreaming of Thailand beaches. And winter hasn't even hit yet!