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Income Property Reveal

1 Oct

We’re officially landlords! We put the finishing touches on our rental property this week and have tenants moving in today. We are SO pleased with how the home turned out and thankfully had an easy time finding good tenants.

Here is a before look at the front exterior of the home:

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And now it looks like this:

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Admittedly, not much of a transformation, but we did rip out all the overgrown bushes and plant some boxwoods and other plants. We also replaced the light over the front door, had a new screen door custom built, and stained the front door.

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The home desperately needs an exterior paint job, which is on our radar for next year.

The back yard was also very overgrown and there was a hole in the garage roof.

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After replacing the garage roof and ripping out those bushes, it looks like this:

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Moving inside is where the big transformation happened. The kitchen looked like this before:

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And now after new stainless steel appliances, cabinets, granite countertops, arabesque tile backsplash, new hardwood floors, paint (Analytical Gray by Sherwin Williams), lighting and more:

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Here’s the other side of the kitchen.

 

And view from the dining room.

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Here was the dining room before:


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And now after new paint (Gray Owl by Benjamin Moore), crown molding, lighting, hardwood floors, baseboards, and more:

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The other side of the dining room looking into the living room used to look like this:

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And now:

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Into the living room, it used to look like this:

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We updated the fireplace, added sconces (from Home Depot), an overhead drum light, and continued the paint, crown, baseboards and new floors.

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For the fireplace, we replaced the paneling with new drywall, painted the brick white, stained the mantle, and updated the tile on the hearth.

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The other side of the living room looked like this.

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And now:

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I just love all the arches throughout the home.

Here’s a before & after of the hallway leading to the bathroom and bedrooms:

hallway Coolidge

The bathroom looked like this before:

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And now after adding a subway tiled shower, refinishing the bathtub, adding a new black vanity (from Home Depot), toilet, lighting, beadboard, and more:

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We were able to save the vintage floor tile, which fits the home perfectly. Here’s a look at the other side of the bathroom.

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The two bedrooms looked like this before:

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And now with new ceiling fans, paint, baseboards and hardwood floors:

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Upstairs used to be unfinished:

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We made it into a 3rd bedroom or bonus space by adding new lighting, HVAC, carpet, paint (Gray Owl as well), baseboards, and more.

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It is a huge space and nearly doubles the square footage of the home.

Before:

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After:

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We absolutely loved bringing this old home back to life and look forward to having this income property for many, many years to come.

Home Goals: How We Did & 2014 Goals

8 Jan

2013 was a year of pretty big changes at 12 Oaks. I posted our goals for the year here and I’m happy to report we got most of what we set out to do done! Here’s the checklist on how much we accomplished.

1) Put in Upstairs Hall Bathroom. Check! We completely gutted and re-did the bathroom. It is one of my favorite spaces in the house and has turned out to be quite the Pinterest sensation, lol. Full tour here.

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2) Re-locate laundry and renovate first floor powder room. Check! Sort of. What was once the laundry and powder room is now our pantry and part of our kitchen. The new first floor powder room isn’t done, but it is functional (sink and toilet working), and we have a new laundry room.

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3) Take down a wall to create open floor plan. Oh yeah! It feels like a whole new house since we did this.

Here was the before:

living room wall removed

And here is a similar view now.

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4) Renovating the kitchen. Check! Just a few minor tweaks left, but this was the biggest transformation yet.

Before:

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And now:

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5) New windows. We’re on a roll, another check.

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6) Renovate Master Bathroom. Ok, this didn’t happen. BUT, our master is now moving and the addition is built so a new master bathroom is started.

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7)  Get the pool up and running. It took until the end of summer but we got another check!

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8) Build a deck and/or patio around pool along with landscaping around it and the rest of the property. No check. We designed the deck, poured the footings and bought the materials but it got too cold to build. We did landscape the front of the house though.

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9) Add french doors off of the dining room. Check! Love these.

Before:

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After:

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10) Paint the house and install new front door. No paint, but we did get a new front door.

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11) Update fireplace in the den. No progress. This is going on the list for 2014.

12) Add shadowbox molding in dining room and stairs. Not yet. Though our stairs did get a nice makeover.

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13) Put in can lights in living room. Check! We put in dimmable can lights in the barn wood beams we installed.

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14) Add hardwood floors in the entry way. Check! Our floors are all one material and color- love them so much.

Before:

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After:

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Phew! We were busy. It was a lot of work, but the house totally feels like ours now. I doubt we can keep up this pace in 2014, especially with our little one arriving in a few weeks, but there is still lots to accomplish.

Our 2014 home goals are to:

1) Build deck out back

2) Install retaining wall and landscape back yard

3) Replace rotten trim and paint the house

4) Finish addition upstairs (master bathroom and closet)

5) Finish addition downstairs (powder room and laundry room)

6) Makeover the office/playroom, including a fireplace re-do

7) Blacktop driveway

8) Relocate master bedroom

9) Update living room built-ins

10) Build a dining room table from native New Zealand wood

11) Build out basement storage

All with an infant. Think it can be done?

Toasty Toes, More Paint, New Lights & A Furry Rug

2 Feb

While I was in Las Vegas for work this past week, my darling husband installed the underfloor heat in the bathroom and finished painting the 2nd spare bedroom.

He said the underfloor heating was really easy to install. First, he laid down the cables in a “S” pattern. You can see in the photo there are little steel straps that you weave the cables through.

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Next, he applied a coat of thinset over everything to keep it in place and prep for tile.

IMG_2288I’m traveling for work again this coming week so maybe I’ll come home this time and see some tile down (hint, hint Ben ;)).

And here is the 2nd spare bedroom with its final coat of paint. I ended up tweaking it a bit from the first coat, toning it down a little by adding about 15% of some grayish paint we had to the original color.

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As you can see, we are using it as a staging area/workshop for the bathroom right now, but I can’t wait to get it all set up!

See that wood in the picture above? We are going to use that to plank the walls in the bathroom. I’ve always loved this look and am so excited to get to do it in here. Here is one of my inspiration images:

Found here: http://www.southernliving.com/home-garden/decorating/bedroom-walls-00417000070400/page10.html

Found here.

We also had a bunch of items show up in the mail this week, including a new light fixture for the office.

It’s a 3-bulb semi-flush light from Wayfair for $99. Simple and clean. IMG_2334

But my favorite is our new bedroom lamps! They are from Pottery Barn and are more than I would have liked to pay except we had a leftover gift card from our wedding, so they weren’t too bad.

IMG_2355They are nice and big and make a major impact in the room. The base is mercury glass and the shade is burlap. I wouldn’t have thought those two things would go well together, but they totally do.

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Here’s the room before so you can see what I mean about the big impact.

MasterThe final tweak this week (I’m a poet) is a faux sheepskin rug that was intended to go in front of the fire but it didn’t look right with our other area rug so ended up in our bedroom.

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I think it works great in here and helps balance out the dark wood furniture and floors. Plus it’s soooo comfy. Doc loves it.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow we are having some friends over to watch the Super Bowl and I am attempting to make chili for the first time. And make these cute little strawberry footballs. Wish me luck…I’ll need it.

Strawberry footballs

Found here.

Operation New Bathroom Part I

19 Jan

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We’ve got some great momentum going in the renovation of our upstairs guest bathroom. Not without a unforeseen setback, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Just to catch everyone up, here is what the bathroom looked like when we moved in.

Due to a leaking tub, we demo’d it completely pretty quickly and then it sat like that for a while.

I created a mood board of what I want this bathroom to look like.hall bathroom mood board_edited-1

So here’s what she’s looking like as of today with drywall (the mold-resistant kind from USG), tile backer, electrical and plumbing.

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We had the electrician come in to wire for sconces which will go above the vanity and put in can lights and a fan.IMG_2200

You might be asking, “what fan?” It’s actually built in to one of those can lights. Cool, right? I’m not a big fan of the look of bathroom fans so when I saw this one at Menards, I was sold. It just blends right in.

Everything was rolling along nicely, until Ben found this.

photo-79Yep, our copper pipes were corroded. Both the waste line (seen here) and the vent pipes. Luckily that huge hole was on the top of the pipe so no sewage could get out.

To fix the pipes Ben tells me he needs to rip out a huge hole in the downstairs bathroom wall and kitchen ceiling. I was thrilled!

But actually it wasn’t bad and he had it all done and cleaned up in a few hours. But we do have some remaining holes in those rooms.

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Next up in the bathroom will be underfloor heating and then tile. We debated the underfloor heating but all our guests absolutely loved it in the last house (and we did too). We found a good deal on the size we needed which was only $99 from Menards. That doesn’t include the thermostat, but that shouldn’t be too much online. IMG_2202We’d like to do a tutorial of how to lay this stuff, so stay tuned for that.

Hope everyone has a good weekend! It’s a long one for me because of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday so I am pumped.