First Nursery

One of the first projects we did in the new house was create a room for our new baby!  This was pre-pinterest, which is kind of funny to think about!  I used HGTV's rate my space for some design ideas and did lots of googling for other ideas.  I had my own "pinterest board" in my head and used bookmarks (I know, right?) to keep track of the things I loved and wanted to use.  I love how the before and after pictures turned out!

Here is the room before:

Not too bad to start with, but it didn't really look like a boy's room.
















Here are the after pics taken by Jessi Taylor Photo during our maternity session:

 The wall color is Benjamin Moore Spring Sky (it's actually Behr paint that we color matched).  I made the curtains and crib bedding. 

 The dresser was an antique mall find in Chattanooga.  The orange rocking chair was my husband's grandmother's. 

 Wall hook from Hobby Lobby.  We have since added a clock above the light switch for the nights when I was up late nursing and trying to time how long he had been eating. 

I really do love the way it turned out!  Of course it doesn't look this good anymore because my 13 month old is a mini-tornado!  Most of his diapering materials are spread out on the floor because he will not sit still!  Potty training really can't come soon enough!

Stillwater

We made the move to the 'burbs!  As much as we loved the convenience of living so close to downtown, we did not love the crime, especially for raising a little one.  I used zillow.com to search for homes, and this time I looked for neighborhoods where everyone paid a similar amount for their homes.  The neighborhood we chose has an HOA with a small yearly fee for upkeep of the neighborhood and swimming pool.  It also has rules, which I actually like because it protects everyone's property value.  In our old home, we constantly ran into situations where neighbors did tacky things to their yards.  Every day, I would look next door and think, "Ok, surely they can't fit any more vehicles (RV, boat, motorcycle, truck, car) in their front yard!"  And every day, they would surprise me!  In our new neighborhood, they can't.  I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of my personal freedom to be tacky in order to protect the value of my home.  We also have a neighborhood pool a short walk from our new house.  Here is Stillwater:

I love this house!  It had the layout I wanted.  As long as a house has good "bones," I'm happy, because all of the cosmetics can be changed! 

I found out I was pregnant with our son the day after we moved into this house, which was kind of perfect timing, and kind of hard because I wasn't really supposed to be lifting heavy things, climbing on ladders, exposing myself to paint fumes, etc.  So, we have been on a much longer reno timeline on this house, especially because little dude keeps us so busy!  One thing at a time...I'm always changing something in the house!

Shorewood on the Market

Eventually, it was time to move.  Shorewood was fun while it lasted, but the general layout of the older home no longer met our changing needs.  When our realtor came in to put a price on our house, she said, "You need to de-personalize and de-clutter.  Otherwise, everything else looks great and move-in ready."  Move-in ready is apparently a huge deal to non-do-it-yourselfers.  We wouldn't know anything about that!  My husband gets turned off by that phrase because to him, it means we are paying extra for something we could have done for ourselves.  Did I mention he's super cheap? :)  So, I went around the house as if I were a buyer.  I tried to imagine myself as several different buyers: old, young, family, single, different races and genders.  I tried to be very neutral with everything and we took down every single picture of people and replaced it with a picture of scenery.  While I was walking around as a buyer, there were several things I found to do for cheap that could deter a buyer, but I could easily fix before we sold.  Here are some of the finishing touches:

I forgot to mention that we removed some giant shrubs that overtook the walkway and replaced with Euonymus bushes.  We actually had a Euonymus bush that always looked great, year-round and thrived in our flower bed when we moved in, but it was in a weird location and was growing into the concrete stairs.  I had no idea about plants, so I cut a sprig of it off and took it to the barn nursery downtown and they showed me where I could buy them.  The main things I focused on were low-maintenance and pretty for most of the year.

Curb appeal is huge to buyers and this house didn't have lots of it.  Like I said before, we replaced all of our windows eventually, which helped with the general look of the house for sure.  I also color matched the paint from the soffit and touched up some areas that needed repair.  The front porch needed to be painted too and felt like a dark black hole when you walked up.  I chose a coordinating lighter color to brighten up the feel when people walked up.  It's actually the same color used on the stucco on the back of the house.

Another easy solution: pressure wash the stairs and sidewalks.  This was very cheap since my dad owned a pressure washer.  It looked so much newer after we did this!

Mulch is also very inexpensive.  We added black trim around the flower beds and then mulched to define the area.  Even though our flower beds look fairly empty, the lady buying the house told me, "I was so excited about your flower beds!  They have so much potential!"  She apparently loved to garden.  I think potential is really the key here.  You want your buyer to think your house has the potential to be great, not the potential to be a lot of unwanted projects and work.

Show off your assets.  We had some things going for us.  So we showed them off!  Every time I got a call or text that our house was going to be shown, I staged big time!  I opened every single curtain and let in as much light as I possibly could.  I also cleaned, straightened, and hid anything I felt like made the house too much my taste and not the buyers.

Upstairs guest bedroom: we cleaned out all of the closets (which were usually crammed full of junk!) and staged with neutral bedding and window treatments.   I also painted the ceiling bright white and the walls a light neutral shade.

This master bath was not so masterful.  Pedestal sinks are so in right now, and I just don't get it.  There is NO storage!  For living purposes, we had a small bookshelf packed full of our stuff between the sink and toilet, but I wasn't about the leave that out when we sold our house.  I did hang a small shelf above the curtain rod to hold our essentials in pretty jars.  It's very hard to actually live in a house on the market!

Take something weird and turn it into something cool.

A weird little nook turned out to be the perfect downstairs linen closet.  An ottoman (which made the den upstairs feel too cramped) made this area off of the garage feel more like a mud room and less like a funky space.  The thing you hate about the house you're selling could be the thing the buyer loves about your house! 






Now, I'm no expert, but I do watch an unhealthy amount of HGTV, and we sold our house in 3 months.  I think asking for a realistic price and doing the things our realtor suggested really helped us move our house quickly.

Other helpful advice if you are thinking about selling:  Take lots of pictures and try to make each picture make the room look its personal best.   Open the curtains, turn on the lamps, get the right angle.  Our realtor posted our listing on websites like Zillow and Trulia with the pictures, and we had several interested buyers. 

Also, big-ticket items such as: new roof, gutters, windows, and AC/heat units are really annoying to buy because you know when you sell, you will not get that money back dime for dime.  But, you will sell the house more quickly and have fewer people that see the lack of those things as a deal-killer. 

About the price:  Everyone wants a good deal on something, buying low and selling high.  My husband is one of the most frugal men alive.  He hated to part with that house for a penny less than we put into it.  But, it is a buyers market.  I had to remind my husband that if we sold low, we might also be able to buy low, which we did!  We found a great deal on a home that had the bones of everything we wanted.  And so begins a new adventure, starting over on getting our new house exactly the way we want it!

Futon Room

Yes, that's right folks.  We had a futon.  It was actually pretty gross.  Who knows how many guys ended up sleeping on that thing while it was a bachelor pad.  It had random spots on it and there were actually two futon mattresses stacked on one futon frame because "it wasn't comfortable."  Of course it's not comfortable!  It's a futon!  Ok, enough about futons, this post is about the room that housed the futon.  The room we called the "futon room," even after we gave the thing away.  This room eventually became our exercise room, back before I became pregnant and exercised more frequently.

Before we started the reno, there were two closets in the room: one under the stairs, and a bifold door closet jutting into what would become the basement bedroom.  We decided to remove the bifold closet and wall it off, tearing it down in the basement bedroom and adding some square footage in the process!  Here is the before:

And here is the after:

Another problem area we had was the entry from the hallway into this room.  In the old floor plan, this room opened straight into the garage.  Since we eventually wanted to add a bathroom, we wanted to move the entire door over to the right to make space for the bathroom.  The pictures explain it better:

 -Before: Doorway was to the left, leaving no space for a bathroom behind that wall.

 -After:  doorway now leads into the tiled mudroom area coming off the garage, leaving space for a bathroom to be added.

  It had a built-in bookcase that was dark brown, like the previous handrail of the staircase.  My dad came over and spray painted it crisp white! 

Basement Bedroom

As I said before, older homes have smaller bedrooms and lack of storage.  Our goal if we had stayed in this house was to eventually put a bathroom in and move downstairs.  Here are some lovely before and after shots:

 Before:  This area was a workshop to the side of the garage.  My husband's goal when he first started this project (before we met) was to add another room and then another renter.  He had to settle for me instead:)  The air conditioning vents could not be moved and they hung down too low to put a bed underneath.  I suggested adding a huge closet as climate controlled storage.  We stored our Christmas tree and out of season clothing in this closet.

Drywall 

 I like to call this the "Great Closet Door Debate."  My husband and his buddy made closet doors to fit the non-standard openings created by adding the closet under the air vents.  These closet doors were pretty, but they were extremely heavy and we had countless problems finishing them (painting, adding plexi glass panels, getting them to close properly). 






We ended up scrapping the huge, time consuming project and we bought sliding closet doors that overlap and cut the bottoms off.  They slid on a track from the top.  Easy to paint, easy to hang.  Much better than making your own, in case you were wondering!

 After:  I added a sewing desk down here after I got a sewing machine for Christmas.  

Before and after the window was added.  To be a bedroom that is up to code, you must have a window and a closet.

Kitchen

I really liked the kitchen at Shorewood.  It had enormous windows and loads of cabinets.  The lighting wasn't good at night and it didn't have a pantry, but other than that, it was awesome.  When I moved in, the kitchen was a bright yellow that reminded me of Italy.  It was great!  But, when our realtor came to look at our house, the two main things she said were to depersonalize and declutter.  I really liked our yellow kitchen, but buyers might not.  We also had 40 year old kitchen cabinets.  My mom and I worked hard to restore them to their former glory and I switched out all of the hardware to give them an updated feel.

Before:                                                                                                After:

 -Before

After

Before:

                                                                                    After:

New windows made a huge difference in this room.  The corner of the old window let in cold air and bugs.  These new windows were energy efficient and pretty!  When the weather was nice, they easily slid open.  It was nice to be able to look out while doing the dishes.

Before:

One light for the whole kitchen...it was actually an entry hall light with weird refractive pieces of glass.  There was NOT enough light in the kitchen!  Especially for making dinner.

                                                                      After: My husband installed a new light fixture and then jumped off that line in the ceiling to run an extra track light (modern design) that we could use for task lighting.  While he was up there, he fixed the light over the sink that had been broken for years! 

Master

Old houses have lots of great things about them:
-Usually have hardwood hidden beneath ugly carpet
-Plaster walls that make you feel like a bomb could go off on our house and you would be fine
-cool architectural features
-well-built

Here are some things I don't like about older homes:
-lack of storage
-small master bedrooms
-small bathrooms
-lack of central air (my husband added this to our house as soon as he moved in)

There wasn't anything we could do about the size of our master bedroom, but we could change how much furniture we had and the placement of the furniture.  Here is how the room looked when my husband was a bachelor:

I made him these curtains to block out the light from fabric I got in Tanzania.  The chest of drawers made it feel very crammed and there was only room for a double bed.  (Fine for 1 guy, but not big enough for both of us when we got married!)  A queen sized mattress was one of our first major purchases as a couple.

Here is how the room looked when we sold our house:

 It's amazing what paint, new windows, and new lighting can do!