Jumping in-- and making it work.

So here we were, eyeballs deep in the renovation of the worlds biggest home. It was like the Winchester mystery house-- behind every door a new horrible surprise awaited. Only instead of charming doors-that-lead-to-nowhere our home's surprises included a scorpion infestation in the shower line, a septic line plugged up with concrete, and a gray-water line that had been blocked with a brick.

Photos from the Winchester "Door to Nowhere" and "Stairway to Nowhere"

On top of that, our AC compressors had been intentionally mis-wired, all the kitchen electrical had been cut and tampered with, and the house was missing all of it's interior doors and toilets. And lightswitch covers. And window coverings.

So with no plumbing, no electrical, and a few painted walls... we moved in. Y'all it was scary.

We were going from a cute, completely new apartment in Gruene (land of Pat Green and Lone Star) to a ramshackle 5 bedroom orange monstrosity in the land of armadillos and meth addicts.... you're welcome Canyon Lake tourists association for next year's tagline.

We moved in exactly a year ago, and things have taken a turn for the better since then-- but it was a long, hot, expensive summer.



I learned that re-using things you already have can go a long way in the interim to making your house feel like home. The front door has terrible dated 1980's brass sidelights. I hate them. So I grabbed some louvered shutters my dad had given me and screwed them directly into the door frame. It was a fast update that covered up the offending panels without costing me a dime. We got the exterior lights from Lowe's as a wedding gift :)

I don't have a before picture, but it was very similar to this:

We hung a flag, we planted ferns, and these small changes made it feel more like home.

At first I was so overwhelmed with the horrible orange paint inside the house, I was scared to have ANY color at all. But the longer we lived there, the braver I got. After I retiled the mantle and installed the new surround (made from salvaged and reclaimed lumber from old homes in SE Texas), I got bold. 

Boring mantle before

Peacock mantle now!!!

My advice is that it's just paint. It's cheap and easy to paint over it if you make a mistake. And lest you think I am some sort of decorating goddess-- ask David how fun it was to completely repaint our bedroom ceiling when the "soft aqua" I picked out turned into "Crest Toothpaste" on the ceiling. It's just paint-- don't be scared in your own house. Aint nobody got time for that.

So it's been a year, and from here on out I will update on the current state of renovations instead of trying to catch you up on everything that has come before. Enjoy this tour in pictures from our last 12 months:

Entryway

Mantle Tiling

Move-In Day. Oh my God.

Concrete countertops over tile 

A few other important things happened along the way:

Rehearsal Dinner

And at the end of the day, we live here. No amount of armadillos and meth-addicts can make this not worth it....

In our yard at dusk.

Sunrise over Canyon Lake.

Easy and Cheap(ish)-- We paint ALL THE THINGS!

Luckily (or unluckily) for us, I was working part-time in the paint department at Lowe's when David and I bought the house. Every single wall downstairs was painted semi-gloss orange. The neighbors told us the previous owners had a home in New Mexico and they were trying to recreate the Adobe look in our Texas farmhouse. Naturally, instead of BUYING a southwestern style home, they just painted everything orange and called it good enough.

This is Southwest....

This is just.... orange.

So we started with paint. It was something fairly easy that we could do ourselves, we needed to do a TON of it and my Lowe's connection meant I often had access to mis-tinted paints at a huge discount. Also, during a time when our septic was failing, the A/C units had been pillaged and hot-wired, and the hot-water line busted IN THE FRONT YARD as we pulled up with the U-Haul, it was important that David and I were able to take control of the renovation in a small way. We couldn't fix all of the many MANY issues that were adding up into the thousands, but we could grab a $39 gallon of paint and feel like we were making headway. 

The thing we weren't prepared for was the sheer VOLUME of paint it would take to make a dent in our home. The Living room took 18 gallons alone. Everything needed to be primed, and then several coats of paint. Don't tell me to use 2-in-1 paint with primer, because we did that. Don't tell me to use a more expensive type of paint because we did that too. Orange semi-gloss is impossible to cover. There was no solution except many many coats. 

Here are the overhead beams in the living room getting their first coat of stain. You can see here that we have primed the walls and ceiling. 

Remember those awful cedar stairs? They got stain and about 412 coats of white paint to match our trim. Here is a before-and-after shot. Start to finish, the stairs took about 72 hours and a case of beer. Painting like this is exhausting, because it requires you to contort yourself to fit those little bitty spaces. 

Painting the woodwork in our house was a huge challenge. I really dislike natural woodwork (except in the case of Victorian houses where it was never painted) and every windowsill, doorframe, and moulding in our house was raw cedar. It took 2 coats of primer and 3 coats of Valspar paint before it looked okay. 

Bedroom after. Color: Valspar Ultra in "Notre Dame"

Ceiling is a super-pale blue called "Watery" by Sherwin Williams. 

The front office got painted a super-dark greenish gray that was a custom mix I did at Lowe's.

Everything else we painted white until we could decide on more permanent colors. For what it's worth I learned a lot about painting. I got very VERY good at "cutting-in", and I swear I will never use Behr paint again. I love Valspar Ultra and Olympic ONE from Lowe's, but the Olympic ONE has since been discontinued. The Olympic ONE (if you can find it) is great for highly-textured walls like ours because it is thinner yet very pigmented. It sank into all the crevices of our knockdown texture, and gave really good coverage. 

Valspar Ultra is wonderful also, and it's handy that they can mix any color from Benjamin Moore, Martha Stewart, etc. if you just know the paint name. All the finishes in our house are Flat or Eggshell because I  just prefer the matte look. 

David and I estimated that we have spent close to $3,000 just on paint alone. We started painting the exterior also before we realized we couldn't get high enough on our ladders. So since last July, the Orange Monster has affectionately been called the Creamsicle, since it is now (to our neighbors DELIGHT) two-tone. In these pictures, you can really tell how ORANGE it was before. The listing photo made it seem sort of a dusty-tan or peach but it was ORANGE.

Next time-- we decide what to do about our plywood floors....

We were either very stupid or very smart....

The closing process drug on for weeks, during which time David and I couldn't get our hands on anything in the house.

We took possession towards the end of May, and then started teaching summer school just a week later. That meant our weeks were completely jammed and we crammed 6 months of reno into about 7 weekends.

During this time, we had no central A/C (previous owners had taken the compressors) and no working plumbing. It took a complete septic overhaul to the tune of $1400 before we didn't have to pee in the woods anymore.

But before I get into the details of what we tackled first, let's take a tour of how the Orange Monster looked on Day 1. Let me be clear: David and I STOLE this house. We paid almost $100K less than tax value (and it was probably undervalued to begin with). We would not/could not have taken on a project like this unless the financial gods had thrown us a bone.


Downstairs you walk into a large entry.

There is an office to your left, and a master bedroom with ensuite bathroom. Towards the back of the house is the living room/dining room/kitchen and the largest laundry room I have ever seen.

The office wasn't too bad. Sure the orange paint wasn't pretty, but it was liveable, and had tons of natural light.

This semi-gloss orange paint was in every room downstairs and most of the ones upstairs too.

Lets continue on to the master bedroom:

 This was taken we we first started working on painting ALL the cedar moulding. 

Here I am trying out paint colors. This hallway leads to the master bathroom. You can see the filthy carpet above. 

Off this room is the Living room, and here is where the WTF'ery really gets turned up a notch (or six). The laminate flooring that is shown in the office picture had been ripped up in the living room. There wasn't much appealing about it, so I wasn't sad to replace it.

These beams were one of the biggest selling points! I fell in love with them. 

I should note here that it's now been a year since we ripped out the carpet and laminate and I'm still living with plywood floors. I will feel so high-class when I don't live in daily fear of a splinter. 

 Living room looking into dining room. The blue is the underlayment from the ripped up flooring. 

HAHAHA. This was the kitchen. Where do I start?!

Upstairs there were 4 more bedrooms, another fireplace, and 2 more bathrooms. I'll just give you a brief photo tour so you can truly appreciate the previous owners design-sense. 

The cedar stairs in all of their glory.... ugh.

I'll leave you to marinate on those images in all of their peach and orange glory. David and I were completely overwhelmed and completely excited with all of the potential of this home. It didn't have my green shutters, but I could see the great bones through all of the disaster.

Things Fall Apart, and then Come Together....

Whether my dream of a farmhouse would come to fruition or not was largely up to timing. The timing, my friends, could not have been worse. David and I were happily squirreled away in a great 2 bedroom townhouse in Greune, TX. We were working a second job on the weekends to save money to pay for our wedding. We were both about to move to different campuses, and have different principals and different students. We were short on time, very short on money, and couldn't give the house hunt our full attention or financial commitment.

I grew up in a great historic house that my parents restored over the course of 20 years. I wanted it all-- a huge back porch, 20 acres, a bouganvillia vine, a wraparound front porch, a swimming pool, and a (literal) white picket fence. My dream house in my mind looked a lot like the one from Father of The Bride.

Is there anything better?

Hubzu.com is a website that features local foreclosures. I often looked here when I was feeling especially brave, since buying a foreclosure is a nightmare path that I would not reccoment to anyone. So, being the 27 year old first time homebuyer who was cash-poor and strapped for time I thought "Let's just take a gander to see if there are any 5 bedroom homes needing a massive amount of money and time....."

And friends.... there it was.

"THE FORECLOSURE OF YOUR DREAMS!!!!" said the listing. (Note: there is no such thing). This was a Friday night, and after looking at the pictures I started to get really excited. This was more house than we (or possibly anyone save the Duggars) could ever need. My only-child greed kicked in. Not only could I have a house, I COULD HAVE THE BIGGEST HOUSE IN THE WORLD!!!!!!

I call it, "The Orange Monster"

David and I drove out that night to see it. We didn't leave until just before 7, not realizing the house was at the far reaches of the earth. As we pulled up, light was fading, and with no electricity to guide me I picked the lock (seriously) and burst through the door. I twirled through the dimly-lit rooms, not even sure of what I was looking at. I LOVE IT! I LOVE THIS! AND THIS! I DONT KNOW WHAT THIS IS BUT I WANT IT!

David looked both skeptical and fraught with concern. As he signed up for eHarmony on his phone, I called our realtor. The bad news? There was an offer on the home already. My heart sank, and David's spirits suddenly lifted.

The next weekend was Round Top antique fair. In a state of delirium and heatstroke, David and I wandered the fields with my parents for 2 days straight. We were sure that we wouldn't get this house, but we had placed a pending offer in case the first one fell through. It did.

The process of buying a foreclosure is a long and boring one. It took us almost 2 months to close on our home, along the way learning some things about the best and worst in people (namely the former owners, who were withoutadoubt the worst. people. ever.)

The dream had become a reality, but where to begin?