Progress Update on The Ravenna House

THE RAVENNA HOUSE

Hey guys!  Today is a progress update post and I'm excited to show you what the house looks like.  But before I take you inside, I need to warn you about something.  See we're still in that whole "it has to look worse before it looks better" phase and I don't want you to be disappointed.

Even though the house may not look like much, it's taken a lot of work to get here. Walls have been framed, retaining wall built, cabinets ordered, plumbing and electrical roughed in and just as soon as we pass our cover inspections, we'll be on to drywall and then we'll be cruising towards cabinets, tile, and paint!  Okay, okay...cruising might be an overstatement.  Inching would be more accurate.  Inching is all we can do with day jobs and a 6-month-old at home.  And as long as we're talking about commitments, Bubba the dog wants to go to the park. Baby wants a trip to the zoo.  And moma wants to get a workout in (that baby weight isn't gonna come off by itself).  So it may not be one of those "bring your toothbrush" houses, but it's damn fine progress in my book!

These are all pictures from today on my iPhone.  Excuse the mess.  We aren't living in this house yet (thank goodness) so tools and appliances are scattered about.

The shots above are panoramas of the "great room" including living, dining, and kitchen.

The shots above are of the upstairs hallway and bathroom.  Now, let's journey downstairs...

The basement is roughly 600sf and will have a family room, bathroom, and office/guest room.  There is plenty of storage in the crawl space.  I'll go into more detail in these rooms as we get closer to a final product.  So that concludes this grand tour.  You've seen the whole house...all 1400sf!

So this is what we've accomplished over the past 2 1/2 months in list format:

• Flooring, kitchen, and basement demo
• Selective bathroom demo
• Cabinets detailed and purchased
• Plumbing rough in
• Electrical rough in
• 5 of 10 windows "un-stuck" and operable (more on this later)
• All galvanized pipe plumbing demo'd (may I take a moment to acknowledge how gross the inside of 87-year-old pipes are? I CANNOT believe anyone drank out of these! Especially myself! I'm gagging over here!)
• CMU block retaining wall built
• Crawlspace concrete pad poured (all told we've poured 3 tons of concrete in the basement!)
• New footings for basement posts
• Appliances purchased
• Basement walls framed (50% complete)

Here's what is coming up in the next couple of months:

• Complete bathroom demo
• Pick out paint (there's a sale at Sherwin Williams until 12/31/13)
• Finish drywall in kitchen and hallway
• Order upstairs bathroom materials: tile and wainscott
• Order basement bathroom materials: everything
• Mud and tape drywall in kitchen and hallway
• Kitchen cabinet install
• Order kitchen countertop and schedule install
• Install Ikea farmhouse sink as an undermount
• Tile backsplash
• Install lighting
• Design the new heating system (we're still tossing around a few options: hydronic radiators, gas stove insert, and a furnace)
• New basement post and beam where it was previously removed (seriously...who does this?!)

Yes...you noticed it too.  That's a pretty long list of things to do!  Well we'll continue inching along...in the mean time, I'd love to hear about your renovations!

Next up: Guess you'll just have to tune in next week and see!

xoxo

p.s. Merry Christmas!  We're headed over to central Washington to celebrate the holiday with Garrett's family.  It's the baby's first Christmas so I'm looking forward to it even more this year :)

Shiny and Perdy: Kitchen Design Ideas

THE RAVENNA HOUSE

As promised, it’s time we got to the “better” stuff. You know…the shiny and perdy stuff.  You’ve been with me when we bought the house. And when we financed the property. And through the very exciting (eh hmmm) demo phase. So it’s time we earned our reward.  The light at the end of the tunnel has arrived!  Let’s talk kitchen design.  Ba..da…boom!

When we first bought the Ravenna House, we weren’t sure if we were going to re-do the kitchen. Although it was small, I thought the original cabinets and sink were quaint and with a fresh coat of paint they would shine.  Plus I really wasn’t excited to put a kitchen remodel into our already-large budget.  But no matter how many times we looked at the space with measuring tape in hand, we just couldn’t fit a fridge, range, and a dishwasher in the existing space.  And that was a deal breaker. So the decision was made.  We were going do a major kitchen remodel. 

Hubby and I played around with layout for a couple minutes, but the house is small so there wasn’t much to play around with.  We converged on the only practical plan like a moth to a flame.  We’d remove the interior kitchen wall and create a giant “great” room with living, kitchen, and dining all open. Kinda like this (IF our house was four times the size it actually is):

via Pinterest

Alright people.  Kitchen design may be fun (tile, cabinets, appliances, countertops…so many pretty, shiny things in one place!), but it’s serious too.  Have you ever been in a kitchen where two people can’t cut carrots without knocking elbows?  Or cooked at a stove slammed up against a wall? Yeah…sucks I know.  So there’s a little pressure to get it right.  Like Mama P always said, “an ounce of preparation keeps you from beating your head against the wall”.  Okay Mama P didn’t actually say that, but she should have.  Because the key to this whole renovating thing is planning.  That and shims.  And YouTube.  But that’s a story for another time. 

So after we took the kitchen wall down, Hubby and I took measurements.  I drew out the space on some engineering paper and played around with the cabinet layout.  Once I was happy with how it looked on paper, I taped it out on the floor.  And then I walked around in my imaginary kitchen and prepared an imaginary dinner and baked an imaginary cake.  Yes…seriously!  And then I rearranged the cabinets and then rearranged appliances until I hit upon what worked best for the space.  The entire design process took a couple weeks.  In the end, there are a couple things in the design that aren’t ideal (like the sink ending up too close to the range), but I suppose that’s part of renovating an old house.  At some point, you have to “make it work”.  So I sealed the deal by ordering the cabinets from a carpenter I found on Craigslist.  No backing out now...

Onto the finishes.  After scouring Pinterest, Houzz, Elle Décor, House Beautiful, Martha Stewart Living, and Prevention Magazine and then getting some input from Hubby, I decided to go with a classic white kitchen with a twist.

 Taste Design, Inc | via Houzz

 

Rebekah Zeveloff | Kitchenlab

Although I love white subway tile backsplashes (pictured above), I’ve already done it in two of our houses.  In the name of trying something new, I looked at some other options.  I briefly thought about marble mosaic tiles, but ringing in at well over $14/sf, I didn’t get very far. That’s when I found Home Depot’s carrara marble subway tiles for under $7/sf. I love the look of honed carrara and when laid in a herringbone pattern, marble subway looks on-trend, classic, and upscale.

via Pinterest

I ordered 60sf of tile, 10 sf more than I needed (you can always return, but it sucks to run out mid-project).  In a few short weeks, I’ll be tiling this very pattern on my backsplash! {insert giddy squeel here!}

Having decided on the backsplash, I turned my attention to the counter-tops. I wanted something that felt historic which in my mind meant Carrara Marble, butcherblock, or soap stone. Carrara marble is my no-holds-bar favorite. It’s what I’ll have in my “forever” house – porous, easily-stained and all. But since we don’t know if we’ll turn this house into a rental long term or sell it, I didn’t want to risk having high maintenance countertops. So Carrara was out. Butcherblock is great, but we’ve had that in our last two houses, and I was ready to try something new. Enter soap stone. Turns out it’s not that readily available and where I have seen it, it was expensive. So I had to go back to the metaphorical drawing board. I did a little more Houzz research and found out that honed Absolute Black granite looks really similar to soap stone. Plus it’s super durable. And it just so happens that I found a supplier who sells pre-fabricated granite for a really reasonable price.  I’m not 100% sold on honed granite, but I’m pretty sure this is the direction we’ll go.

Lastly, we had to buy appliances {dang… J}.  Since we wanted to go high end on this kitchen, we decided on stainless-steel.  My favorite appliance store, Albert Lee, has a warehouse sale twice a year that just happened to occur a month ago.  I enlisted grandma to babysit and Hubby and I headed over to the sale at 7am to get in line.  Yes, there’s a line for this sale.  Kinda like a sample sale in New York but with women wearing tape measurers instead of Prada purses.  We stood in line for two hours through a hailstorm before they opened the door.  But it was worth it because we bought up everything we needed for the house, including an Electrolux washer and dryer, Viking dishwasher and an American pro-looking gas range…all for crazy good prices.  {Insert another giddy squeel here!}

So the final kitchen design looks like…well you’ll have to wait for that. And I’ve got to get to work!

Next up: Progress Update on The Ravenna House

Do any of you have kitchen design woes to share? I’d love to hear about it!

xoxo

How we Scored (and Paid for) the Ravenna House

THE RAVENNA HOUSE

Now that you've seen the "before" pictures of The Ravenna House, you're probably wondering how we scored such a gem!  Okay, okay so I'm being factitious...you're probably wondering why we wanted such a "dump".  Some may even call the house dirty.  Old.  Neglected.  I get it! She's a little run down.  But it's what’s inside that counts and this little lady is solid, vintage, and authentic and damn it if you won’t call her beautiful in a few short months.  Cause that's what my girl deserves!

Ah hem.  

What we were talking about?  Oh yeah.  How we scored this little beauty.  Well, I have this nasty habit of checking Redfin first thing every morning for all newly listed pre-1930s homes in the Seattle area.  On one rainy Saturday in September, I ran my usual search and up popped The Revenna House.  There were only two pictures in the listing and they were of the  exterior, which is never a good sign, but the price made me do a double take: $230,000.  Yeah, I know...a crazy good deal!  I immediately set up a tour for noon that day.

When noon rolled around, we packed up the baby and headed over to Ravenna. The house is small so we walked through it in a matter of minutes. I immediately liked the layout and the coved ceilings in the living room.  The back bedrooms and unfinished basement had great space.  And there was lots of storage (I know...I was pretty surprised too!).  All this was enough for us to put in an offer but not to make my heart swoon.  That came after we met the owner.

John was a sweet, 84-year old who loved sharing his house with us.  He launched into the story of how his family had owned this house since his birth.  In his early years, he remembered walking a few blocks north to the poultry farms that used to occupy the area, which itself is shocking since the area is now 100% urban and many miles away from the nearest farm.  In the few minutes we talked, a realization began to grow out of the real connection I felt with this man.  We could be the second owners of this home!  Baby Wilder could spend his wee years here just as John had.  So although the house needed a good deal of work, and despite the fact that we didn't have time to renovate a house (baby took up all the spare time we had), we decided to put in an offer.

But that's where the good news ended.  The seller was accepting offers for one week only (read: multiple offers expected) and worse yet, only all-cash offers would be accepted.  And we didn't have $230,000.

We went home and talked more about the house.  It was such a good deal that we knew we had to try to buy the house.  If we could just come up with the sale price in cash, we figured we could close on the property and then seek traditional bank financing, and pay back our initial cash investment.  We briefly talked about getting a hard money loan from a bank, but the crazy high interest rates scared us off.  So I did the only other thing I could think to do.  I called mommy.  And Daddy.  And anyone else I thought could loan us money.

Over two days, I was able to secure personal loans in the sum of $210,000 from my spendthrift family.  They agreed to loan the money at a simple 10% annual interest rate.  Coupled with the $75,000 we had in our bank account, we officially had enough money to put in a cash offer!  Of course it couldn't be that simple.   I had noticed that the old furnace in the basement hadn't been inspected in over a decade.  Well it turns out that it hadn't been operational in just as long, which meant that we'd have to upgrade the heating system before we applied for a mortgage.  We'd also have to remove the old oil tank from the back yard.  All in all, we budgeted $20,000 in the necessary upgrades in order to secure a traditional 30-year mortgage. With $285,000 in cash, we were ready to make an offer. But we still had to decide what the house was worth to us.

So we turned our attention to due diligence. We looked up all the public information on the property including the property report (available on the County Accessor's website), the side sewer card, and permit history; Zilllow value estimates; and comparable recent sales.  Then we read the seller disclosure and title report form the seller's agent, completed an inspection; scoped the sewer connection; got bids for removing the abandoned heating-oil tank; and talked to our mortgage broker about financing.  We had to be thorough because the property was being sold as-is and we wouldn't be able to ask the seller for any modifications or cash back for repairs.  After talking to our real estate agent and weighing the necessary repairs against the condition of the property, we decided to put in an offer for $230,000 with an escalation clause up to $262,000.  In order for our offer to be competitive, we waived the financing and inspection contingencies and included a personal letter.  The letter had been my idea after meeting the owner, but our agent recommended including our picture on the front stoop of The Ravenna House.

One week after viewing the house, we submitted our offer and waited.

So how did our offer stack up?  Well you may be surprised to find out that we weren't the highest offer.  We weren't even the second highest offer.  In the end there were 11 offers and ours was somewhere in the middle.  But the story doesn't end there.

All of the other offers came from contractors or investment companies looking to flip the property and lucky for us, the nostalgic owners wanted the house to go to a family.  So they countered our offer at $280,000, which was $6,000 below their highest offer.  We chewed on this for 20 minutes or so, but ultimately I wasn't comfortable that we would have enough money left over to complete the renovations the house needed in order to secure bank financing.  In the end we really wanted the house, but we weren’t comfortable offering more than $270,000.  So I asked our agent to thank the owners for considering us and if there was any way they could accept $270,000 we'd love to be the new owners of their home.  I could tell that our agent thought that there was not a snow balls chance in hell that the owners would accept our counter, but she took it to them none the less.  And knowing our agent, I'm sure she sold it like a pro.  An hour later she called with the good news that we had just bought The Ravenna House.  The owners had accepted our offer even though it was $16,000 less than their highest bid.  Meaning our letter with the family picture on their front stoop was worth a whopping $16,000.  The single most valuable words I've ever written!

Two weeks later, we signed the closing docs and received the keys to The Ravenna House! And that's where the real fun begins...

Next up: Shiny and Perdy: Kitchen Design Ideas

Do you have any funny stories about how you bought or financed your house?  I'd love to hear them!

xoxo

Demo: It has to get Worse before it gets Better

THE RAVENNA HOUSE

My least favorite part of any renovation is demo.  It's dirty, loud, and worst of all, the house always looks worse afterwards.

So when demo time came around on The Ravenna House, I did what any self-respecting lady in my position would do.  I handed the sledge hammer, tyvek suits, P100-rated masks, and demolition saws to my husband and his dad and went home to get caught up on Season 2 of Scandal.  In my defense, the hubby's family is really talented at demo. In gramma's own words, "it's your father in law's specialty".  So I wasn't so much as ducking out as leaving the task to the experts.  Plus someone had to watch the baby...

It took hubby and his dad about three weeks of nights and weekends to demo The Ravenna House. Luckily, we're not living in this house while we renovate it (a first for us) so they didn't have to worry about the dust all over the house.  Here is what had to be removed:

• Carpets though out main floor (Bubba is the only one missing the cat pee smell!)
• Kitchen wall
• Kitchen cabinets, sink, and faucet (I know, I know...it was a real heartbreaker to lose these!)
• Galvanized pipe plumbing
• Knob and tube electrical
• Bathroom - saving this for later so that we have one working faucet in the house
• Basement furnace
• Basement black-lacquered room (an old dark room?)
• Washer and dryer
• Basement miscellaneous plywood and framing

I'm a big proponent of re-use so we saved anything that could be recycled or used elsewhere in the house. I found a scrap metal collector to haul away and recycle the furnace. We sold the old washer and dryer on Craigslist.  And the black-lacquered room door (surprise surprise it was also painted black) was saved for the future bathroom door.

Here's the progression of the carpets.  (With Bubba on hand, hubby got these removed in a couple hours!)

    

All in all hubby and his dad took just over 2 tons to the dump.  That's 4,000 pounds, people!  It took them three trips in our pickup, which was a real coup for Bubba because the dump is one of his favorite places on earth.  Maybe it's the treats he gets at the gate.  Maybe it's the smell.  I'm not really sure...

We left the removal of the buried oil tank to a real expert, a tank removal contractor. They handled the fire department permit, hauling, and removal of the tank.  I understand contamination from these old tanks is pretty common which requires some serious environmental mitigation (not to mention money), but luckily our contractor didn't find any leaked oil on our property.  Major victory number one!

Any who, demo is now substantially done at The Ravenna House and what do you know...the house looks pretty bad!

This is now:

This was before:

Now:

Before:

You get the idea...demo sucks!

But as someone once said, it has to get worse before it gets better.  Which means things are about to look up around here. So it's time that we got to the good stuff, my favorite stuff...the polish.  This is the time in a project when I get to scour salvage shops and Home Depot and Rejuvenation sales for materials.  I get to draw up plans on engineering paper and go to the City for permits.  I get to score deals and make splurges!  I get to buy, buy, buy... Hallelujah we've made it!  And I can't wait to share my ideas with you but that will have to wait for another post.

Did you even make it this far or did I lose you at dump?  Well here's a little treat for you who did:

What's that, you ask?  Original hexagon tiles!  I know!!!  Hubby found them under the bathroom linoleum. Aren't they they most beautiful thing you've ever seen?!  I nearly cried when he showed me! We won't uncover the rest of the floor until we demo the bathroom (crossing my fingers that the tiles are in good condition!).

Next week: How we scored (and paid for) The Ravenna House

Thanks for following my blog.  I'd love to hear about your demo stories or the awesome things you've found in your old house!

xoxo

Introductions

My name is Cathy and I'm in love with old houses.  Yes, love. It's a heart pounding, giggly kind of love. Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales, but my romance is chock-full of wood millwork, squeaky floor boards, original single pane windows, and that intangible thing we old-house-lovers call "character".  I hope you'll hang out and we can get to know one another.  

So, if this thing I have for old houses is a love affair, you're probably wondering when it all began.  Well, it began long before my husband and I bought our first old house in 2008.  It started even before I met my husband (and being that we've known each other since middle school, that's saying something).  I first fell in love with old houses when I was 5 and my parents bought a 1910 duplex with the intention of converting it back to a single family home.  I remember spending a whole summer eating out of a microwave when the kitchen was remodeled and then there was the install of the metal roof, removing the second staircase, the endless weekends on the basement and so on.  And after all that time getting to know the house inside and out, it became the fourth sibling I never had.  At times she was a red headed stepchild, but mostly an older sister who tucked me in at night with a favorite bedtime story.  When the day came in 2000 when all of us kids had gone off to college and my parents decided to sell the house, I cried myself to sleep.  

Fast forward 20 years and you'll find me on the doorstep of my third old house.  My husband jokes that I'm nuts, but he's been nothing but supportive when it comes to me and my old houses.  And thankfully he's pretty darn good with a hammer, because there would be no renovations without his handy skills.  We work together on the remodels as much as possible {can't you just see us on a romantic dinner date of pizza and painting} but when I'm off watching the baby, daydreaming about marble tiles and floor plans, it's hubby who's yielding the framing nailer.  And he can usually talk his electrician-dad or another member of his hard-working family into lending a hand.

House number three is a little goodie I like to call The Ravenna House.  She's a 1926 tudor with 830 sf, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, a shoebox of a kitchen, original oak floors, and ceramic hexagon tiles under the bathroom linoleum. She may be a little run down now, but there's no doubt that she's going to be a beauty. 

This week I'll leave you with a few of the "before" photos of The Ravenna House interior...

And here's a family shot of the exterior, two days before we bought her.  

Next up: Demo...it has to get worse before it gets better!