8-27-09

Home is where the heart is, if renovations haven’t sucked the life out first

My wife and I fancy ourselves as closet designers and house flipping geniuses.
We watch a lot of HGTV. In an attempt to protect my manliness, Leigh turns it on and I somehow get sucked in, if that makes a difference.
In Boston and Maryland, Leigh and I were addicted to working on our property. We didn’t have very much money to work with so the game was simple. We maxed ourselves out, working with what we had, doing as much as we could by ourselves and then sell for as much profit as possible.
We did this a couple of times and had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot more.
We didn’t have children at that time so Leigh and I were able to focus all of our time and energy toward details.
The first place in Boston was a nightmare.
At first glance, this condo was beautiful. About 80 years ago, the nine foot walls were constructed and the seven foot wood wainscot was installed. All of the wood doors were solid and the floors were the same.
This place was love at first sight. The only problem was that the kitchen and bathroom had to be gutted.
Sounds like the start to a good HGTV show.
Unfortunately, we weren’t being filmed or paid for our adventure. It would have been a great show if it was.
When we raised the sledge hammer in the air and let it slam into the tile on the bathroom floor, the floor dropped about three inches around the toilet. We had a toilet that looked like it was floating above the busted floor.
We had just opened the proverbial can-of-worms except ours smelled like a sewer and cash.
There was only one thing to do. Out with the porcelain convenience, out with the sink and out with the tub.
The beams below were exposed and we found a window in the wall at the shower that had been boarded and tiled over and only latched shut. This hidden window had been leaking and allowing water to run down the wall for who-knows how many years.
The beams rotted where they joined the wall and had “slipped” past the brick ledge that had been holding them in their place since the 1920s.
It took us three months from the day we bought the place until we were brushing our teeth and taking showers to finish the project. We didn’t even think of starting the kitchen for another year.
Today, we are living in our house that we built with our own two hands. It is ours and I made sure all of the beams were secured and I didn’t install any “hidden” windows in the bathrooms.
One day we might decide to tackle another fixer-upper and maybe even try to turn it for a profit, but for now Leigh and I will be content watching HGTV shows that exploit other homeowners in dealing with their pitfalls and money traps.
We now catch ourselves coaching the unsuspecting owners on the TV shows like armchair quarterbacks on Sunday afternoon.
“Don’t buy that house, that hill in the back yard is going to cause drainage problems in your crawl space.”
“Inspect that wall behind the stove, there is a reason the drywall has a big crack in it.”
We know it all now, we are experienced-professionals, homeowner extraordinaires. With our wisdom, there is nothing that can stop us from being ace renovators.
One important thing we learned is not to jump into that arena again without reviewing the “tape” for many, many years to come.
Bryan Pinkey can be found charging his drill... and putting it back in the case or at bpinkey@nccox.com.