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Our first project house started out as a mess! The crawl space was a big cat litter box, and we had to go under there quite a bit to level the floor (as much as 6″!). We re-arranged the bathroom area, deleted the hallway (for the most part), added closets to the bedrooms, opened up the wall between the living and dining/kitchen areas, completely remodeled the kitchen, and made the back porch into a laundry room. Whew! What a lot of work! The house sold in 5 days for $1000 over the asking price.
Project house number two wasn’t really a house when we purchased it in late December of 2021, just after the first house sold. The original structure was a home built in about 1950 with materials the owner could hobble together from other people’s scraps, etc. It had been purchased in the late 1980’s and turned into a second-hand children’s clothing store called “Raggedy Ann and Andy’s.” Everyone shopped there and knew the store well. As the store grew, they decided to expand and built a 32×48 addition. We started on the “old” side first and jumped over to the addition when the tradesmen (plumbers and electricians) were working on the other side so we could keep going. We discovered old solid oak flooring in what was once the living room under loads of glued-down carpet and refinished it, adding more hardwood flooring for the kitchen and hallway. We added a new side door and built a car-port, and relocated the front door, replacing it with French doors. We also took out the rooms that had originally been part of the porch but had been turned into retail space. The front porch now extended the entire width of the house like it originally did. We finished the house in mid-June and sold it right away for asking price.
The third project house was legally separated from the second project house prior to the sale of the second project house. They were joined by a wall and we had to separate them not only legally but also by a double sheet-rocked wall going all the way from the foundation to the bottom of the ceiling. That was a LOT of work, but we got it done. Since the whole back side, built in about 2002, was almost empty, it was a blank slate as far as room arrangement. There was no plumbing on the second side and the electrical had to be added to in order to accommodate bedrooms, a kitchen, etc. The final result was wonderful with solid hardwood floors, new everything, and custom epoxy countertops (for the third time; the first two project houses have them as well). The house sold for $1000 over the asking price.
We purchased a property and house on Dominion Street to make sure we had another project to move onto when we finished the Raggedy Ann and Andy’s project houses. It was built in the early 1900’s, but was not built well. Our original plans for a two-story, 4-bed 2 bath house had to be downsized when the building inspector told us there was no foundation to the house. It was simply on a slab supported by a few cement blocks. The 6×32 addition had to be torn off as well since it had simply 2×4 boards sitting on cement blocks for its foundation! Eventually we had to tear the house down and figure out what to do in order to keep a house in our town! We were NOT going to lose housing! We discovered a local church was going to build a bigger youth center and needed to get rid of a house built in the 1950’s that had been turned into their current youth center several decades ago. We purchased just the house structure from them and proceeded to tear off the garage, take down the chimney, and basically disconnect the main floor from the basement in preparation to move it 5 1/2 blocks to its new location. While waiting for the house to be available to work on, we started on project house 5. We got everything ready to move, framed out the bedrooms and a new bathroom, moved the kitchen and living room, moved doors and installed new doors, etc. Then — MOVING DAY! As of this writing (06/11/2023) the house is waiting to be put down on a new foundation and stem walls and then we can finish the interior.