I’m going to preface this with the fact our house is close to 200 years old. Although our home is bordering on ancient, it’s been renovated numerous times over the years just as most of the houses around the city. You know what else most of the houses in the city have in common? Terrible & CHEAP contractor work…
Let me explain a little about how our house is set up. Our home has three floors – the first floor has the living room, dining room and kitchen. The second has 2 bedrooms and a full bathroom with a small deck and tiny balcony. The third floor is an addition to the original structure of the house, probably to increase the property value. It has the primary bedroom with full bath and outside of it is a “sitting room” that leads out to another deck with a spiral staircase to the rooftop deck.
When we bought the house, we knew it needed work. We did not buy a turnkey property and boy, we knew it. Our goal always had been to buy a fixer-upper, househack while adding some equity over time and then move on to the next fixer-upper and so on. What we didn’t know when buying this house was all the undisclosed issues that came with it.
One day while one of us were showering, the cheap metal and plastic standing shower door closed just a little too hard… Part of the tile railing fell right off and gave us a peek into what was lurking under it. Water damage and mold. Lovely, right? Thankfully we have 2 bathrooms in the house so we have time to make a game plan.
We contacted 3 to 4 contractors all giving a generalized quote of $20k.
If you’ve read up about Lyle and I, you’d know that he’s a 6th grade public school teacher and I’m a recent COVID-19 unemployed/freelance graphic designer. It’s safe to say, we are not rolling in the dough and that number wasn’t a drop in the bucket. We are both incredibly frugal, absolutely hate debt and always try to avoid it if we can so financing the project didn’t sit right with us. We are both kinda handy (compared to most of our peers) so we made the tough decision to renovate the bathroom ourselves with the help from a couple friends who work in construction and my father.
So we did a complete demo on our own.
See the pictures below of what our bathroom used to look like and where the tile trim fell off. If you were wondering what kind of tape that is that’s holding it together; it’s probably electric tape…
We knew this would take a long span of time to execute ourselves especially with Lyle working full time teaching and as a Real Estate Agent. We started this process in September 2020 and this is written in March 2021. We were not sure how much work and time it actually would be to finish.
END GAME: REFI
Now, our end goal with this project is to finish the bathroom so we can refinance and LESSEN our living expenses even more by lowering our monthly mortgage payments. Next steps from this blog is how our demo went explaining what we learned.
