Old House. Brown Dog

I mentioned in my previous post that the cabin did not just have cosmetic issues working for it. One such problem was mold. There was mold in the crawl space and the attic. Do you think we hired a professional to deal with this? Hell no. We talked to someone who preforms mold mitigation and learned how to do it ourselves.  I did the crawl (the only space of the cabin I hate) and Jose took on the attic.  Essentially we wore 78 face masks (which we had on the ready, thanks COVID!) and cleaned the mold spots then sprayed them with some bleach mixture Jose made using a garden sprayer from Ace Hardware until the mold was gone and we felt like we were going to pass out and/or die from bleach fumes. Then we sealed it I think.  Project notes- Duration : about 3 hours Medication : The bleach did the trick here. Reflection : I was too high from the bleach fumes to remember much of this. Recommendation : This was not super hard, but probably not super safe either. $$$ : under $50

In addition to a whole mess of cosmetic issues, our little cabin in the woods had a busted up foundation to boot. Yay!  There were two major issues: 1. the block foundation was cracked due to water damage  2. the wood (rim joists as the cool kids call them) were rotting in several spots. The previous home owner tried to pull a fast one and said the entire repair would only cost about 3k, and even had a contractor make a fake quote for the realtor. However, as those who know me can tell you, I have no time for that kind of tomfoolery and threatened to pull out of the agreement when we found out. How did we find out you might wonder? Well, we called said contractor and he told us he made the estimate as a favor and that it was not real, AND we got it on voicemail, if you are going to lie cover your tracks buddy. The actual cost for both repairs was going to be 20k, not three. So we got the previous seller to meet us in the middle and cover 10k. With that loot, we hired an awesom...

When we bought the cabin it had not one, but two decks! There was a deck off the front and another on the side of the house. We knew the front deck needed some serious TLC and we also knew we wanted to connect the two into a wrap around. What we didn't know was the front deck was a deathtrap. One of the fun things about being at close to 11,000 feet elevation is there is snow on the ground almost year round. When we bought the cabin in March, there was so much snow that it was impossible to see what was going on under the deck. So we used it. I did work outs on the deck, we had lunch, happy hour, you name it. Just doing a little yoga on a rotting deck... Once the snow cleared, we saw the front deck was legit resting on wood chips and about to collapse at any moment. When we realized this, we called in reinforcement in the form of our good friend Ben and got sauced up and tore that deck off. It took us just one day, was a great workout and we didn't run into any issues, which is...

Here is all the stuff we plan to tackle inside! Interior projects: Remove carpet and replace with luxury vinyl flooring throughout Replace woodstove tile Gut and replace kitchen Paint entire interior Replace painted beams with wood beams Build barn doors for kitchen pantry Add organization system to pantry Replace bathroom vanity/lighting/storage Ok, inside doesn't sound that bad...we have got this. What are we doing!? Lugging stuff up to the cabin. 

So the list of projects is long... I am no doubt forgetting a lot of them but here is what I can think of for now.  Exterior: Repair foundation New septic system Repair exterior paneling and paint  Replace all doors (and sliding door) Remove existing deck (he rotten!)  Build new deck Grade driveway Pro tip, always have coffee and/or booze when doing construction

 Here is the grand tour...all 600 square feet! The before exterior The master bedroom Before floors and kitchen, the fridge may have contained a dead body judging by the smell. Living room and lazy fred the front of the cabin Guest room Wood stove Brown painted beams... Another of the exterior and old decks A gift from our relator, who called us "team this old house" and knew we were drunks come stalk me, I dare ya.

Some might think it is a little reckless to take on a second mortgage when you don't really have all that much money to begin with, but here is why we decided it wasn't the worst idea... Manfriend and I had quite a lot of money in our savings account. Now I am no financial expert or anything, but I am pretty sure anyone would tell you that is dumb. So instead of investing it in stocks or gold deplumes or something, we figured real estate made sense for us. We can put the money into the cabin that would have otherwise gone into our savings and we also get to use it while (hopefully) the value increases. We also feel like it is a fairly safe bet. The Colorado real estate market is bananas, that will of course change at some point, but for now, we feel confident we could sell the cabin tomorrow and make a few bucks. The reason we were even able to have our offer accepted and get the cabin for under a bazillion dollars is it needed SOOO much work.   Since we are doing almost every...

Some might say you should have your finances in order before taking on a second mortgage. Jose and I don't really like to overthink things, and being adult children we decided to take another approach. When we went to see the little cabin in the woods, I knew as soon as we pulled into the driveway we were buying it and would just have to figure the whole paying for it thing out. So we went to the bar after our showing, and used the mortgage calculator on zillow.com to see what the monthly payment might look like (it was fairly accurate I might add). Ok- we can make that number work. So the next math we had to do was figuring out how much it would cost to renovate the entire place. Instead of doing too much research, we made a list of all the projects on my phone and took a stab in the dark at how much each of those things would cost to rehab. Ok- we had more than that in the bank so what the F, let's buy it. That was all the financial planning we did, about 30 minutes and 3 bee...

Masked up at the title company why you so cute??? Once upon a time, March 14, 2020 to be exact, the entire world was just about to shut down because COVID...and a bearded man, his girlfriend and their brown dog decided to go look at a little cabin in the mountains that she found on zillow. They toured the 600 square feet which took all of ten minutes, and saw that literally everything needed to be repaired or replaced. They told the agent they needed some time to think, so they did what any responsible adults would do and found the only bar in the tiny town where the cabin is located and got a little drunk. After crunching some numbers on an iPhone calculator, they went to the real estate office and put in an offer. That night the offer was accepted. They celebrated that night not knowing it would be the last time they would go into a bar for months.  Spoiler alert, the girl is me!! The bearded dude- my manfriend Jose, and the dog- well he's the brains of this operation, Fred. Thin...