The Renovation Has Begun

Reminds me of the work we had to do to fix our house after all the snow and ice on our roof last year. But this time it is for an exciting reason, our renovation project has begun.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Change of Plans

No renting or selling, we're remodeling. We weren't successful in our attempts to rent or sell our house. We did receive a viable offer, but it was lower than we were willing to go and we had a lot of trouble finding a new home so we have decided to stay put. We weren't sold on the idea at first, but now that we're expecting baby #2 and more than double our usual monthly daycare bill, we're quite happy with our decision. We'll be making some changes to the house so that it suits our needs better and we're planning to stay here until Noah goes to middle or high school. (Plans could always change, but that's what we're decided for now.)

We will be making some big changes to our little house on Alameda St. We'll be raising the roof so we have almost a whole second story (not quite, but Eric will have all the head room he needs when it's done). We're putting in a master suite upstairs with a master bath, his/hers walk-in closets, a linen closet, an office/den area and a storage closet. It's going to be so exciting once it's all done. However the project will have to work around the weather, since it is winter in Minnesota right now. We will be able to start some of the interior prep work, such as running the plumbing for the bath and tearing our the current half story finishings, but we can't have the contractor remove the roof until we're pretty sure it's not going to snow anymore.

Here's a few of the contractor's drawings of what the place will look like when it's finished.

For Sale or For Rent

This is our forth try putting an offer on a new house and if this one goes through, we're preparing for the eventuality that we may rent our Alameda House. The showings have slowed down lately. We had one buyer come through for three showings, but she decided on another house instead. That is the closest that we came to a potential offer. We're not too discouraged, but we are growing weary of keeping everything put away, clean and ready for a showing at any time. So we're looking forward to finding a potential renter much more quickly than we have experienced finding a potential buyer. We're taken a look at Craigslist and been chatting with all of our friends who own rental properties. We're feeling more comfortable with the idea now that we've had more time to think about it. So given that we're expecting to keep the property, we've decided to move forward with the smaller things that will make our lives easier as landlords.

This weekend was spent scraping the garage so that we can prime and paint it in the next couple of weeks and ordering windows for the living room so that I do not have to spend the rest of my summer re-glazing. When we have these new windows we will have replaced all but three windows in the house. Maintenance free windows, what a great invention.

We have a pretty good feeling about our latest offer. If it does go through we'll have more space than we could fill by the time we retire. Even with all of Noah's toys, we wouldn't have a storage issue. It'll be a big change from where we're at now. We love our house, but we have definitely outgrown it. We're also missing our kitties too much lately and we're really looking forward to getting them back. Noah loves them and can't spend enough time giving them hugs and pets when we're at Grandma's house. The new house has several bay windows for the kitties to enjoy while they bask in the warmth of the sunshine.

I'll post an update once we know more about whether our offer is accepted. The process will be longer than with a traditional seller because the house is a potential short sale. If our offer is accepted, we're not expecting that we would close much earlier than Labor Day. That's nice because it gives us more time to find a renter. So, more to come... when there's more to share.