by Tom | May 11, 2009 | Hat Trick House, Interior Paint
The interior paint came out really good and we’ve received 2 offers already and the house isn’t even done yet! Build it right and they will come. Instead of popping out different room colors like a clown house we ran Ralph Lauren Macaw through the entire house except for the baths.
With all the floor plan changes and the room addition now it seems the house is reconnected with the color unity and it all flows well. My electrician also came this week and installed all the devices, switches and receptacles.
The buyer’s agent I spoke about on the last update showed up Monday with her buyers in tow, a really cool young couple. I had told her my price was in the $300k range but wasn’t specific. They absolutely loved the house and have been looking since Feb and have seen almost 70 houses.
They wrote an incredible offer the next day for $310k with only 2 pts for the agent so effectively a $313k offer. With the recent new comps I really think we can push it a bit higher and as good as the offer was, I really want to market the property correctly and see what we can get.
There have been 2 recent sales (one was ours with Craftsman Bungalow) that have got $175/s.f. The new pending sale we are excited about will be close to $190/s.f. With our addition of the master suite the Hat Trick House will be around 1930 s.f. so even if we use the conservative $175 per square foot then that puts us at $337k.
If they love it now just wait until the landscape is done and we stage it. The highest sale in our area was for $299k and only 1650 s.f., so it looks like we are headed to another record breaking sale.
Wednesday night we received a call from Agent #2 whom we’ve done business with before. He has another buyer who has evidently already stopped by, spoken with me and seen our project.
They offered a little less than 300k and wanted to finish it themselves so they can pick the colors and fixtures. We’ve got about 13k left to spend but we also have final payments to our subcontractors and open permits to finalize.
Plus as we mentioned, half the fun is staging it and marketing it so we maximize the potential on the project.
by Tom | Apr 19, 2009 | Exterior Paint, Hat Trick House, Interior Paint, Tile
It’s been a crazy week jumping from one project to another and making offers on 2 other properties. We started to paint the exterior and got rained out on day 2 of a 3 day rain. We did however get 2 coats on the eaves painted with Benjamin Moore’s Monroe Bisque.
Then we got 2 coats up on the body of Benjamin Moore Tate Olive before the rain started. We are doing a 4-color scheme here but the 2 additional colors are used sparingly on window screens and accents.
If you are ever painting and it starts to rain STOP immediately because the paint will not dry! I still have a day or so left on the trim and columns but it looks like we are due for a sunny week. The green body color came out sweet.
was simultaneously spraying the interior trims and doors with High Gloss White. This is tricky business because you can’t have any runs but need complete coverage.
It’s very similar to painting a car (or in my case a beach cruiser frame with spray paint). Multiple thin coats is the trick. Halfway through the day the clouds rolled in and it started dumping so with the moisture in the air this paint just sat there wet and wanted to sag.
We quickly got lights and heaters to speed up the drying, whew, close call. So we are ready now to put the color on the walls, which I’ll cut in with a brush and roll soon.
We still haven’t pulled the trigger on cabinets yet. An old friend that I reunited with on Facebook this week has a cabinet shop in Houston and can order from several manufacturers and have them delivered right to our job site. I am choosing white shaker style cabinets from Woodmont called Hearthstone.
For the price that I would have gotten cheap Ikea cabinets I can have these better white maple ones. The cabinets might take 2 weeks to arrive so in the meantime I’ll tile the bathrooms.
I finished all the hardibacker floors and shower walls since it was raining so I’m ready to tile now. We finally decided to go with 18” travertine on the floors but white subway tile for the tub surround and shower with glass tile accents we found online.
There’s a great site called glasstilestore.com that offers free shipping on some items in case you want some glass tile for a backsplash or accents.
by Tom | Jun 29, 2008 | Craftsman Bungalow, Interior Paint, Trim Out
The interior is nearing completion. I finished the trim carpentry this week, hanging doors for the pantry and laundry & putting in the kitchen baseboards to match the existing ones. Inside the kitchen pantry I made some custom shelves as well.
The baseboards are 1 x 8 pine with a shoe molding. All the original trims had to be sanded and primed with oil base, as they were originally oil-based paint. If you’ve ever tried to paint oil based trim in an old house with latex, you know how it will just peel right off.
I like the Zinnser oil based primer product better than Kilz. It’s extremely difficult to work with, you have to slop it on, move fast smoothing it out and don’t go back over old work.
All that’s left now are all the windows and casements which are extremely flaky, this is going to take a lot of prep work this week to smooth them out and get them in primer. I just passed the 8-week mark for this project, looks like about 1-2 more weeks and the inside will be done.
I’m still on track with the budget however I’m expecting to go a little over on landscaping and the rear deck. I’m not too worried though as the neighborhood comps are showing that my original sales target price was conservative a bit so I’ll list now for $19,000 higher than initially planned.
by Tom | Jun 8, 2008 | Craftsman Bungalow, Interior Paint, Kitchens
We got the A/C roughed in this week, it has all new ducts and we relocated the furnace up into the attic. After a couple of tries we also nailed down the paint color for the kitchen.
It’s a Benjamin Moore color called Spring Valley but we went to Home Depot and had them match it in Behr because we would never pay $50 for a gallon of paint. As we said before, we really want to do something different with this house since it’s a 1920s bungalow.
By using green in the kitchen it gives it a more authentic 20’s feel and the color turned out exactly as we’d hoped. We went with the white cabinets that have some glass front doors and fluted lines.
We got most of the upper cabinets hung on the wall and started on the lowers as you can see in the picture, it’s starting to look really cool. Keep in mind that we’re going to refinish the original long leaf pine floors in the kitchen.
We’re thinking of using black granite on the counter tops and stainless appliances. White appliances would probably look really good and more period-correct but most buyers today are still looking for stainless.
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