The House of Plaid Ceilings

Well, we are hopefully less than a month away from listing my 2nd flip house.  Right now I’m busily working on a staging plan.  I thought you might like a peak at what the house looked like when we opened the doors!

We purchased a foreclosure at auction.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when I go to auctions, I get an adrenaline rush while bidding.  I can’t help but get giddy, especially when I land the prize.  I have been known to bid against myself though, so since we were going to be placing bids a little bit north of $100, I called in my father who’s been going to auctions for years.  I just knew I would get tripped up and screw up.

Bidding on a foreclosure is certainly risky.  You cannot enter the house to determine its current state, and it’s often been sitting vacant for a decent period of time, sometimes years.  So you have to take a leap of faith, planning for the worst and hoping for the best.  The home we were targeting was a townhouse, so we had a decent idea of what the layout was like inside based on other listings in the neighborhood. Still, this neighborhood is very small and well cared for.  Units don’t come available often, so our information was still limited.

We were pretty lucky!  Inside, we mostly needed just cosmetic work (hello plaid wallpaper on the bathroom ceilings!)  The biggest issue was the back sunroom. There were 3 sets of sliding doors to maximize golf course views and fresh air.  But the roof had been leaking and all 3 doors needed to be replaced. That was an ouch to the budget!

When you walk in the front door, the stairs are to your right and the living area to your left.  The living area and dining room are one long room, and there are sliders connecting the dining room to the sunroom. The kitchen is to the right off the dining room.

 

The kitchen had original cabinets from the 70s.  And it’s tiny.  We discussed several options for making it larger and more efficient, but none of them made sense from a return perspective.  The house is built on a slab, so the soffit couldn’t be removed, and there weren’t any simple, or budget-friendly, ways to change it.  So we kept the footprint as is.

 

Once you walk through the kitchen, you go to the den, or the fireplace room as we’ve been calling it. This room has sliders and a window opening to the sunroom.  Overlooking the den is the upstairs loft. Below the loft are the powder room, laundry room, and garage entry.

 

And here is a pic of that powder room in all its glory.  It’s tough to get a pic, but you can just see the corner of the plaid wallpaper on the ceiling.  It felt like a cave!  One of the upstairs baths had the same beautiful treatment.

Here is the other upstairs bath, wallpapered in a slightly more refreshing motif.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t wall paper. It was like a thick paperboard, which had couldn’t be removed without destroying the drywall.  We had the option of leaving it or replacing the drywall.  I’ll let you guess which route we took.

Here is one of the 2 large bedrooms.  Each has its own bath.  I think this is the original master, and I think the large bedroom in the back was originally designed as 2 bedrooms, making it a 3 bedroom home.

  

Out front, we are very limited in what we can do.  There are strict deed restrictions on colors, so we can’t change much.  However, the first thing we did was remove a tree that blocked the front entrance.  You can see it lying to the side.  Just that simple changed helped a bunch.  Unfortunately I don’t have a pic before we cut it down.

Hope you enjoyed this little tour – I’m excited to post after pics soon!