10 months later...

So, last year, Russell and I decided about two weeks before the first time homebuyers tax credit expired (we're talking April 2010) we needed to become homeowners.  Our one bedroom apartment on the Waltham/W.Newton line was lovely, but we had outgrown it.  As a couple of impulsive shoppers, we decided to do the leg work on Zip Realty, found some properties, and started going to open houses one weekend.  Well, to make a long blog post a bit more concise, it DID NOT work out.  The agent was late, could have cared less (even though we already did all of the work finding homes) and when we saddened that we didn't magically fall in love with the first property we walked into, she was like 'no? okay, find something else and we can go look'...

In our overwhelmed confrontation with reality, Russell and I found ourselves slumped in someone's TINY living room (no way would we buy a glorified low ceilinged one bedroom home with no land for 289k), with my mom telling us why we needed a real realtor (there are many things I can do or figure out how to do myself, apparently real estate isn't one of them) and like magic, Susan Shruhan and Kevin Monahan from Jack Conway Realty poofed into our lives.  They were wonderful about listening to and understanding what we needed from a home, and introduced us to condos, townhouses, foreclosures and shortsales.  [Sidenote, though we were pre-approved for 350k, there was NO WAY we could afford that mortgage... and we wonder why everyone's screwed over money-wise in this country?  We felt comfortable at or under 250k, and unfortunately that doesn't go far for a legit house in Boston!]  We viewed tons of properties with Susan and Kevin, and decided we would focus on the Roslindale/West Roxbury/JP/Hyde Park area.  For a bit we looked at multi-families, to play the landlord game and make some money (too overwhelming), for another period of time we looked at BEAUTIFUL condos in JP (while amazing these condos were still often 290k!), and lots of foreclosures.  We got in a rut and totally stuck and discouraged for a tiny bit, and then I asked to see a house in Roslindale that Russell had passed over.

For some reason I was drawn to this house because it was tall (great reasoning, I know) and it had a tree in front of it.  It also had some mystery going on, and I'm all about the mystery.

A big perk was the backyard space as well.  Russell had given up on getting New Hampshire sized land, but to find a house with lots of green space with a Boston zip code was a delight.

As I am sure you can tell just from the outdoor pics, this house was not in lovely shape!  It was a HUD foreclosure, had been vacant for a seriously long time, and before that it was a type of sketchy boarding house (read: sweet drug smell, marbles in the floorboards, a bit of graffiti here and there, snails everywhere, total re-do needed inside).  But I LOVED it! I walked in to find sunny living space throughout, high ceilings, wood floors in surprisingly good shape, and POTENTIAL.  Problems were that the kitchen and half bath on the first floor needed a complete gut, both spaces couldn't even be used.

Russell and I were lucky enough to have my dad, who is a great handyman/carpenter/construction/nothing he can't do/fix kind of guy, and my mom who offered super generously to fund the kitchen gut/replacement (amazing, will never be able to send enough gratitude), and that was enough to get us to jump.  Nervously, we low bid 215k, had to counter 225k, got accepted, and waited MONTHS to get into the house.  Seriously, I won't detail it here, but buying a foreclosure with a FHA loan is kind of a nightmare.  Finally, we closed on August 28, 2010... and rushed right over to start ripping things out of the house!  We moved in on our first wedding anniversary (Aug 30) after Russell's parents graciously hired us a moving company.  We were just so incredibly stressed with the HUGE project we had committed to, that this was a great gift.

Below are some 'before' pictures... in retrospect, I can't believe how brave we were to tackle this! Sorry, the pics aren't quite in chronological order...

The kitchen.. a bit into gutting.  We're talking mold, snails, no appliances, awful wiring and plumbing, leaks, grossness.  Russell is amazing for ripping most of this out!

yuck.

The whole house had/has the classy orange paint job found on the stairs here.  Also, fake wood paneling... everywhere.  The floors were tile, but AWFUL... cracked, chipped, condensation on them... no good.  They were a pain in the ass to remove, since there were 2 layers of adhesive linoleum underneath, and then the 1800s wood nailed down with square nails.  The square nails were by far the coolest part of this project.

Living room with some of the weird wallpaper removed...

Hallway with the stylin wood paneling.

Stairway to the third floor, orange paint and wood paneling in their full glory.  Doesn't it make it look so closed in and awful?  Yes.

Yucky kitchen when we moved in... The photos don't make it look as gross as it was...

Otherside of kitchen, aka nothing.  

The living room had a jail built into the skinny doorway... left gap for crack, middle for guns, right gap for meth.

It got fun to throw all of the junk out the window into the backyard... until we realized we had no idea how to get rid of it!  Thanks to pain in the trash removal services it was not problem.

(yes, that is the stove tossed into the pile)









Now, I am happy to present some new pictures!  The first floor and some backyard reno took 10 months (Russell had a crushed thumb from work for a month in there, so we lost a bit of time), but we did it entirely ourselves, no hired contractors except for the electrician who had to install the plug for the dryer, and the electrician who had to hook up the dishwasher!  Isn't it beautiful!?

So... that's it!  Now on to the second floor, and then the third!