Tag: thrifty

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Our First House (Flip)

In honor of our recent closing day anniversary, I thought it would be fitting to share the before and after photos from our first ever house which later became our first house flip! Technically speaking, I guess we bought and flipped our second house, then bought our 3rd house and flipped our first house. It was a crazy 3 years! More on our Phillips Flips (home flipping stories) here.

On March 21, 2013 we bought our very first house. It was dreamy… and I mean “dreamy” in the sense that you had to dream about what it would look like one day and not what it looked like right when we bought it.

Here’s what it looked like when we bought it:

And the inside:

Check out those floors! The floors on the right of the picture above are linoleum tiles. There was 2 full layers of ceramic tile where you see the tile up there at the top and the carpet to the left was dark green. And about 8 feet inside the front door was a nice little 3-way junction where all 3 of the mixed floors met up for no real reason.

All the bedrooms had that same dark green carpet.

The kitchen was pretty small and awkwardly closed off to the rest of the house. So the first thing we did was grab a sledge-hammer and bust through some walls:

We removed the wall shown above which opened the kitchen to the entryway and a little more to the dining room over to the left.

We removed the upper cabinets that were hanging above the island which opened the headroom up a bit and made the kitchen completely open to the family/TV room.

We ripped up all of the floors to make way for light-colored hardwoods.

And then we got to work! We painted the kitchen cabinets white!

It was much more open with the overhead cabinets out of the way.

We painted the front door this fun minty color and I DIY Frosted the front windows with a little hand cut monogram in the center.

I replaced the fan in the dining room with this Maskros Pendant Lamp from IKEA and we painted the fun accent stripe wall on the side wall over there. That was SO “in” back in 2013!

We gave all the other walls a fresh coat of paint (either white or light gray).

And replaced the dark green carpet with a neutral “greige” color that we found on crazy sale at one of our local carpet/flooring warehouse places. We found just enough carpet to put in our sunken den area and all 3 of our bedrooms. It was meant to be!

I didn’t get a ton of great shots of it, but originally we had vaulted ceilings that were covered in dark wood paneling. We painted over that with white paint and it looked kind of like vaulted shiplap covered ceilings!

With the wall knocked out, the upper cabinets gone and the white paint, the kitchen looked much more open and bright!

And finally, we got around to painting the outside of the house and redoing the roof with light metal panels.

On our first ever house flip, we spent about $10K in renovations:
Flooring: $4,000 (purchased whole sale and installed by a friend of a friend)
New roof: $5,000 (we pulled our own permits and had a friend do the work for us)
Paint: $1,000 (we used a lot of leftover paint that we had sitting around in storage and we may have used plain old white primer on some interior walls- you got to save wherever you can!)

We ended up selling this house for $16K more than we paid for it which was a $6K profit on the sale alone. We also rented it out for several months during some of the transition time while we were in between houses and we made a total of $11,700 in rental income. So all-in-all we made $16,700 on our first flip.

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A Bold Entryway Makeover

When we first moved into this house, every single wall was painted in this flat beige color.

I am definitely a fan of neutrals (although I usually prefer cooler tones like crisp white and light grey) but this bland entryway was a little too neutral for me. After tackling all the must-have projects on our fixer-upper (i.e. furnishing it with appliances, new AC, new windows, updated electrical and plumbing) we were finally able to work on the fun stuff – PAINTING and DECORATING!

I’m naturally drawn to light colors. I like when rooms feel bright and open, but with this small semi-sequestered entryway room that led into the rest of our bright and open house, I really wanted to go for a bold entrance. I toyed with a bright color. I also considered neutral walls and painting our antique piano yellow (or another fun eye-popping color like that), but I was worried I might regret painting the original wood on our piano, so I decided to go bold with dark walls instead.

I settled on a dark Navy with an eggshell finish. We used Sherwin Williams “Pitch Cobalt” which is kind of a grey-ish Navy. I almost always opt for a Satin finish with paints, with an occasional semi-gloss or high-gloss if I’m going white because it brightens the room up more and is easier to keep clean. But since I was going so dark in here, I thought it would be nice to keep the shine down and let the color speak for itself – so eggshell it is!

I added some greenery to our piano (plus a couple floor plants) because you can never have too many house plants! More on our house plants here.
(Note: in the previous picture, you can see more greenery than usual on the piano. I’m in the process of attempting to propagate some clippings from our fiddle leaf fig trees and I forgot to move them off the piano before snapping the “after” shot. They don’t normally sit there though. I’ll share more on how that goes later!)


Chair: All Modern

We framed the window with these sweet white curtains from All Modern and they are the perfect contrast to the dark navy walls.

We used gold/brass accents on everything and kept some of our costs down by getting our curtain rods from Target. They weren’t exactly the style I wanted, but they were about $100 less than the ones I loved from West Elm, so I was happy enough with these. We picked the “brushed nickel” finish which doesn’t match the gold exactly, but it’s close enough that you can’t tell without closely studying it – and we don’t know anyone who is 10 feet tall, so I feel confident that no one will be putting their face up to our curtain rods anytime soon.

We replaced a silver, outdated wall sconce with this one from All Modern. In the “honey gold” finish.

I painted this thrift store entry table with some light grey paint that was leftover from our master bedroom renovation.

That white umbrella holder we snagged on sale from All Modern.

As well as this round mirror.

And my favorite spot in the room is the corner that houses these framed photos of our girls. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in the door, and there’s just nothing better than being welcomed by squishy little sleeping babies am I right?

Photos by Petal & Vine Photography.
Gold frames from Hobby Lobby.

We still have a few more things on our dream board for this room including: recovering the old chair in the corner, buying a new entryway rug and getting a new front door, but we’ll take that one day at a time.