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Lots of Pope House Progress

Front light fixtures.

Everybody is working hard and having fun at the Pope Residence! There’s so much progress that it’s hard to keep track. That’s a good thing.

Now that the place is electrified, we put up the outdoor light fixtures. Most of them have light-sensitive bulbs in them, so they should come on at night and go off during the day. The front porch has to have a switch, by code, so we got one with fancier lights on it. I think they look great, and we already have a plan to cover up where the old fixtures were. Signage!

The other fixtures all look like this.

Another big push has been to get all the bathroom floors in, now that the plumbing is all set. And we do have subfloors now! They look really good, ready for the real flooring (tiles in one bath, vinyl everywhere else).

Sooo excited about the floors.

Plus, among many other deliveries from Lowe’s, we now have the flooring for the main part of the house, and it looks so good. Luxury vinyl flooring is an amazing thing. Most of the lighting has also arrived, but it’s all staying safe inside its boxes until installation time!

The stairs are a real thing of beauty, and I’m so impressed by how little they impact the back bathroom. Chris routed a bullnose edge on all the treads, which will give them a real hand-crafted touch. The landing is all done, but we are waiting to finish the rest of the stairs until work is complete on the sunroom addition roof.

Going up! And the bathroom pipe.

The addition roof should be finished today. Chris and Easton, assisted by Randy’s sawing help, have been up there banging and installing the new metal roof and flashing, so there will be no more leaking back there. We are putting a beadboard ceiling in there, when we are done. It should be very pleasant, with space for a reading/plant nook.

Color Time!

Since it’s getting close to that time, Kathleen and I were instructed to go pick out paint colors. I think they are going to be really pretty.

Roof crawling.

We chose the colors for the trim and walls that aren’t brick, as well as the painted ceilings. The main color is called Rosy Pashmina, and will complement the brick really well. It’s a shade lighter than the actual bricks, but will blend in with them, we hope. It goes mostly in the back of the building.

The trim is a “designer white” called Wings of an Angel, which is a very light cream. We wanted to be sure to get a warm white to go with all the brick and wood.

Color-ific.

The main bathroom is a calm yellow (if you can call any yellow “calm”) called Deviled Eggs. I hope it doesn’t always make me hungry. It’s toned-down nature will go with the rustic decor of that room quite well.

My office bath will be a very vivid red-orange called Steelhead Redd. It shouldn’t be overwhelming, since one wall will be metal and the brick wall will be the cream color. Besides, I like vivid bathrooms. I love the one in Bobcat that is a paprika color.

And in a move that I hope works out well, I selected a very pale blue (Dreamstress) for the ceilings that are currently white. I think they will register more as white, and will be a nice contrast to all the warm colors. I always wanted a ceiling that looked like the sky, and it reminds me of the tradition of painting porch ceilings the “haint blue” color.

More Progress Photos

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Workin’ on a Presence and New Project

It’s a logo.

You’re Too Kind!

Thanks to all you zillions of people who celebrated along with us as we officially acquired the Hermit Haus property. Since then, I’ve been starting on a website, which is nowhere near finished, but you can look at it, if you want to. And we have a temporary logo, featuring the friendly Hermann. We at least now have a presence!

We’ll let you know when there’s a Facebook page and all that, but until then, we will put updates on the Hermits’ Rest Enterprises page.

And More Remodeling

The new project we’re working on now is sprucing up our old office, which you may recall is a really lovely 1930s house in Cameron, the former Trubee place. It has four bedrooms and two baths, though one bedroom is really better suited to being a sunroom, office, or den. It has a huge living area and a gorgeous dining room. Continue reading →

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Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Action shot from my video, of a hunk of tree falling.

So, on Tuesday, Chris and Gary of CHAMPS Handyman Services couldn’t get into the Rattlesnake house to work on it, due to the driveway suddenly being inaccessible (thanks, giant rain storm that dropped .4 inch in 20 minutes). But, that’s OK, because we had that other project, conveniently located across the road, which is “The Cabin,” located on the Wild Hermits ranch that Lee and I co-own with our neighbors, Sara and Ralph. I’m not sure if I mentioned before that it has a main building that’s the oldest one on our property, plus two outbuildings with bedrooms in them, and a beautiful, large deck that has the best sunset views on the ranch.

We’ve been working on it for a few months, painting, cleaning, making it livable, etc. And last weekend, a large group of people got together and cut down two ancient dying trees on the place. (The link is to a video of the cabin, trees, and manly/womanly workers.) We are SO grateful for Sara’s nephews, who came with all their fancy arborist equipment to do the hard stuff, and to her sons, who got very good at the log splitter and axe!

Even after all this work, the cabin is rustic, as you can see from this fun video Chris made. I hope you enjoy our precious chickens and their weird (but functional) little chicken house.

We sure appreciate that Chris is letting us share his comments! It’s fun to see someone else’s perspective, when you’ve been in a place so long you can no longer see it with fresh eyes.

You can see that the bathroom in the cabin was in pretty bad shape. The guy who lives there now and our neighbor have worked and worked on the septic system, so that’s now good. But the shower was ancient, perfect for a hunting lodge, not perfect for a young man and his fiance.

Chris and Gary are putting in a nice new shower unit, in two pieces, and have repaired the sad walls. I know our tenant will be happy to be able to shower in his own place, at last! The bathroom is at least up to the twentieth century in standards!

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Travis 1 Has a New Bathroom!

I don’t think this bathroom has ever looked so clean and fresh!

How exciting that the bathroom remodel on the Travis 1 house is finished! It has gone from being a boring, outdated space with a horribly place window just begging to leak, to being fresh, clean, so cute, and that nasty window is GONE!

It was really feeling like the project was just never even going to get started. The contractor that had won the bid to do the job just disappeared. Have no fear, Mandi knows people. That’s where Ryan comes in. Originally he was only going to replace some light fixtures and by the time it has come to a close, he has done that, numerous other odds and ends that no one saw coming, and he has rebuilt that tired bathroom.

Please check out these pictures of the new bathroom. It’s really very nice and it is ready for the final touches of decorating to be done with it. I am usually not a fan of the black and white floors, but I really like this that Sue Ann picked out. Ryan did a fantastic job putting it in and I really think I may have to rethink what I feel about the black and white floors.

Continue reading →

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Bathrooms Sell Houses

Ruben shows off a new toilet. It has the water-saving dual flush feature and a soft-close seat. And it cost less than $90.

“Bathrooms sell houses” is a bit of a truism in our business. But now that I have your attention, I want to talk about something a lot less sexy: Toilets.

I see a lot of renovations where people reuse the existing toilets. Okay. You save a few dollars, but not that much when compared to your overall renovation budget. And think of your buyer’s reaction to walking into a beautifully redone bathroom, lifting the lid, and seeing a toilet ring from a decade of limestone accumulation.

That’s why we always budget to replace every toilet in every one of our projects. When we catch a sale—like we did with the Roadrunner project—we come out ahead. But even when we pay our regular price, new toilets make a good impression on buyers, and we come out ahead.

But toilets aren’t always inexpensive, as we found out on the Ash House. The architect who designed that house used modern wall-mounted toilets. Both bathrooms in that house had beautiful brick floors, which we wanted to keep. Replacing the wall-mount toilets with freestanding ones would have required jackhammering out the brick floors to rerun the drain lines. Worse, it could have required replacing the drain lines throughout the house.

I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of the fancy wall-mounted toilets we used in the Ash House. Luckily, they are still available.

Still, we didn’t have a choice. The toilets in the house when we bought it looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in more than a decade. No way they were coming clean!—no matter how hard we scrubbed. As you can see if you follow the link on the picture of the toilet, the replacements were expensive, but I believe they were well worth the price when you see how beautiful the bathrooms ended up.

So the bottom line is simple. Budget to replace the toilets in all your renovations. They’re not sexy, especially not like a jetted tub is sexy. You’ll never hear a potential buyer exclaim how excited they are about the toilets. But old toilets can kill a deal. Spend a few more dollars to make your buyers happy, even if they don’t know it.

 

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