just call me joanna gaines now, i mean come on! its only fitting right? well kind of, i didnt knock any walls down, i didnt install an island and i didnt give the space that cute modern farmhouse style she has. and i didnt even do this alone, nick was there too…this wouldnt have been possible without him.
now are you wondering what im talking about? or do you already know and you want to me stop talking and get to the juicy stuff?
for the peeps who dont know, nick and i own a duplex (we live in the bottom unit and the upper is our rental) in bayview, wi. i love bayview, i would suggest moving there so we can hangout 😉 ANYWAYS, the old guy that lived upstairs for the past 20 something years had to move out (we are not going to get into details here) but that meant we had the opportunity to get up there and fix it up.
now before they moved all this stuff out, the space seemed pretty “clean” and “taken care of” but we were wrong. after our old tenant moved out there was outlines of his pictures still on the wall + very dusty and dirty walls, the bathroom mirror looked like it had been to hell and back, the stove had a weird smell to it, the oven door was being held up on by a screw. The light above the sink had wires exposed, the rugs we thought he “left” there were actually nailed into the floor. the carpet was so worn down and pieced together in some spots.
yeah, it was a total mess. on top of all of that stuff, we only had about a week and half to get everything done. now im not complaining because we had the place rented within two days of posting about it but still, that mean a lot of work in a short amount of time.
so where did we start? well, we first started by figuring out what we needed to do to get this place up and running again. we figured we should start with the floors but didnt really know where to so we asked one of our good friends. he suggested lumber liquidators. i literally knew nothing about this place but i knew they had commercials on tv and what was about it. we went there and loved it! i would recommend this places 100%. the staff was very helpful and they had a huge selection of flooring. now, since this is a rental, we didnt go with the best of the best, we went on the cheaper side but literally, you can not even tell that is a cheaper choice of laminate flooring. i would suggest though, asking for a couple of samples, taking the home and try to match them with the trim. i know a lot of homes have white trim and white goes with everything. in our case, our trim is cherry colored so we had to play around with a couple of floor choices to see what would look/match the best.
next, it was paint color. again, this is a rental so we went with white because we knew in the future that would be the easiest color to fix and also cover up. we just went to home depot and used glidden pure white paint. we shouldve just bought the five gallon sized one because i had to make a few trips back to get more paint but ya live and ya learn. we used this color literally everywhere, on the walls and the ceiling and personally, i wouldve used the same paint in my own space if needed.
here is where the party starts! we started by washing all the walls and the ceiling because duh! it was so dirty and gross. so after everything was washed, we taped off all the rooms. i loved it because we didnt have to worry about the floors. plus i can be a messy painter…RIP to my favorite pants. from there we started painting, i took one room and nick took another. we banged out the painting pretty quick.
then the floors went in. first nick tore up all the gross carpet. thank god we had the help of our friend greg because both nick and him were able to finish the dining room, living room and bedroom in one day. no… its not A LOT of space but still, its a lot of up and down, cutting while making sure everything lined up. i could not believe how amazing the space looked after the floors were in and the walls were painted!!
ugh at this point, i just wanted to move in myself. arissa and i dreamed of making it our office and just working out of there all day BUT you cant have it all 😉
like i said before, the stove was a hot mess lol , okay but seriously! it has a weird smell to it, it was painted, yes painted and the oven door was being held together by a strew, kitchen fashion 2019? the kitchen space is not small but its also not huge. therefore, we chose to go with a small range but with going with an “apartment size” stove that means it came with mansion price tag. who knew little ranges costed so much money! so this did take some time find one that was reasonably priced. we looked everywhere, menards, home depot, lowes, second hand appilances and even sears outlet (yeah i didnt know sears was still a thing but they are!). after a lot of comparing stove after stove, we finally found a new one at sears that had minimal scraches and dents on it. i think if i didnt tell you, you wouldnt know it was from an outlet like that. getting the stove installed was a whole different story. the guys who came, didnt know how to install the store becasue they “couldnt find the gas shut off valve”. long story short, we had to call the WE Energies to come and help us. and of course, were was a shut off valve and it took the WE Energies guys like five mins to install the stove for us. ~eye rolling here~
lastly, it was just the little things that needed to done, like cleaning, scrubbing the paint from the kitchen floors (my fault), changing the kitchen light, changing light bulbs and replacing the smoke detectors.
and just like that! it was done. a little bit of me died walking away and just leaving it. i felt like a parent dropping their child off at school for the first time, okay thats a little dramatic but you get it! i am proud of all the work nick and i put into it in for the time frame we had. i think im crazy and i would do this again? i enjoyed it even though i didnt get to be a full joanna gaines but great things take time, right?
BEFORE AND AFTERS:
kitchen:
living room:
dining room:
bedroom:
bathroom:
i hoped you guys enjoyed our week and half journey of flipping our rental. id love to hear of any question you may have or if you need a recommendation for your own place.
and no, i am not coming over to paint 😉
xoxo kelsey
kupofkelsey.wordpress.com 