Before and After Home Renovation _ Craftsman Style House

Welcome Flipsters. Welcome to the channel. Today we have another throwback Thursday for you. We're going to look at a past project we did over on the east side of Austin. It's this cute, charming little bungalow. See it here? Doesn't it turn out cute? Okay, we'll show you how it got that way. The east side in general is just a happenin', hoppin' place to be. There are condos going up left and right. There are companies moving their headquarters over there. H-E-B just announced their digital headquarters will be on east Austin. There's kombucha joints on like every corner. There's trendy chicken places. It's just if you're a hipster, you want to be on the east side. As a result, the demand on the east side is super high, especially for properties that are fun and funky and appeal to a young, urban millennial buyer. Our property that we got was a three bedroom, two bath. It was pretty small. It was 1,048 square feet and we purchased it for $260,000. It was in the Boggy Creek area, which is just a little bit further east of the super happenin' part, but still within a mile of downtown, so a super cool place to be. It did need some foundation work. Luckily, it was a pier and beam foundation and so we were just able to add some horizontal cross beams and that addressed the problem. If it was a slab foundation, it would have been a little bit more work and a little more time consuming to fix. Make your design choices based on the neighborhood and who you think the buyer is going to be. You do that ahead of time and then you can make some calculated risks. For this house, we imagined that it was going to be a young, urban, professional buyer and so we were able to make funkier design choices. We were able to make layout choices that we thought fit the lifestyle of the person that was going to be buying this house. Let's start with the property. Let's see what you want to see. Okay, here it is. We first bought it. Still cute, charming, but just a little plain and definitely not funky at all. Here's the porch before, you know, just kind of very traditional looking. Just kind of some wear and tear on the property. Some bars on the front door, you know, things that aren't super friendly for a buyer. So we wanted to make sure that we just kind of gave it this updated look and something that would be fresh and fun and hip. And ta-da! Here we are. So we did a lot of things to the curb appeal of this one. We painted the exterior siding. It's Benjamin Moore Bracken is the color and we also did the trim in Benjamin Moore Polo Blue. Now I've linked all of the products that we used on the stock and shop page for this project. So you can go check out all the specifics if you would like to copy us and imitation splattery. So, you know, we're all for it. We're all for sharing. Sharing is caring. We also wanted to up kind of the funky factor. So we changed the porch layout. We added these slats horizontally to give it kind of a more modern appeal. These are actually just two by two pieces of wood that we stained. I believe the color is Harbor Gray. It's a bare paint. And then we added this lattice to the side over here, kind of a vertical piece to kind of give you a little more privacy and also give it more of a modern vibe. We updated the windows. We added an industrial inspired lights out front, kind of a farmhouse vibe. We also added a fresh door that we painted a charcoal gray and we ran the numbering for the house vertically and we added some modern numbers to just kind of freshen the look. We also did some basic landscaping, pretty minimal, but just, you know, fresh, clean. All right. Moving inside. I know you guys are anxious to see what happened inside. Everybody's favorite part of the house. The kitchen. Okay. Here was the kitchen before. Basically, a basic galley style, dated cabinetry, dated appliances. White appliances are a no-no. Laminate countertops, you know, like these vertical blinds. It needed some help. It was pretty tight space. So we decided in order to open it up, make it more functional, make it more appealing for our buyers, that we would remove this wall. And so in doing that, we were able to get this great island. We incorporated the stove and the cooktop into the island. We added this stainless steel vent hood right up here and some bar stools right here. So not only is this kitchen more aesthetically pleasing, it's also a lot more functional. It's still a galley kitchen, but you have access to the dining room. You have access to the living room. It's just a better space for entertaining. A couple of things we did here design wise. For this wall, we just did basic. We painted these cabinets. It's called Silky White. We did a white quartz countertop. Just a nice, fresh, clean look. And then for the island, because we are on the east side, we wanted to go a little bit bold. We painted this. It's called Thai Basil. It's a turquoise color. And when we are making a bold choice, we like to pick things that are just easily replaceable by the buyers. For example, paint is a great place to go bold because the buyer can walk in. If they hate it, they can say, ah, just paint that. And it's not a deal breaker for the sale. Whereas it also helps you stand out to all the buyers that are coming through. So they'll be like, oh, I remember that house with that cool turquoise island. It just helps you stay memorable, which is in real estate, what you want to be. You want to be memorable. You want people to feel like it's something they can either live with and enjoy and they love it. And that's why they're buying the house or they love everything else about the house and they're willing to live with it or work with it or change it or fix it. And they can do so easily. Moving on to the dining room, it was very 1990s cottage vibe in here. And again, this is not a big property. It's a small space. They have an enormous table and a clock above the window. I don't even know. I'm not going to get into their aesthetic choices, but they're not mine. And so we just wanted to give it just a fresh urban vibe. And so here, that's what we did. Again, in order to make it feel bigger, we put in this smaller bistro table, like thinking about our buyer, right? If they're a young urban professional, they either, you know, maybe they're married. Maybe they're not. Maybe they have kids. Maybe they don't. But they're not going to be entertaining a Christmas dinner in their dining room. It's just not in their lifestyle. And so they don't need a huge table and it doesn't draw attention to the fact that this is a smaller space. Same thing with the chandelier. We originally had a much bigger one, but it overwhelmed the room. And so we went with a smaller chandelier from West Elm. We also stage it with modern furniture to kind of, you know, continue the vibe we were going for. Okay. Here's the living room. So the living room was kind of borderline unusably small. I don't know if you noticed this TV in front of the window, this lazy boy that you walk into as you walk into the property, this enormous couch and these laminate floors. It just needed an update and upgrade. So here's where we took a risk and a calculated risk at that. Ordinarily, we love three bedroom, two bath homes because those are the most popular. They sell the quickest and it's just a reliably easy to sell property, right? But in this case, we, once again, we started to think, okay, who's going to be buying this property? And we imagined it to be a young urban professional who maybe isn't really concerned with bedroom space at the moment, but is concerned with their ability to entertain and have people over and live and just have good living space. So what we did is we actually turned this from a 3-2 into a 2-2. We took this front bedroom out to create a much larger living space. Ta-da! Isn't that better? It feels huge. So yeah, this was a bit of a gamble, but again, we took a calculated risk based on who our buyer is. If this house was located in a suburban neighborhood that's popular to families, we would never have done this because for families, bedroom space is more important. In this case, we thought, you know, these people aren't thinking about it yet. They're probably going to move before they reach that stage of life anyway. They don't care. Let's give them, let's be different from our competition. Let's give them a real, live, usable living space like it's a new house. Other things we did in here, new windows, fresh paint, modern furniture. We changed out the fan for a modern light fixture. Super simple. Oh, you'll notice the floors in here. These are actually hickory. The natural variation of the wood is just, it gives it a bolder feel. Moving on to the bedroom. So like I said before, these were small bedrooms, small spaces, dated materials. We got, you know, dated flooring, the ever popular sheets as curtains, this enormous chunky fan. I don't know. A lot of scarves. This person had a lot of scarves. We live in Austin, Texas. It's never scarf weather. So I don't know. This is just a fashion statement wall. I'm not really even sure. For this bedroom, we did a few fun things. We ran our flooring in here. We put in a fan that was made for a lower ceiling height so that it's not as obvious. It's also kind of a sleeker, more modern design. And we added a wallpaper accent wall, which I love. I love these things. It helps you have a little bit of style, but again, you're not committing to the pattern on all four walls. It doesn't feel like too much. It feels like just enough. It's interesting. It's not boring. But it could be changed if the person didn't love it. If you're thinking about a wallpaper wall, I would recommend going with a vinyl peel and stick option. Companies like Wayfair will sell that, and that way you can try it out. But if you don't like it, you can take it down. And it's not nearly the commitment of true wallpaper. So flipster tip. Moving on to the master bedroom. This looks tight. Does it not? It's got a lot of furniture in here. I'm not sure how they're opening their drawers, but faith, love, and family, right? It's all you need. So in this room, we wanted to do a shiplap accent wall that was originally in the budget. We were going to run it on this wall over here, but budget got tight and we decided to nix it. It was just an added cost. So we just kept it basic with paints, new fan, new flooring. We had two bathrooms. They're both pretty small. So we wanted to make some design choices that would take away from that feeling or accentuate the space that we did have. So all new vanities. We put in a new round mirror to make it kind of funky. We added this wall niche over here and some hooks to just kind of give it some practicality. Because it was a small space, we decided we could go a little bit bolder with our tile. It's not something that's going to overwhelm you with the design. It's just a nice added touch and a little bit of a funky vibe. In the master bedroom, here's master bathroom, I'm sorry. Here's what it looked like before. Again, tight space, but you've got this enormous vanity and sink making it feel smaller. What we did is we did a floating wood block here for the vanity and you have exposed piping, which is kind of cool industrial hipster vibe. We added a bowl sink just to kind of give it a little bit of style and ran our plumbing out of the wall to kind of free up space over here. One thing we did in this project, which I really liked, was we ran the subway tile on the wall itself and then continued that into the shower. And I think visually that just kind of extended the space and makes it feel larger rather than having a break right here. It just kind of extended and wraps around this wall. We added a niche for functionality and we did a bold tile on the floor because again, it wasn't a huge space and it added some character. All in all, this was a great project for us. Because the house was small, we were able to keep our renovation costs low, which is what we always recommend. Get the smallest property you possibly can. However, this one did add up. It was $75,000 that we spent on updates, but those paid off because we sold the house in four days for $415,000, which if you're doing the math at home, we bought it at 260, put 75 in, meant we came away with a profit of $80,000 before our closing costs and holding costs. But that's still a pretty dang good project and a fun one that allowed us to stretch ourselves creatively and just kind of had fun with it. So if you want to know more about this project, you can go to our website, AustinFlipsters.com and under the project page, it's called the Boggy Creek Craftsman and it has a project gallery. It has kind of all the stats. It has the neighborhood location and some things that we like over on the east side, our favorite coffee place and you know, one of those trendy chicken joints I was talking about. And then if you want to know specifics on materials, you can go to our stock and shop section again under Boggy Creek Craftsman and we actually have a link to all the materials that we used. So if you want to put it in your own house, there you go. Thanks guys for joining us. These are fun to do. We enjoy doing them. Make sure you follow us on Instagram, Austin Flipsters and also subscribe with notifications on YouTube so you don't miss any of our new videos. All right. See you later.