Flip Thy House

Exterior of Main St. House: Before and After

Here’s a before photo of the Main St. house, when I purchased it.

And here’s the after photo:

A few more before/afters:

Most of that’s pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t dwell too much on the work involved. It’s also not the best picture of the walkway/patio in back, as that picture was taken before it was finished and patio furniture and plants added. I pretty much did everything myself, as far as the tiling and stonework, painting, landscaping, etc. I did pay a landscaping guy we use to put the mulch in all the beds around the house, as I just ran out of time to do it myself.

As far as degree of difficulty of anyone trying this at home, it’s honestly much more sweat and labor than any skill. Even the tiling on the front porch. If you go slow, take your time, and avoid doing anything dumb, jobs like that are pretty straightforward. I decided not to paint the body of the house, as it’d been painted fairly recently, so my painting efforts were focused on the trim and doors and windows. I also stained the concrete steps in the back instead of tiling them as originally planned, mainly to just save time.

I’d originally planned to mortar down the patio stone on the front walkway and grout it, but ended up setting it in sand and using decomposed granite to sweep and work in between the stones. Grout and mortared stone looks better (to me at least) but doing it the way I did saves a ton of time, and I think it looks pretty good, especially compared to the before photos.

As far as costs, here are the approximate expenses for all the exterior work:

Slate tile: $175

Patio stone: $200

Limestone blocks: $100

Sand: $40

Decomposed granite: $30

Grout and mortar: $50

Paint: $20

Plants: $50

Mulch (plus labor): $125

Metal edging: $60

Concrete stain: $20

Miscellaneous (grout float, buckets, street numbers, paint brushes): $80

Total cost: $900

As far as things I’d do differently, goals, original plans, etc., in the end I was pretty happy with the exterior of the house. One recurring theme with this property is that while I had some grander plans before starting (adding a carport in back, possibly repainting the entire house, more formal stone walkway, more elaborate plants added in landscaping), I scaled most of them back, after getting my hands dirty working at the house and simply having more time to be realistic about things.

I did want to do a little more work in the back, as far as planting more stuff around the walkway and semi-circular patio area, but I cut those plans late in the project. While I think adding elements like that add a decent amount of value (and they’re relatively cheap), what I was really after was doing some of the visualizing work for anyone buying the house. Instead of thinking “Gee, that backyard is big, I wonder what we could do with it” it turns into “Hey, that’s a nice little patio area to sit at and chill out at after a long day of work.” Which is even more attractive if it’s your first house and you’ve been living in apartments. As far as fleshing it out with beaucoup plants, well, I’m just not sure that’d add value to a starter house like this.

Part of me wanted to get my Flip That House on, making grand, sweeping dramatic changes, but that would have been forcing things a bit. In the end, what I was working with is a 3-1 starter home on a corner lot in a good location, that was a reasonably solid rental house that just needed some polishing. So for the most part, polishing is what I did.

I think it’s a decent lesson for anyone following along at home, as in many instances you can create a pretty large impact simply by addressing all of the 187,103 things that can be easily upgraded and touched up on an older house, such as missing faceplates, mismatched hardware, paint, landscaping, etc. Add up all of those little things and voila, you suddenly have a house that gives off a much better general impression, where your eye really can’t focus and latch onto anything negative, instead of a house that in its previous condition had more than a few bumps and bruises.