Frugal Adventure Update

Renovations are done!  Well, 99.9% done anyway.  The inside is completely done,and the tenants moved in over Memorial Day weekend.  There are just a few minor projects outside that we need to wrap up, but those are small and will take no time at all to complete.  I am just SO happy the inside is done, and was completed on time for our renters.  WHEW! We have come a long way!!  Our renters happen to be one of my frugal friends, Corinne, and her family.  I wish them many years of happiness in their new home!

I have lots of photos to share with you, all of the completed project.  If you would like to start by checking out what it looked like before we started, check here, here and here.

Let me take you on a tour!

We will start upstairs with the Master Bedroom......

Lovely large closet!! 

 Next, one of the other two bedrooms....

refinished existing wood floor

new closet doors, when we started there was no door or framing for one

 The other bedroom.....

 The Hallway....

 looking up

looking down

 The upstairs bath....

 The living room (that is the doorway to go upstairs)...

new wood floors (see comment below)

new front door

 The dining room...

replaced ugly light with a nice ceiling fan

The kitchen.... (my favorite part of the project)

all new: cabinets, appliances, flooring - you name it, it's new!

that is the door that goes to the basement

extra cabinet space in an open area that we didn't know what to do with

cabinets open on both sides on the peninsula with an overhang for a breakfast area

a new addition...a large pantry

(I was sure to make it nice and large since Corinne is a couponer!!)

 The main bath (downstairs).  This did not exist before.

 The outside....(not much changed there, cleaned up and put up the shutters)

The carpet upstairs and the wood floors in the living room and dining rooms were installed by my frugal friend, Nicole's husband.  Chris Vincent of Vincent Carpeting, Inc. did a great job!  He was very reasonably priced and worked quickly.  He was able to get us scheduled right away when we requested it and was very professional about the entire project.  I highly recommend Vincent Carpeting, Inc.  You can reach Chris at 815-978-6911 if you need any kind of flooring work done, you won't be disappointed!

I love how light everything is now, one of the things that I just could not stand in this house is that everything...every room, every nook and cranny, was SO dark.  I had to do everything I could to lighten up the house and make it more cheery and airy.

I haven't tallied up any figures to know where we are at in our challenge, but I do know with the work that we decided to do it will take a little longer than expected!  Property taxes are higher than we expected as well as the insurance policy needed on a rental property.

Our next step is to have our "Estate Sale" or "Resale" to sell off some of the items that we obtained from the inside of the house.  We have begun setting up in our barn for this sale, but it's still going to be a little while to sort through all the stuff.  Man that guy had A LOT of stuff!  As soon as we have a date set in stone I will post about it so if anyone wants to come check it out they can.

In the Home Stretch

WOW, it's been a busy couple weeks.  We are in the home stretch of our frugal adventure!!  If you want to see the progression so far, start here, then look here, and here.  Our renters are moving in over Memorial Day weekend and I think all will be complete and ready for them by then, maybe with the exception of a few last outdoor projects to finish up. 

Watch for final photos real soon, I hope to get them up as soon as I have the last little ends pulled together.  Someday in the distant future I will sit down and look at all the numbers so far and see just where we stand in our frugal adventure.  We are no where near our goal yet, but we also ended up doing a lot more to the house than we originally planned on.   

Since I have been putting in lots of hours working on various things there, I haven't been in the stores at all.  The only place I have set foot in, aside from Menards, is Wal-mart to just grab some of the essentials like milk and bananas.  I think this is the first week since I started couponing that I haven't walked into the door of a Walgreens store!  I miss my deal seeking adventures and hope to be back at it soon.  And when I do you can rest assured that I will be passing along the great deals to you again too! 

I think it is going to take me a week to organize, clean out and clip several weeks of inserts, but I am looking forward to getting back on track, especially with summertime right around the corner.  Time to stock up on all things summer!  I also think it's going to take me some time to get everything at my own house back on track, I may be slow in getting back to deal seeking, but I will get back at it! 

All I have to say is, a week without Walgreens is like a whole week without sunshine!  ;-)

House Update - Renovations and Treasures

My life has been extremely busy these past couple of weeks, as I am sure you can tell with my lack of deal and shopping posts!  I have still been shopping - I have to!  I just haven't had much extra time to sit down at the computer and type up my trips...

As many of you know we had the arrival of our daughter, Jade Marie, just under 7 weeks ago.  To make things a little more exciting, we decided it was time to hire someone to start renovations on our "frugal adventure".  You can see my original post about that adventure here, and a little bit of the progress here.  We had originally intended on doing a lot of the work ourselves, but with Jade's arrival that changed our plans.  My husband has been able to take some days off of work to take care of some demolition to help save costs on that. 

Things are moving along at a really nice pace right now, and we have plans to have it done and rented by June, 2011.  The man that we hired has had some great ideas and has really made a lot of headway already.  Here's some photos of how it's looking now:

Upstairs bathroom getting ready for tile. 

Master bedroom, ripping down the wallpaper.

Upstairs bedroom.

Small upstairs bedroom. 

Kitchen, gutted and ready for the new tile, cabinetry and fixtures. 

We decided to do more work than we had originally anticipated.  Since there's only one bathroom in this house, and it's upstairs, we are adding another full bath off the kitchen (along with a walk-in pantry).  We had to remove the wood burning stove to make this work. 

Even though this is going to be a rental home, I am replacing things with nice quality and design - things the way I would want them if I were going to be living there.  The ceramic tiles in the kitchen will be 20 x 20 and there will be expanded maple cabinetry with a new pantry too.  I am leaning toward stainless steel appliances for the kitchen.  The wood floors in the living room and dining room areas will be replaced with red oak flooring. 

So, as you can see, my time has been consumed with picking out lots of things for the renovations, and I have spent way more time in Menards lately than I have at Walgreens or Jewel!  :)

I also wanted to show you some of the beautiful treasures we found in the house.  I am a big fan of antiques so as you can see, this is all right up my alley!  I am going to have a hard time parting with some of these things....and some are already a permanent part of our home. 

This entire set of dishes was boxed up in the basement, wrapped up in newspapers from 1952.  It has obviously never been used.  I am guessing it was someone's wedding gifts that were packed up and stowed away to be forgotten about.  There were about 4 sets of dishes that were packed away like this.  Did I mention to you how much I like dishes?!?  Yeah, my husband wasn't too happy about his find!! 

So, as soon as things settle down around here I promise I will post more of my shopping trips and deals.  I would much rather spend my time in Wags than Menards, but then again, maybe next time I should bring my coupon binder along and see what kinds of deals I could muster up there! :)

Progress!

Many of you have asked about how our frugal house adventure is coming along so I thought I would post an update with our progress and some photos.  To read about our adventure and how it all started, you can read my original post here.  You can also see some great "before" photos there. 

On November 2nd it will be two full months that we have owned this house and I am quite proud of our accomplishments so far.  Most of our work has been concentrated on the outside for two reasons; first, to make the neighbors happy and spruce up the neighborhood because this place was a pretty big eyesore when we purchased it, and second, to get as much outdoor work done before the snow flies - unfortunately that will be here sooner than we all want it to! 

Here's a couple photos of the outside now:

As you can see, all the clutter in the driveway and yard has been removed.  The little shed in this second photo will be the next to go.  We are moving this to our house and it is going to be fixed up and re-purposed as a play house for our 6 year old son by his playground.

We also had two very large trees professionally taken down.  One was very close to the house and rubbing on the roof, the other was a huge, old, messy walnut tree.  The neighbors were very happy to see the walnut tree go since it was right on the property line and they were not happy about all the nuts hitting their house and cars.  We were able to strike a deal with the man who took the trees down since walnut is very valuable wood and this was one nice hunk of wood!  We were also left with a really nice, big pile of spruce mulch that we will use in the spring for landscaping.  In the meantime, the yard smells wonderful with the scent of spruce everytime you get out of your car or go out into the yard. 

Here's our progress on the inside:

Whew!  It makes me tired to look at these photos - I can really see just how much we have accomplished in just two months!  I do have to give most of the credit to my husband.  I have worked many hours there and at home on a lot of this, but he's really the one who has put in the most time and effort.  Without his long hours and elbow grease it would not look this good - Thanks, honey!  You are the best! 

We haven't had the water hooked up yet, and won't be doing so until spring.  We have decided that it would not be frugal of us to heat an empty house for the winter months.  If we had water hook up we would have to heat the house all winter so the pipes wouldn't freeze.  Once it gets too cold we probably will hold off on any further work until the spring. 

I haven't sat down and added up the expenses vs. income in a couple weeks, but as of the last time I ran the numbers we were ahead just by a little bit.  We sold the 1996 Dodge truck which was a nice chunk of cash to offset some of our recent expenses and we tallied up all the loose change, postage and aluminum that we cashed in to recycle too so it all adds up.  We don't have a FREE house yet, but we are keeping our heads above water and breaking even so far and that makes me happy.  We won't show any serious strides in my challenge until we have our estate sales in the spring/summer of 2011.

We have found many treasures that we are keeping and I have slowly started to clean, organize and put away all the great items we have found.  Stay tuned for a post about some of these treasures with photos.  I just need to figure out how I am going to track these items as part of my challenge - that's going to be the difficult part!