We fondly referred to this house as: The World’s Smallest Kitchen.
We bought our first rental house in October 2021. We had talked about it for what seemed like an eternity, read books, articles, and talked to people we knew with rentals. We talked to our realtor about finding the right house, and we started making offers on homes that met our criteria and hit our target numbers. We made a couple of offers on houses that were already renovated, and it turned out we were competing with both investors and first-time home buyers. After a couple months of offers and patience, we found our right house. The house we bought needed so much work that there were few people as crazy as us willing to buy it).
Travis couldn’t come tour the house or to sign the paperwork when we decided to buy it (he was in the middle of his MBA on top of work), so our joke about this house is that it is the one that Tori just went out and bought one day.
We had intentions of project managing the renovations by hiring contractors to help. That could not be further from what we actually ended up doing. We underestimated renovation costs and timing significantly because the house needed to be completely remodeled (think old wires, rotted floors, old pipes, world’s smallest/unusable kitchen, no laundry room, old roof, old windows – you get it). We got quotes ranging from $50,000-$70,000 which was more money than we had saved for the project at that point. We ended up spending $30,000 on renovations because we recruited a saint of a family member who is a contractor, and we spent nights and weekends learning construction, DIY renovating, getting sweat equity from other super helpful family, and sub-contracting out some components (tile, hardwood floors, paint, landscaping) for 5 months (twice as long as expected). We walked away with some handy new skills thanks to all of our sweat equity.
We ended up picking out higher end finishes than what some would call “rental quality” because we knew that would attract a good renter in our market and would be worth it in the long run from a resale value standpoint too. We also wanted to go with higher quality so we would have less to repair over time. These trade-off decisions were tough in the moment, so we always went back to thinking about our “target tenant” and what they would value to determine just what we wanted to include in our renovations.
Here are some highlights from our renovation journey – who doesn’t love some good before and afters?
BATHROOM RENOVATIONS
We fully updated the bathroom. The big surprise here was the rotted subfloor (maybe not so surprising since we could feel how soft the floor was when we bought the house). I remember my realtor making fun of me as I bounced up and down to test out the floor when we were touring it. We removed all of the wall tile, the subfloor, lanolium, the old iron tub, the toilet, vanity etc. and replaced it with new sheetrock, subflooring, tile, a standup shower and all new fixtures. We did most of it ourselves, but got a little stuck on the shower, so we called in some help and had a sub-contractor install the shower for us. Since we kept the small footprint of the bathroom, we bought ourselves some additional storage with the vanity and a modern medicine cabinet that we set back into the wall.
KITCHEN RENOVATIONS
This was the big one – we spent the most time here because this house had a very tiny and non-functional kitchen. This was also where we realized when we were getting quotes from contractors that we would need to DIY a lot of the work ourselves. This old house needed all new electrical and an upgraded electrical box to support the appliances, outlets, etc. We ended up knocking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room and using the dining room space to expand the kitchen. Because we were designing the kitchen from scratch, we got some help from Home Outlet which was super easy. They offer a free service to give them the kitchen dimensions and they provide a design back. They provided several revisions to me as well as I gave input and feedback on the design. We again had rotted sub-floor to deal with, so this room was knocked down and rebuilt from the bottom to the top. There were two different floors in the kitchen and dining room – we opted to add in a transition and continue the hardwoods to match the rest of the house.
LIVINGROOM RENOVATIONS
The living room layout was a little tricky because of the fireplace. We decided to board up the fireplace so we could keep the interest in the room and it was overall simpler for our purposes. We kept the original door and just painted it. We freshened this room up with refinished floors, paint, new windows, and blinds.
LESSONS LEARNED
This turned out to be a fun family bonding experience for us. We definitely had our hard days through this project and probably bit off more than we could chew at first, but we trudged forward anyways, and are seriously glad we did. Here are our big lessons learned from our first rental renovation:
1. It is going to cost you time and money – assume the project is going to cost more and take longer than you actually expect from the outset
2. There is not a quick and easy path to this – renovating a house takes time and effort even with a lot of help but it is worth it
3. Remember who this is for – think about your target tenant in each decision that you make
4. Don’t lose sight of the goal – it is easy to get frustrated and discouraged when you are in the middle of the trenches (putting in long weekends, nights, etc. week after week), but putting in the time and maximum effort will get you there