My House Renovation: Story of a 1947 Sh!t box

[Scotty Dosent Know]

I am not sure if people on here would be interested in this kind of thing or not but it seems like alot of people on here like to turn abused neglected cars into some thing beautiful. So if there is interest I would like to share my project/build, even though its not a car it is still turning a turd into some thing nice. I got my hands on a 2 Bedroom, 1 Bath, 800sf rambler built in 1947. They House needs EVERYTHING. It has been very badly neglected and sat vacant for roughly 5-6 years with a broken furnace and a leaking roof. The house had mold, water damage, bad furnace, leaking water heater, etc. etc. If you can name it it needed it. Just to let you know I have been working on the house for roughly 1 year right now and have currently just moved in. This is not a project I have just begun but I am also not finished with it yet so I will post pictures info etc. every few days so it will seem like progress is going very quickly when infact the pics are old and working their way to the present. PICTURES DOWN BELOW Please leave comments/criticism/Ideas!

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[Numba1 K Series]

So what made you think that you 'knew me in real life'.

BTW...I'm in for the intense house project!!

[Scotty Dosent Know]

lol umm im not sure I think we know alot of the same people.....maybe maybe not lol im not even sure what your name is or what you drive ha!


in just a min here I will have the first batch of pictures up.......you will be horrified. This house was REALLY bad. My g/f cried for a solid month after I told her it would soon be "Home" haha If we hadnt been dating for 4 years im sure she would have thought I was crazy and dumped my ass.

[Numba1 K Series]

I believe you posted pictures in the NW thread.

I was the one that pointed out that living room looked small but a house is a house.

As long as you pay it off, you own it.

[Scotty Dosent Know]

Yea I posted 2 pics a while back in there, the house is very small(800sf) The master bedroon is only 8'X13' to give you an idea of the size.

Ok this should be a good start, you can use this as a reference to where different pictures are and what they are looking at in the house


Dont laugh at the MS paint skilz

[Scotty Dosent Know]

These pics are when we first started tearing the house apart, getting rid of all the shit that was left in it and starting to gut the house. We literally tore every thing out, drywall, carpet, flooring etc as you will see in the next series of pictures.


At this point I had 3 months left on the lease at my rental house. When it was up my g/f and I were going to be moving into my parents house in Kirkland. I did not want to live with my parents after being moved out for 10 years but I also did not want to sign another year lease(I was paying $1,600 a month)


This is the point in the project that my g/f freaked out a little, she had never seen in the house before and was more than a little worried (I dont blame her lol)

I had alot of work ahead of me

Living room looking twards the kitchen. Notice the water damage and sweet wood paneling



Other side of the Living room looking tward the hallway, yes that is the door to the furnace in the living room lol



Looking down the hallway, office and bathroom on right. Master Bedroom on left



Master Bedroom. What a fcuking sh!t hole


Master bedroom closets/shelves This room features dirt, mold, destruction and apparently Tampons??



This is the office......I HEART BLACK MOLD lol note all the shit I pulled out of the attic


Looking out of the Office. It has a peekaboo view of the bathroom



Office shelves and Closet. More shit and mold


This is my best friend helping tear the Bathroom appart. I did not take any pics before we tore stuff out........it made me sick and would rather remember it this way. ...........this is also why there are no pics of the kitchen in this batch prob lol Actually suprisingly enought the kitchen was kinda clean and mold free but it still needed to go bye bye

[Numba1 K Series]

Dude....this may look like a shithole now but all it needs it some TLC.

Do you own this home on a small land or on a acre? Because if you owned it on an acre, you could always rebuild...

[ken9]

Yes I'm interesting doing this because this what i do for living everyday. Home Construction and renovation. Make GOod $$$

[MikeW]

very interested in seeing the outcome. good luck, i hope you turn it into exactly what you want.

[Scotty Dosent Know]

We had thought about rebuilding but with the economy with the way it is I was not sure how easy it would be to knock a house down and get a loan for a new one.

We figured that down the road it would be alot eaiser to add on to the house since the bank is more likely to grant a loan for that. Both houses on either side were essentially the same floor plan and they have both added on. The house on our right added on 1500sf with a 2nd story. It is now a 5 bedroom 3 bath.


The super nice thing about this house is location, it is right between 2 major cities(Seattle and Everett) so it is close to every thing like freeways, shopping and jobs. We are only 10min out side of down town seattle and the house is on a little over 1/3rd acre.

[berb_15]

Looks like a fun project, I'm definitely interested in seeing how it turns out since I'm keeping my eyes open for a house right now.

[my95dc2]

i love stud deep gut jobs. Im a career plumber and do some carpentry so i can appriciate the work it will take to finish this. The outcome will be worth it jsut make sure you neutralize the mold because it will come back fast and furious. Kilz primer will help with that.

[berb_15]

do you usually spray the studs/remaining pieces with something to kill the mold??

[I_R_Baboon]

Good luck on the restoration. In to see the progress/results.

[kra95teg]

good thing about it if you don't remove walls. you shouldn't have to get permits to finish your build. depending on the permit laws your state has. also I'm guessing your going to re-vamp the elec, and plumbing while you are there?

[Prudz_lude]

I definately will be watching this build lol. I just spent 2 years finish my house. All i need to do now is the landscaping, get the living room hardwood refinished, a tile backsplash for the kitching, a few new appliances, and a bathroom redone. How much did you pay for the house if you don't mind me asking?

Good luck with the project!

[ramen]

Keep us updated, I'd love to see pics when you're done.

[Sparkles]

Dude, very interested! There are places here in tucson for cheap but they need work like that.

Keep us updated

[FxCkyoVTEC209]

im in for this

[Scotty Dosent Know]

Originally Posted by my95dc2

i love stud deep gut jobs. Im a career plumber and do some carpentry so i can appriciate the work it will take to finish this. The outcome will be worth it jsut make sure you neutralize the mold because it will come back fast and furious. Kilz primer will help with that.

The house is a brick home and we got lucky almost all the mold was just on the sheet rock not the bricks. Once every thing was out we sprayed the whole inside of the house down with straight bleach 4-5 times. Floor, celing, studs etc. Any thing that was sketchy was painted with Killz.

[Scotty Dosent Know]

Originally Posted by Prudz_lude

I definately will be watching this build lol. I just spent 2 years finish my house. All i need to do now is the landscaping, get the living room hardwood refinished, a tile backsplash for the kitching, a few new appliances, and a bathroom redone. How much did you pay for the house if you don't mind me asking?

Good luck with the project!

Congrats man! Yea it is a good feeling to complete a project like this, At this point in time we are almost done with the inside. I need to build counter tops, tile, kitchen flooring etc. Now that I know people are interested I will work towards posting that stage.


As far as house price thats a tricky one, before I started in on the house in its crappy state it was worth around 160-170,000. To make a long story short the situation with this house is that my parents have owned it for over 30 years. They lived in it as their first house and then moved out. It was a rental for a while and got run down and just sat. It was actually still in good shape but needed some big things like a furnace that they could not afford so it just sat vacant and the leaking roof and lack of furnace pretty much did it in for 6 or so years. They dis like this house and it gets the short end of the stick because they own like 5 other nice property's like a condo in hawaii they would rather put money onto lol

I am renovating this house out of my own pocket and in exchange I live here for free as repayment. When the market recovers and the time comes to sell I will be given a large chunk of the sale price(30-40K)

Originally Posted by kra95teg

good thing about it if you don't remove walls. you shouldn't have to get permits to finish your build. depending on the permit laws your state has. also I'm guessing your going to re-vamp the elec, and plumbing while you are there?

We were not planning on doing electric or plumbing the project was origionally suposed to just be fixing it up a little but things were really bad so we went full bore. All the plumbing was rusted through and all the lights and outlets in the house were on one 15amp breaker lol A good friend of mine is a plumber and helped me redo all of it and I seperated some rooms onto their own breakers.

As far as permits there are prob some things I should have gotten them for but im not really worried about is(especially since the house is 90% back together)

[NstyGrnHatch]

man good luck. I bought a forclosure 3 years ago and it kinda needed the same reno but not as bad as yours. I will tell you one thing from my exp. is that tearing down is easy...building back up and having it look nice is the hard part

[Scotty Dosent Know]

Ok got a few pics loaded these are the only camera phone pics I took so the rest will be alot better like the first few. Just didnt have the camera handy that day.

This is one of the few shots of the house I will prob post from the outside since all of H-T doesnt need to know where I live.

At this point in time I started saying "What the Fcuk am I doing??" This is looking into the living room and you can see every thing is gone including the window. We had just started to clean/rebuild at this point




Here is looking towards where the furnace door was. At this point in time I decided to ditch the furnace all together since it was broken and only vented into the master B-room and living room(these were the only 2 rooms with heat! thats how the house was built!). We also tore the brick chimney down hence the tarp on the roof in the first picture. I went with a direct vent gas fireplace hooked up to a thermostat to heat the hall, livingroom, and kitchen. We decided to open up the wall between the kitchen and living room so it was more open and also to help heat the area. In the bedrooms/bath we decided to go with in wall electric heaters on a thermostat.




This is looking from the kitchen towards the livingroom/side door, I take renovation very seriously. You can see we also took a couple feet off the livingroom/kitchen wall (not done yet in this pic that framing was temporary, we actually went back a little farther).




Master Bedroom closets. Gutted, cleaned and the bottom of the closets/shelves were repaired. I also framed in and installed new closet doors for both bedrooms. You can see the firing strips used to attatch drywall to the blocks.....that is one thing that was challenging about this house.




Every thing almost out of the bathroom. The wall on the right has all the plumbing for the house in it and it was old and leaking. I replaced part of the footer in this wall.

One interesting story is that back in the old days medicine cabinets had a hole to drop your used straight razors into the wall so they didnt have to go in the garbage can. When we pulled the medicine cabinet out we found a little shelf behind it and a bunch of razorblades and little white pachets that had fallen past it full of a powdery substance lol 70's what? haha

[my95dc2]

ha its funny mention the razor blades, we did a bathroom with the same thing and the capenters just kind of left them in a pile on the floor and inside the studs, one of there mexican demo guys sliced the shit out of his hand on one I couldn't think anything but "at what point was grabing a pile of 30 year old razor blades bare handed a good idea Manuel?" Good project. Hands down the best build thread on Honda-tech

[declareyrwar]

Probably the most refreshing build on honda-tech that I've seen. Looking forward to more updates.