happy halloween!!!

I'm not into dressing up for Halloween this year, that ship has sailed. I would rather spend $75 on a cute shirt tile for the bathroom that I can use for 365 days of the year instead of spending $75 to dress up like Harry Potter and only wear it 1 day out of the year. Aren't I so mature and grown up? Owning a house will do that to you! Just sucks the fun right out of you. JOKE! What did you do for Halloween? Anything fun? We did take part in some Halloween fun..



sometimes you just need fancy. (this is from last year, look how small he is!)



she's a PRETTY brick house

Guess what! The outside is done!! The form stone is gone, the acid has been washed away, the scaffolding has been removed and she’s a beauty! Let’s take a trip down memory lane first..

formstone, red awning, shultz development sign. hot mess.

see ya, formstone!

just getting a little facial

still has her bandages on..

00o0o0o0o pretty!

 

TA-DA!



I could not be happier with the way it turned out! It blows my mind to think this was hiding under that sad formstone. This is a huge change but we’re not completely done with the outside- we’ll get all new windows, a new door, a hand rail, a mail box, numbers, wood molding at the top called a cornice and most importantly flower boxes! It’s really exciting to see something change, it makes all of this seem real!

 

it's real







on top of it all

Last but not least, I wanted to show you the plans for the top floor! I know we’re not even moved in yet but we’re thinking about the future and how we want to keep this as a rental property. With that in mind, we wanted each bedroom to have its own bathroom and have two separate “master suites”. Besides a bathroom, closet space was also really important. The design below is an old one, we originally had two sinks in the master bathroom but after thinking about it we thought that wasn’t the best use of the space. Plus, in the future when we have renters they won’t care about two sinks in the bathroom since it will be in the one bedroom and not a shared bathroom. We currently have two sinks in our apartment and it’s really nice but it’s a luxury not a must- have in our opinion.  

As you see the front bedroom (on the left) and the back bedroom (on the right) are about the same size, each have a nice size bathroom and closet. The front bathroom has a tub and the back bathroom just has a shower. That’s really the only difference.

That's the inside! A few other things that we're planning on doing are adding a back deck off of the kitchen, putting a rooftop deck on as well and taking down the formstone on the front of the house.. Now that you've seen the plans for the house, what do you think? Any suggestions?

the right stuff

When we started looking for a house there were a few things that were on our “must have” list. One of them was a basement- we somehow have a ton of stuff and we want more stuff in the future so we needed a place for the current stuff and future stuff. We live in a 1 bedroom apartment right now, we have two huge walk in closets, a linen closet in the bathroom, a laundry closet with shelving/storage and a coat closet. Even with all of this storage I still feel like I don’t have enough (space, not stuff). I think once we get a bigger kitchen with more cabinets and I can take the juicer,coffee maker and serving bowls out of my closet I’ll feel better but right now all I can think about is more space/storage for ya know.. stuff. We’ve seen the pictures of the current basement and our plan for the future basement is to have one bedroom, one bathroom, a closet, a laundry room and another living room where RC will be able to watch all of the football pre shows/ football shows/ football games/ football post game recaps/ recaps about post game recaps/ previews of football games / football specials he wants.

I forgot to mention that we don’t have a ½ bath on the first floor. GASP! We tried, we REALLY did. It just didn’t work. You would either open the bathroom door to the kitchen and who wants a toilet near the stove? Or we would put it at the back of the house and lose the only other source of natural light in the house or put it in the front of the house and open the door to the living room and lose all that wall space. It just didn’t work and trust us, nobody was as disappointed as we were. We thought we NEEDED one but we didn’t want to compromise the main floor for a toilet and a sink. We have 3 other bathrooms in the house and I don’t think going up or down a flight of stairs to a bathroom has killed anyone.. yet.. so that bathroom down there will be the "main" bathroom.

That’s the basement, what do you think? Want to move in yet? You can bring all of your stuff!

first (floor) comes first

Now that we’ve started demo I thought should share our plans on how we’re going to put it back together. Like I’ve said multiple times, we’re doubling the size of the house. We’re ripping down the back wall on all three levels and going back another 20(ish) feet. If you check out this picture, the brown cabinet behind Cait on the right is where the future living room will end and the future stairs will be begin:

no, i'm not looking at you. I'm looking at the cabinet behind you!



RC explaining how far the living room is going to come. See the cabinet behind him?



Then we’ll add stairs in the middle of the house so you walk up about 4 stairs, you hit a landing you turn around and then walk about 4 more. You don’t see this much in row homes but I think it gives us more livable area.  In my first house the stairs were on the side and it didn’t give you much room for a table or to walk:

I still love this house

I’m going for this look:

this lady doesn't look happy. I'll be happier with these stairs

When you’re standing at the stairs on the first floor you will have the option to go down to the basement (on the right) or up to the 2^nd floor (on the left). Am I making sense? Maybe? So besides having a stair case in the middle of the house we also really wanted a dining room area next to the kitchen. Just like how the girls and I shoved a table against a wall next to the stairs most people who live in row homes are forced to do the same thing. Since we were in charge of the layout this was something that was really important to us. We sit at the dinner table almost every night to have dinner together and I don’t want that to change when we move. Don’t worry, the TV is usually on… we’re not that crazy but sitting at a table is far beyond our days of eating on the couch when we first met. Point of the story is we added a dining room area. This is what the first floor will look like:

i love paint. <3

We’ll have a deck off the dining room and since we’re on a hill it’s 1 story up! What do you think or the 1^st floor?

1 week down, 21 or so to go

We survived 1 week of construction! Thanks for all of your comments on the pictures from last week! Just because a few people asked:

1.       We're currently living in our apartment; we signed another 6 months and won't move out until April. This kind of renovation isn't one of the ones you live through and just wash your dishes in the bathroom and eat microwaved food for a few weeks.

2.       My boots are from a boutique in NYC, I can't remember which neighborhood or how much. I just know they were totally worth lugging around Manhattan and Brooklyn for two days.

3.        Yes, my hammer swing is REALLY that pathetic.

This weekend, my parents and sister came down to see the house! The construction team started demo-ing the inside on Friday, check out the living room! Ugly green carpet is gone!!!



hi, Cait!



just a casual blurry picture in a war zone

We couldn’t get up the stairs because of this:

This makes me think that a lot happened upstairs and for all of us to speculate how the demo guy got out. Did he go out the window? Did this happen AFTER he left? Is he still up there?

Dad giving it the once over

I haven’t really talk about the plans of the house yet, but I did mention that it will double in size. We’re going to extend the back of the house on all 3 levels about 20ft. This was RC and Dad measuring 20ft from the back of the house. Yes, we’ll lose the big yard but we’ll have two decks and think that will make up for it.

Then Cait and Mom decided to help with the demo by pulling off the back.. umm, stuff.

they enjoyed this more than they should have.

We did some more demo in the kitchen and found this beautiful wall paper..

at some point this was probably baller style wall paper

Before we left, we took our weekly picture in front of our house:

Then we called it a day and went to fells point..

college Cait, she is different than HS Cait.. and not just because she brushes her hair now

how was your weekend? What did you do?!

she's a brick house

MIGHTY MIGHTY.

To recap our first week for you, our construction was supposed to start last Monday. It didn’t though; they were having some issues with getting a dumpster close to the house. So Monday.. Tuesday.. Wednesday.. nothing. Thursday RC went by and saw this:



would you even know this was our house?




it was late and dark, but look.. it's RED!




hello brick, sorry you've been covered for so long!



Can you even handle it?! Just to refresh your memory, this is what it looked like last week:



the monkey wasn't impressed




see ya, polyester!



That grey stuff that is no more is called Formstone. A little Baltimore history lesson for you, all row homes are brick- that pretty red brick that nobody should ever cover or paint but in the 1950s some guy started selling Formstone and marketing it as “no up keep and virtually no maintenance” and compared to the porous brick everyone loved that idea! He quickly became a rich man because up it went… everywhere. You can find it all around the city in multiple colors. I’ve seen shades of grey, blue, combinations of grey and blue, browns, purple and of course the legendary orange and black Harley Davidson house in Canton. The good thing about it, if there is a good thing, is that it just went OVER the pretty brick so if you remove the Formstone and repoint the brick we can all pretend like it never happened. kay? We decided that we wanted to expose the brick again and to qualify for an historic tax credit (more on this later) we had to. Win-win. I read that Formstone was referred to as the “polyester of brick”, I die. So off with the polyester brick!

The next day, they put an acid on the brick to take off the glue from the Formstone.

acid or sunscreen.. it hasn't seen the light of day in a while.

Not sure what the next step is- probably cleaning off the acid/glue and repointing the brick. Repointing? Huh?

Repointing is the process of renewing the pointing (external part of the mortar joints) in masonry construction. Over time, weathering and decay causes voids in the joints between masonry units (usually bricks) allowing the undesirable ingress of water. Water entering through these voids can cause significant damage through freeze/thaw cycles and from salt dissolution and deposition. Repointing is also called pointing, or pointing up, although these terms more properly refer to the finishing step in new construction.
(thanks, Wikipedia)

Regardless.. this was one of those projects that I was most excited for! I do know what you’re thinking, what happened to the red awning?!


she has a new home in back yard.. until the dumpster comes



keep showing me the moneyyyyy

The 2^nd program is called “Buying Into Baltimore” and this one is open to just about everyone.  Back in the day it was referred to as The Trolley tour because you had to sit on a trolley to see each house. They have recently given participants  the options to either drive themselves or sit on a trolley. I’ll let you guess which one we chose.  A few stipulations with this program-  you can’t be buying a house over $417k, you must buy in the designated area and it has to be when the city is offering this program (they do it once a year). Which is understandable- if you can afford a house that costs $417k then you don’t need the $4,000 from the city and you can’t be “Buying into Baltimore” if you buy outside of Baltimore. Fair enough, right?

 Since RC and I plan on buying into Baltimore and spending just under that (just so we can get the $4K, obvi) we qualify! All we had to do was go on a few tours of some houses and get a “passport” stamped at a minimum of 4 houses. Look how much fun we had!

stamp #1



stamp #2- no that's not a bracelet from the club, it's for the tour!







stamp 3



Even though we look like hell, it wasn’t because the tour was strenuous or mind blowing. It probably has more to do with the prior evening activities... Bible study ran late, naturally. (Hi Grams!) The tour took all of an hour and was super simple! We drove to the four closest open houses; I put on my best sorority girl voice and attitude to say hi to the real estate agent, make a nice comment about the house and then receive our stamp.  

Here is where it gets tricky, after the tour, we had to take our “passport”, our housing counseling certificate (already had this from LNYW. check!) and our signed contract (which has to be dated after the event date) all to the Baltimore City Housing office downtown. The catch here is that the city only gives out 50 of these grants a year and you need all 3 of those things to qualify and to be put on a list! Having the counseling already done was a huge help, having a home in mind was an even bigger help and having access to sign the contract on the Sunday following the event and before the housing office opened on Monday was priceless.

When Monday came around we didn’t know what time we should get there. Was this like the Tickle Me Elmo craze circa 1996? Did we need to camp out overnight and then beat up the people in front of us to get on the list? Turns out that you didn’t. RC and I got there around 7:30am on the Monday morning. When the office opened at 8:30 there were only 2 other people there with us. That being said, I still wouldn’t have done it any differently, something about being first on the list makes me sleep better at night. Buuuut that’s probably a whole different topic. Anyway, after you give them the initial 3 things they also need a few others documents to prove you’re actually getting the home- like signed mortgage papers/approval letters/blood samples/etc. After they recieve all of this It then takes about 14 days for them to process and to get you a check so make sure you account for that time prior!  Even if you have to wait an extra few days it’s totally worth it! $4,000 isn’t chump change and if it’s free why not take advantage of it?




stamp 4- ALL DONE!

 



show me the money

 I previously mentioned that we took advantage of some city run programs. The first one is “Live Near Your Work” (LNYW) or more commonly referred to as “Work By Your House”  if your name rhymes with SharShe. To qualify for this program you have to be buying within a certain distance of your office AND work for a company that participates in this city run program. I am lucky enough to do just that. (I don’t just have a killer spandex wardrobe; I also get great perks like this.) My company contributes $2,500 (before taxes) to closing costs/down payments and then Baltimore City matches up to $2,500.. so 100% in my case! 5 Gees for working and living in the same city. As my good friend Meggie would say,  CHA-CHING!

i miss these sausage fingers.

Now, if I told you actually getting the money were easy I would by lying but if I told you it was hard that would be dramatic. A fair statement would be that it’s time consuming. You have to fill out paperwork, get it signed by just about everyone you’ve ever met and then you have to take a 3 hour Home Ownership class which in turn gets you this Housing Certificate that is needed to qualify for the cash. I personally ran into some roadblocks with the silly class but hopefully my experience will help you. When I called they said to come in on that Saturday (seemed too good to be true.. because it was) to take the class and at the end I’ll walk out with that certificate. Super. Saturday came and off to the class I went.

Side note: Let the record state that RC offered to come to the class but I said no. There was no need for two us of to be in a 3 hour class when I was the only one who needed to be there since I'm the one employed at the participating company. (1200 best gf points for me, just saying)

So, I sat down to a booklet of about 200 pages of information- samples of contracts, samples of mortgage paperwork, a glossary of terms and about 10 power point presentations all with the title “The American Dream”.  I thought to myself, “All of this in 3 hours?!” but I sat there with my game face on thinking “$5,000, $5,000. Just 3 hours for $5,000”

if only this was the American dream they were referring to.

The class would be very helpful for people who are just starting to think about buying a house but since we’ve been looking for so long I knew a lot of the information the instructors were going over. Example- the first slide said “What is a mortgage?” errr, can I teach this class?! But I thought to myself that this was easy enough to sit through plus the two instructors were so nice! They took their time going through each slide and answering every single question that came up- even the seemingly obvious ones. They both had thick Hispanic accents and explained everything thoroughly. “ A mortgage. Chu know, da ting dat da bonk gives chu to buy a howse” Seemed very basic and wasn’t what I needed to learn BUT sitting through that for a few hours was totally worth it for $5,000. Don’t chu agree?

Well, turned out that the 3 hour class was actually 8 hours and at the end of 8 hours I didn’t walk out with the certificate.  I had to go in for a one-on-one counseling where the “counselor” went through my monthly budget to help plan for owning a home. His advice was to cut back on the shopping and boozing.  Shocker. He also used the words “saving” and “fun” in the same sentence multiple times, clearly this guy has never hit the Nordstrom’s Anniversary sale.. now that's FUN.

Today’s Lesson- LNYW is an awesome program; just make sure you go to the right class. The 8 hour class was not necessary and turned out that I could have taken the 3hr class online for a little extra money. Worth. It.

it’s all about the benjamins

P Diddy was right- it really is all about the Benjamins and  to buy a house you need a lot of Benjamins. So let’s talk about the best kind of money- FREE money! Baltimore City is working really hard to get people to buy homes here. They have TONS of programs out there that give people cash-money for just buying a house in Bawltimore city, hon. It seems like a no brainer to take part in these programs, who would turn down free money? Not this girl. The catch is that you can’t go buy clothes and wine with it- it must be used for a down payment and/or closing costs. You know what that means, the money you were saving for a house can now be used to buy clothes and wine! (you win!) If you’re thinking about buying in Baltimore check out http://www.livebaltimore.com/  for all of the programs offered. Each program has certain criteria that you have to meet- like certain neighborhoods you have to buy into, income limits, etc. Most of them we didn’t qualify for but we did find 2 that did work for us! We were able to get a FREE $9,000 (ish) from the city/my company.  If only getting that much money were that easy all the time... legally of course. More on these programs to come..

beauty is in the eye of the beerholder

 Now that you’ve seen the outside of our humble abode, let’s take a tour of the inside. It may help to shotgun a few beers or sip on a couple of glasses of wine prior to reading the rest of this post, sometimes a little buzz makes me feel better about this undertaking too.  

beautiful red awning.


 

living room. front door. green carpet. mint colored walls. vom.



  

in our kitchen!



 

Reeds in the kitchen, gorgeous floors.


 

kitchen- nice molding around windows. new (ish) cabinets, random stove placement.


 

close up of the heinous laminate floors.


 

drop ceilings in the living room



 

View out of the kitchen. Notice we're one level up, perks of being on a hill!


 

a Barbie girl lived here. Notice the random white molding- that was a window at one point.

 

This bathroom was an extension so that mirror is back of that "window" in the pink bedroom.


 

Only bathroom

  



bedroom ceilings





basement- wood paneling, full size door and window!



hello pretty brick! not sure who covers brick with wood paneling... probably the same person who glues tile to a porcelain tub.





the furnace from 1920!




view from basement



After the initial tour we got to work... 



pathetic swing.





it's official!



RC got to work..



apparently RC has a little more aggression than I do.

Now that you've seen the inside, what do you think? It's crazy to think that all of those pretty pictures of homes I showed you before looked like this at some point! Thoughts? Anything we should keep?