Dream house, or just good investment?

Most couples our age who are looking for their first home go out looking for something already finished and fairly new. If you don't know us, we are far from the "typical" couples our age. We like to joke that we are 40 years old stuck in bodies of a 25 year old. Anyway, back to the house. We went out looking for an older house that would need some work, not anything "major" (a lot of people would say what we have been doing is major) just some updating for the most part. We were at the point of giving up and just renting when we came across the house that is now ours. At first look, it was not a looker. It needed A LOT of updating. It was built in 73 and every bit of it showed that year. I knew it would take some convincing my husband because as soon as he saw wood panel walls, he would be out and there was a ton of wood paneling. This is what we stared with!

Big surprise, I talked him into it ;) Needless to say our first project was going to be taking down the wood panel and putting up sheetrock. Neither of us had ever worked with it before but knew we were not willing to pay someone $3000 to do it for us. So we researched it but still didn't feel 100% about doing it alone. Good thing my family has done professional sheetrock before! So we had some people come over and help us figure out what we were doing. We put up sheetrock, textured and painted the whole living room in about one weeks time. This is what we ended up with! Plus it only cost us about $400 in materials!!

We not only saved a lot of money but we learned something most people have NO idea how to do! We also had to replace the sheetrock in two of the bedrooms in the house due to termite damage. We did it though, for a very small price. Of course there were lots of sweat and tears involved. You always think during the process, "why didn't we just pay someone to do this?!" at the end though, we were always very happy we did it ourselves!

We also had an added room that was on the house when we bought it that we had to take down pretty quick since it was hurting the foundation. Go figure, they went cheap with it and did not do it right. We did however hire someone to do this. We felt like that was too much of a task to tackle and it dealt with the roof. However the guy underbid and decided midway he was not going to finish it, awesome right?! Luckily, my Dad has done that kind of work as well and came and showed Phill how to finish it up, including re roofing and all! So proud of him :) Here is a before and after of it!



The bottom picture is what it was before, the other two are the after shots. Sadly, we have not done anymore work to the backyard. After the kitchen remodel (what we are doing now) is finished, this WILL be the next project so the kids can play back there instead of in the front yard!