2020 has been... a lot, to say the least. The world has changed beneath our feet in a way that no one has really ever seen before. So many lives have been degraded, ruined, or lost. But, as I write this after nearly a YEAR of this pandemic, I feel secure in saying that some silver linings of this incredibly strange time. Without work commutes and dinner parties demanding our time, there's been more room to think, reflect, and plan. For Noah and I, the conditions of this year provided the perfect opportunity for us to buy our first home.
our background
This wasn't necessarily where I expected to find myself this year. Like many others, I found myself unemployed in at the start of the pandemic. By April I was looking to put some energy into something new, so I started this blog. When the lease on my shoebox studio in NW Portland was set to expire in July, I was happily searching for a similar but larger space in the neighborhood for my partner Noah and I, and all my plants to move into. But Noah had bigger plans.
A little background for those who have not had the pleasure of meeting Noah - we met in college when I was getting my degree in landscape management and design. He got a highly coveted Bachelors of Architecture from Cal Poly, and when we moved to Oregon he decided to take his skills to commercial construction. After a year and a half, he is a project engineer on the biggest jobsite his company has ever taken on, with responsibilities that are completely beyond my scope of comprehension. Noah is the kind of person who believes that if someone else can do it, he can do it too. He is a passionate and driven person who time and time again proves that he is up to the task. So, when I was looking for modest places to rent, Noah was looking for the best place he could buy. And boy oh boy did he find it.
the timeline
After months of being on the phone with lenders and realtors at any spare moment between the demands of work, Noah managed to find us this place we now call home. But the road was so rocky, and I pretty much did none of the heavy lifting and just started making Pinterest boards. Once he found this house, the idea of it pretty much took up all the air in the room. Though incredibly rough around the edges, for what we were looking for and could afford this was it. The house had been on the market for over 4 months, one buyer had already backed out, and our realtor had advised us against offering as far below asking as we did, but Noah was adamant that our offer was as high as we could go. Directly after we put in our offer, the seller accepted another, higher, offer. Our leases were waning and we had put a lot of eggs in this basket, only to have to go back to square one. We looked at a couple other properties; a triplex on a busy street, a quadplex next to an open lot, but nothing could measure up to the opportunity we had just lost. We resorted back to looking to rent in our former area of town, and even contemplated moving back to California, or to Denver (Noah's hometown). Our lives felt very up-in-the-air until miraculously, the buyer backed out and we were back in it!
The thing about buying this house was that we pretty much did not get to celebrate until we moved in. Noah found the house in early May, we were outbid in late May, and the other buyers backed out in the middle of June. Because of the financing we have, there were a lot of inspections and work to be done before we could even know it was for sure ours. The ups and downs were a bit exhausting. We finally closed on the house and got the keys until the 29th of July, 2020. Mind you, our leases ended on July 31st. The time crunch was astounding. We initially thought we would have time to do a whole host of renovations before moving in. Instead, we moved straight into a construction site. We thought we would finish the upstairs before moving in, work on the downstairs right away, and have a rented in by the new year, but that was not in the cards. Now, nearly 5 months into the project, the end is finally in sight, and our new goal is to be able to move downstairs and list the rental in March/April.
the property!
Over and over I have feelings of "I can't believe how lucky we are to be here." While it has been challenging (and will continue to be for the next couple months) it has also felt absolutely perfect for us. This home is a ~2,700 sq ft craftsman style, split-level duplex built in 1907. The top unit is 850 sqft, and the bottom floor and basement are 950 sq ft each. Both units have 2 bedrooms and one bathroom with shared laundry in the basement. There is no access from one unit to the other, and each unit has both a front and back exterior door. There is a large Ipe wood deck in the backyard as well as a private rear balcony for the top unit. My favorite feature of the house is the front porch, which also feels like the biggest transformation we have completed so far. The property itself is 100ft by 50ft, with a sloped front yard and a large backyard that are begging for attention that I cannot wait to give.
The location of the house was a big draw for us. After spending only a year in downtown portland, I wasn't ready to move too far from the city. This place is located about 3 miles from downtown Portland - an easy drive or bike ride in - and one house away from a gorgeous 9 acre park filled with old growth Doug Firs and Maples, with a 100 foot tall historic American Sycamore about 40 feet from our front steps. I thought I would miss the bustle of the city more, but being on the end of a quiet street in a storied neighborhood with the park at our doorstep has provided the best of all worlds. We can still walk to get coffee and drinks just a few blocks down, but be far enough from the city noise to find a whole lot of peace.
This house was in really bad shape when we first saw it. The UPS man told me the last people to live here filled a construction dumpster with hoarder-levels of junk when they moved out, and it was obvious the tenants had not put much care into maintenance.
All the things that people typically look to avoid when buying a home? We got em!
I'm talking mold, peeling lead paint, foundation issues, squirrels in the attic, knob and tube electricity, drafty broken windows, the works. That being said, some things that attracted us were the back decks made of ipe, the roof, and the yard. Even though the decks had definitely not been resealed or treated since they were built in 2008, ipe wood is an incredibly dense tropical hardwood that is super expensive and lasts forever so they are still in really good shape. This means one less thing to add to our extensive list of repairs. The roof was also replaced about 3 years ago. A new roof is wildly expensive so not having to deal with that was also huge.
The landscape at first sight was slightly overwhelming, but also really exciting because it was so neglected but also so big. With so many people spending the majority of their time confined to their own homes during the pandemic, having a place to be outdoors without the anxiety of COVID is more important than ever. In Portland around this time of year, the winter rains have fully set in and any dry chance to be outside must be savored. In August, the backyard was about 50% blackberry and the front was so overgrown you could hardly tell there was a house behind it. While I haven't been able to do any planting before winter hit, we have successfully kept the blackberry at bay (for now...) and removed everything from the front yard to let some light in, and open us up to the neighborhood. Our neighbor told us they used to call our house the Addams family house, but now with the growth cut back and a much lighter paint job, the house is more welcoming. I have very big plans of using this landscape to build up my design portfolio, but all of that comes after the house itself is finished.
the nitty gritty
Noah envisions a future in which we rely entirely on passive income from real estate rentals, so he was only really interested in buying this year if it was a multi-unit property. One of the things that made this house so perfect for us was the condition of the units. The top unit was much more updated and livable from the start, while the downstairs needed a complete renovation. This meant that we could get a federally backed multifamily FHA loan with a very small down payment. With financing we were able to put only about 4% down. The monthly mortgage is just about equal to what we were paying for our own apartments last year combined, so the monthly expense is manageable, even without renters. When we do have renters in the upper unit, over half of the mortgage will be covered, which will mean that living in our own custom 2 bedroom unit in a house that we own is less expensive than Noah's 1 bedroom rented apartment last year. If we were decided to leave Portland for an extended time, we could store our things in the basement, rent out both units, cover the mortgage and have a couple hundred dollars of profit on top. While most people do get infinitely more tied down when they buy a home, the nature of this property actually gives us more flexibility to move or develop other properties.
{ I feel like this is a good time to put in a little privilege acknowledgement. While Noah and I didn't / don't have any financial help on the house from our families, we would not have been able to do this without the financial support we received earlier in our lives. In addition to the incredible gift of a debt free college education, there are also a host of other privileges that I recognize we have as a cisgendered-heterosexual white couple that allow us to avoid the barriers that many people trying to enter the housing market have. If you are interested in learning more about discrimination in the housing market based on race, sexual orientation and gender identity, or ability, please check out the linked reports from the Urban Institute. }
In addition to the income requirements, there are a whole host of inspections to be passed by the house. The FHA inspection and appraisal process is definitely more intense than the process to get other types of loans, but you come out of it knowing exactly what the house needs to be safely habited. We could not close, or even step foot in the house until all the called out repairs were done. This house is very old, wasn't particularly well tended to when it was occupied, and then sat vacant for about 5 months, so it was... worse for wear to say the least. This house was (still is) a fixer upper in the truest sense of the phrase.
The biggest things that had to be done before we could close on the house were the peeling lead paint on the outside, and the work to be done on the cracked foundation.
Obviously we could not do these things ourselves so we hired them out. The contractor who did our lead abatement also did a host of pick-up jobs inside to make it more safe, such as patching big holes in the floor, patching some holes in the walls, dealing with the mold in the back bedroom closet (I know) and building a temporary front railing on the stairs to the porch. The lead abatement and foundation work were the most expensive repairs this house needed, adding up to about $19k. Fortunately, we were able to negotiate the asking price down $25k and then include the cost of that work under the loan, and still end up $6k under asking.
the plan and progress
This house turned out to be perfect for us. The fact that the upstairs unit only needed aesthetic upgrades meant that even coming in so close to our old leases ending, we could move into the house right after closing. Now, nearly all the work on the upper unit is complete, we are living comfortably upstairs with extra belongings stored in the basement, and we are well underway with the work downstairs.
The ultimate goal with this property is to live upstairs while completely renovating the lower unit, then move into the lower unit and rent out the upper unit.
We are greatly enjoying living in the upper unit now that it is all put together. We painted all the walls and ceiling, painted the cabinets, refinished the butcher block countertop, replaced all the lighting, and deep cleaned everything. Now, the space is functional, versatile, and bright, with the sloped ceilings giving a nice cozy attic vibe. Our house is taller than those surrounding it, so we have tons of natural light without worry of privacy. It will be bitter sweet to move out of the upper unit, but there is a certain temporary feeling about being up here right now. We don't have a closet up here (yet), and still have a lot stored in the basement. The nester in me has definitely brought up a few knick knacks to feel more at home, but we have refrained from hanging anything on the walls to avoid having too many drywall repairs on move out, or rather, move down.
Currently downstairs is as barebones as it will get and although it looks pretty rough right now with holes in every wall, dust everywhere, and no functioning lights, it's an organized chaos and we aren't too far from the finish line. I anticipate that as projects become fewer, I will be able to formalize more content about our progress so far, in the last couple months we have:
had the exterior painted
completely gutted the kitchen and bathroom downstairs and removed the tile floors
moved 2 door frames and a wall
demoed a plaster wall in the back bedroom (shown below)
designed a new kitchen
ripped out the whole front yard
leveled the entire house by lifting it 4 inches in the middle
And perhaps the thing I find most impressive, Noah has single-handedly rewired all the electricity the entire downstairs. The exterior paint work and foundation repairs are actually the only things we have hired out, so all the rest is just the two of us. To say we've been busy is an understatement. Next up on the checklist is getting drywall hung and finished, then we can paint and install our kitchen. After the kitchen will be the flooring, the bathroom, the windows, the lighting, the landscape, and everything else. It's easy to get lost in all the work still left to be done downstairs and outside, but it's also important to step back every once in a while and realize how far we have come. This project can be incredibly daunting. While Noah has his architecture and construction background neither of us have ever done anything like this and are both completely figuring it out as we go.
With a renovation project on an old home like this, there is no magic amount of planning we can do to be fully prepared. Yes, it's a good idea to watch a couple youtube videos and do research about the work to be done, but the only way to understand it is to jump in and figure it out. This has been a particularly hard lesson to learn for someone like me who likes to know what they're getting into before actually getting into it. Noah doesn't have these limitations, and his blind confidence matched with my perfectionistic hesitation actually level out pretty well. I've learned that the only way to know what is inside the wall is to bust the wall open. Don't know what's under the ugly red tile in the kitchen or how to remove it? Only one way to find out!
This project has been so fulfilling so far, and we are learning so much. I feel like after completing all the work on this house we will be prepared for anything that comes next. We are not only learning practical skills like wiring, drywalling, tiling, and framing, but also planning, motivation, and persistence. Even though we are only 5 months into this journey, I could see this being the start to a long story of building for Noah and me. But for now, we are trying to enjoy every moment that we get to be in the trenches together and learn as much as we can.
Because this blog is a reflection of me and my life, it will morph as I do. Winter means that any plant-related energy I have is going into keeping my plants alive at best, and there is a whole lot of stuff to show about our house, so I will likely make some changes to my site in order to transition a bit to more renovation content. Thanks so much for following along and be sure to subscribe if you would like to keep up to date on my posts!
Oh Darlins this is such a fun journey to be on with y’all via the blog. Well done!!!!
You have done absolutely fantastic. It is looking fabulous. xx