The Blue House

After listing and selling The Birchman House in a matter of days, Melissa and I found ourselves homeless with nowhere to go. Luckily, my parents were kind enough to let us move back in for a few months. We knew we wanted to move to the Fairmount district so that we could be within walking distance to BREWED (which we were about to open) and I knew that I wanted to buy another house that needed work. We had just made a good amount of money from renovating and selling The Birchman House and my plan was to reinvest that money into another fixer upper that I could fix up and then sell again in a couple of years (you don't have to pay capital gains taxes if you sell your house after living in it two years). We also wanted something a little bit bigger, and it had always been our dream to have a big front porch. 

We looked at a ton of houses, but we just couldn't seem to find the right one. I had made several offers on different properties, but we kept striking out. Either the house was already fixed up, too small, not close enough to BREWED or was too expensive. Finally, we put the house hunt on hold and I went out on the road with GRO for a short two week tour in the Midwest. One morning, while we were in Ohio for a festival, I woke up in our hotel pretty early (it was 7:30 am, which may not be early for most people, but it is in musician world) and I couldn't go back to sleep. So I started my daily house hunt searching on my Zillow app. There was nothing new to be seen, so I decided to do a quick search on Craigslist to see if anybody might have listed a house on there. 

And then I found it. Someone had listed a house just thirty minutes before and I instantly knew that it was going to be our next home. It was just a few blocks from BREWED, had a huge front porch, was the perfect size, was definitely a fixer upper and the price was just right. I knew I had to move fast because this was the best deal I had seen in months, so I immediately hopped out of bed and called the owner. When he answered, I told him I wanted to buy his house. I let him know I was going to be sending him a contract when we got off the phone and that I couldn't go actually check out the property, because I was actually in Ohio. He thought I was crazy! He had just listed the house thirty minutes prior and was completely shocked that I would make him an offer without even stepping foot in the property. But if there is one thing I have learned, when you find a great deal you don't hesitate. In real-estate you have to move fast. So I typed up an offer and I immediately emailed it to him.

After I sent it, I called my wife up to tell her that I had just made an offer on a house and asked her if she would go check it out later that day. She was hesitant at first, but luckily she went along with it and went to go check it out later that day. She loved it. The house was the perfect size, had great original 1920's charm, and was in a great location. She got the contract signed for the two of us and by the end of the day we were on our way to our second house adventure. I understand that this may sound crazy; I just put an offer on a house I found on craigslist, had never seen, all while I was in Ohio. But when you find the right deal you have to take some risks and go for it. I would say that this has really been instrumental in all of our success with real-estate. You have to know your area, diligently hunt for properties, and move fast when you find a deal. 

Thirty days later we were closed on the house and the real challenge ensued. It was time to bring the house back to life and get it move in ready. This was a bigger project and a bigger house than our Birchman property, but I had a blast working on it. 

We painted the boring brown exterior a fun blue, did some landscaping, put in a drip irrigation system, and installed a big back deck. We opened up the kitchen into the dining room, painted the cabinets white, added a bar made out of reclaimed wood, hung funky wallpaper, installed a glass chandelier, and put in an industrial faucet. We also pulled up the tile and painted the old pine floors a fun striped pattern. I relocated the entrance to the laundry room and downstairs bathroom, and finished off the new entrance with with a sliding barn door system. We painted the entire interior and scraped all the popcorn ceilings. The original wood floors had been painted black by the previous owner (not shown in these pictures), so I sanded them down, white washed them, and sealed them with a special clear coat that would leave them natural looking. It all turned out super cool. We added a reclaimed wood wall to the upstairs TV room with salvaged wood from another home I was working on in Fairmount. And last but not least, we tiled the master bathroom with subway tile and I built a custom vanity out of an old desk that Melissa found at an antique store. It was quite the ordeal, but we really made this house our own and it looked fantastic!

So now the moment you have all been waiting for. Here are some of the before and after pictures: 

This was a fantastic house and we made some great memories here! But I am the type of guy who is always looking for the next project. I listed this house 2 years later while we were on vacation in Mexico for double what I had paid for it. I didn't think anyone would buy it for quite some time because of the high asking price, but we had 4 offers on it in less than 24 hours. The rest is history and you can read about our next project, "The Ice House" here. 

The Ice House

The Journey of the Ice House: 

The Ice House, named by the good folks at Fort Worth Magazine, was a 5 year journey for Melissa and I. I have worked on 25 houses in my short career as a home renovator, but the Ice House was my biggest challenge. It was my "Moby Dick" so to speak. It has and always will be my dream home, but it took me 3 years to figure out a way to buy it and then when I finally did it was a BEAST of a project. 

The house is 4,240 sq ft with 6 bed rooms, 3 bath rooms, & a huge unfinished basement. Yep, that's right it has a basement! I didn't even know they had basements in Texas. It was built in September of 1920 for $22,000 by Joe Schwartz and it is located in the historic district of Fort Worth. The neighborhood is up the road from BREWED and is Fort Worth's own mini version of Austin.  I am not gonna lie, our neighborhood is fun and unique. We have hipsters, a community garden, people have chickens in their backyard, everyone rides bikes, and folks are way into recycling and protecting feral cats. It is the "funky" side of Fort Worth.

I did some research and was able to track down the original deed card. Pretty cool right??

To make a long story short the house sat empty and abandoned for almost 6 years. The previous owners ran into some financial troubles and had 4 different liens against the house that added up to WAY more than the house was worth. As a result, they were unable to sell it. At the same time due to the type of liens that were on it and because of how many there were, the banks were unable to foreclose on the property. So the owners just abandoned the house and left it to rot. It had leaks in the roof, so every time it rained it would cause damage to the sheetrock and floors. To make it worse, all of the windows were busted out, so homeless people and raccoons used it as a temporary home. It sat in "house purgatory" for 6 years. Progressively it got worse and worse and it fell victim to vandalism and the elements. 

Melissa and I lived right down the street and would often take walks down to this house. One time we snuck in through the broken back door and walked around it, dreaming about what it would be like to one day live in it and bring it back to life. The house was across the street from Jimmy & Waverlee (our best friends), it went to a great school, was close to BREWED, and had a big office downstair that Melissa could use for the Net. This was our dream home!

It wasn't on the market and no one lived in it, so in 2012 I did some digging and I was able to get a hold of the previous owner who verbally agreed to sign over the notes to the house (a short sale). We got really excited thinking we would get to buy our dream home, but things got complicated and the owner eventually disappeared and stopped answering my phone calls and emails. Two years went by and Mel and I would still go on walks by the house, dream & pray about the house and I would try to call the owner once every few months. I also started calling the bank that held the main loan against the house, to see if and when they would eventually foreclose on it or could sell it to me. But each time it was always a dead end.

In 2013, I got wind that the house might finally be going up for auction. When a house is foreclosed in Tarrant County they will auction it off in front of the Court House steps in downtown Fort Worth on the first Tuesday of the month.  It was scheduled for auction 7 times. Each time I went hoping it would be sold, but because of the crazy liens it was pulled from auction every time and I would have to wait 3-4 months for the next time it was "scheduled" for auction. We prayed about the house a ton and would often ride by it. We would get super excited thinking we would have a chance to buy it, because every few months it would be scheduled for auction again. I would always go down there, and each time it was pulled from auction last minute. It was an emotional roller coaster. 

Fast forward to June 2014, while on vacation in Mexico with our friends Jimmy & Waverlee (our friends who live across the street from the Ice House), I decided to list our current house (that I just finished remodeling) on Zillow to see if anyone would bite (not thinking it would really sell). Well, while in Mexico without anyone even seeing it beyond the pictures online, we got 2 offers for what I was asking. Melissa was not happy with me that I listed our house and did not want to move. But when we landed back in the states I got a notification on my phone that the 6th ave house was once again scheduled for Auction. I thought maybe it was a sign! We went down to the auction the next week and this time the house was actually on the schedule. Not a single person bid on the house (because it was in such rough shape), so I bid "$1 more" than their asking price .....and Won! I couldn't believe it, we just purchased OUR house......and it was a mess!

For almost 3 years I had been trying to buy the house and we finally got it. Now that it was ours, it meant I also had to remodel a 4200 sq ft house that had been rotting for 6 years. This thing was a mess! It was filled with trash, had all sort of damage, the front porch was rotted and collapsing, it needed foundation work, it was infested with fleas, and needed a complete makeover! I immediately got busy and it took me and my guys 5 months of insanely hard work to get it in livable shape. But it was worth every bit of blood sweat and tears! 

I rebuilt the entire balcony, salvaged the 100 year old pine floors, re-floated every wall in the entire house with a smooth hand sanded finish, dug 12 feet under the foundation to add new piers, new cabinets, new tile, new marble counters, made an island countertop out of 1950's boxcar flooring, updated the HVAC, replaced a ton of plumbing (it flooded my basement every day for a week when we finally turned on the water), all new fixtures (except for the original chandelier in the dining room), new landscaping and grass, and lots and lots of paint, caulk, and sanding! We have officially been in the house for almost 2 years now and we have loved every minute. I still have a To Do list a mile long of things I want to eventually do with the house (I am already planning my next kitchen renovation & basement conversion), but it's our dream home and we plan on staying here for years to come. 

-Jamey

Before & After Shots

The Birchman House - Our 1st Home & Remodel!

The Birchman House - Our 1st Home & Remodel!

The Birchman house was the house that started it all! This house gave us a lot of of firsts. It was not only our first home (we moved into right after we got married), but it was the first house we ever bought (we rented it for 2 years before buying it from our landlord), AND it was our first ever remodel. This was the house that started my love affair with remodeling old homes! 

When we first got married we rented this cute 1940's 1350 sq/ft house from a nice 70 year old German lady named Helga. We were young, in love, and excited to be in our first house together. 2 years into marriage we began praying about what it would look like to buy our own home instead of renting. We started looking around, but could not find the right house within our budget. We approached our landlord Helga and asked if we could buy the house from her, and she quickly responded with a hard "No". But we kept praying that God would give us wisdom on making the right choice and provide a house for us. Two weeks later Helga came back and told us that she had changed her mind and that she wanted us to have the house. When she told us the price she wanted, we were thrilled! God provided us with the perfect house and it was exactly in our budget. The only problem was that the house had not been touched since 1985. It had yellow counters, yellow cabinets, yellow linoleum in the kitchen, brown shag carpet in the bedrooms, pea green tile in the bathroom, and cheesy wood panneling. To say it was outdated would be an understatement. 

We had big dreams for the house, but had almost no budget. I called a few contractors out to the house to get bids and was blown away by how expensive their quotes were. Their prices were WAY out of our budget. Around that same time, Melissa and I felt called to start getting to know the homeless population in Fort Worth. We started going down to a park on East Lancaster called "Unity Park" where all the homeless would hang out every Saturday. We soon made a ton of friends and great relationships.  One of the things we discovered was that most of the people we met did not have a pressing need or want for food, clothes, or shelter. They had several options for places to stay and had access to all the food and clothing they wanted from all the great non profits on Lancaster. What we found, was that most of the homeless people we met deep down really wanted friendships and good conversations. They wanted someone to share their stories with and for someone get to know them. These Saturday morning hangouts with our homeless friends would eventually be the inspiration for what would later become The Net.

It was  on one of those Saturday's that I got to know my friend Carl. Carl was Vietnam vet, who had his own contracting business for many years. He later traded in his own business in for a more stable job as a maintenance man at an apartment complex. He worked at the apartment complex for 8 years, until it eventually got purchased by a new owner who had his own maintenance man. The new owner soon let Carl go and 2 weeks later Carl found out that he had lung cancer. Because of his cancer Carl could not work and wound up on the streets, which is where Melissa and I met him a few years later. He was in better shape after his battle with cancer, but could never get back on his feet after losing his job. 

When I heard he used to be a contractor, I told him about our new "old" house we just purchased and how I one day wanted to remodel it. Carl looked at me and said, "Well Jamey, I can help you work on it. I can teach you how to remodel......lets start tomorrow." And teach me he did. For an entire summer, Carl would wake up at 5:30am, catch the 6:30am bus, and arrive at my house at 8:30 (if you have ever taken public transportation in Fort Worth, you know it takes FOREVER). At 8:30 each morning I would open my back door to see Carl hanging out on my picnic table having a cigarette, until I invited him in for a cup of black coffee (which he would drink 5-8 cups per day). Carl turned out to be one heck of a handyman! He came to my house 5 days a week at the same time every single day for an entire summer. He taught me how to hang sheetrock, redo hardwood floors, lay tile, paint, texture, install fixtures and a ton more! We remodeled my entire house in about 2 and a half months. Even when I would head out for shows, Carl would still show up everyday to help out.

I didn't have a ton of money, but was able to pay Carl a small daily wage. It was enough for him to save up and get his own apartment. I will never forget how excited he was to have his own place. After we finished my house, some of my neighbors started hiring Carl and he wound up with a nice little business. I am sad to say that a few months later the lung cancer caught back up with Carl and he passed away a few years ago. 

I will never forget the lessons Carl taught me. He inspired in me a love for old houses. He also taught me the value in taking a chance on someone and to never judge a book by his cover. Carl's legacy played a huge role in my future house projects and also launching The Net. 

-Jamey

At the Birchman house we did a ton of work. We knocked out walls and expanded the kitchen, we opened up the archway from the dining room to the kitchen, installed can lights, new cabinets, granite counters, new tile, we moved the master bedroom and added walk in closet, we pulled down the old wood panelling, and we repaired and redid the hardwoods (that were hidden by carpet and linoleum) throughout the entire house. It was a lot to say the least. We transformed the 80's yellow interior to something we loved living in. We felt like God gave us this house, because it helped launch my career in renovating and it paved the road for The Net.