Hello dear friends. Well, we are finally finished! If you have been following along with me on Instagram over the last year, we bought a house sight unseen from Auction.com and have finally completed phase two of the renovations…..YAY! We’ve listed it as a short-term rental and have been blown away by the response. We are very tired but very happy campers. Would you like to see it? Let’s take a quick tour.

A little background…my husband found the house online one Saturday morning (looking at real estate is relaxing to him). He was intrigued. I was meh. The house was located close enough to us that we could do a drive-by. I was still meh. The location was fantastic. Close to Lake Michigan and two blocks from town. However, when you buy a house at an auction, you are purchasing it “as is,” and we were not able to see the inside at all. This is what the house looked like on the drive-by.

Despite some reservations, we placed our bid and held our breath, not sure if we wanted to be the high bidders or not. A few days later, we were notified we were the new owners of the house! EEK!

Once we got in and took a look around, we gave a big sigh of relief. For rookies, we had gotten off easy. The structure was not only sound, but someone had begun what looked to be a flip a few years back, and the main issues on the inside were the amount of garbage (several dumpsters worth) and updating the heating and cooling. The roof was in good condition, some of the windows were newer. Outside needed lots of love and cleaned up, but we were pleasantly surprised at the condition overall. I think we had convinced ourselves it was going to be a disaster. Once we cleared the trash, we rolled up our sleeves and decided to start on the bottom floor.

This is what it looked like on day one.

We hired out the things we had never done. Floors were one of them. Having the wood floors refinished made a huge difference. We didn’t stain them; we just added a matte poly for protection.

You can follow more detailed project progress here as we completed the first floor for the One Room Challenge last spring.

Since we knew we wanted to turn this into a short-term rental as quickly as possible and keep costs under control, we tried to keep and reuse as many of the materials as possible. We kept the cabinet boxes in the kitchen but replaced the broken doors and kept the concrete countertops on the bar and coffee station. We did donate the original hood vent shown below as I wanted something warmer in the space.

We also added the butcher block countertops but saved the original sink and shelving.

One of the biggest bonuses we discovered was that a powder room had been added somewhere along the line.

One of my favorite things in this renovation is this wallpaper from SpoonFlower! I just love the birds!

Now for the upstairs!

We painted the stairway trim, SW Iron Ore.

The upstairs bathroom is small but mighty. We replaced everything except the tub and the linen cabinet in here. Subway tile to the ceiling and penny tile on the floor worked perfectly to retain the character and make the space feel fresh and updated. Here is a before-shot to show you where we started from.

It’s always about the details for me. I adore these floral decals. I got them from Leen the Graphics Queen. They have held up very well, and this is one feature the guests have commented on.

The upstairs has three bedrooms. Bedroom number one:

Bedroom number two is my favorite.

And finally, bedroom number three. It’s the smallest of the bedrooms. Our goal was to sleep 6 guests, and we made it!

One of the very best features of the house is the large deck. Because we were on a time crunch, we simply had time to get it cleaned up, but that’s as far as we’ve gotten (did I mention we are booked pretty much through October?!?!). It’s on the top of our list of things to do this Fall.

A few last pics of the outside cleaned up. We will continue to finish up some projects, but we are so excited to be live! You can see the Airbnb listing here.

Thank you for coming along for the tour today!

Other posts you may enjoy:

DIY Kitchen Hood Vent

How I stained My Kitchen Counters

Until next time,

Libbie