kitchen pictures before and after
hi i'm jen i want to talk about theprevious house i lived in that cost $47,000 yeah youheard that right it was 47 grand 47 k 47 gs and i want to talk to you a littlebit more about you know why we decided to buy a house like that what's it likeand also how do you get that sort of deal so while i live in atlanta nowpreviously my husband and i lived in florida and back in 2009 we were lookingfor a house together previously i don't a condo in texas and i actually did makea little bit of money on it before there was that market crash of like 2007 iliterally sold my house in may of 2007 and then it crashed several months laterso i was extremely fortunate and with
real estate my husband james and i havejust been very we've had very very good timing with things overall one thing youshould know about us is that we like to live below our means so we had a goal ofhaving a house payment that we could survive and afford on only one income soif one of us lost a job or something happened to one of us that we couldstill live in the house be able to afford the mortgage and not worry aboutlosing our shirts so we were looking for short sales and foreclosuresin 2009 we had a great great realtor and she was amazing and she actually helpedus find this short sale and we paid forty seven thousand six hundred dollarsso let me tell you about the house and i
do have some before-and-after picturesso we're gonna get to that the house was built in 1955 it was more of thoseflorida bungalow styles it was a two-bedroom one-bathroom housethe bathroom was pretty tiny and the second bedroom the previous owner hadadded on a screened-in porch so the second bedroom actually has a slidingglass door in it so at that point i wouldn't even consider it a bedroom plusit was absolutely tiny the real bedroom the master bedroom wasn't anything tooreally right about either but a good thing is thatthe house had no carpeting it had tile throughout and laminate flooring it hadbeen somewhat renovated previously but
the work had been pretty subpar ifyou're buying a house like that just know that if you get a great deal on ityou're probably gonna have to put some sort of sweat equity into it and do alot of cleaning we actually spent a few months trying to get it ready to move inbefore we actually moved in it needed a lot of cleaning and actually had sometermite issues so we had the house tented and we just did we tried to do alot of painting and just general i don't know cleaning deep cleaning before weeven got in there so we lived in the house for about we owned it for aboutfour years and in that time we did several pretty pretty cheap but verylabor-intensive renovations my husband
james pretty much completely did redidthe kitchen we also redid the bathroom and he put insome really beautiful finishes he did a black granite floor since it was theonly bathroom we wanted to be nice he also did an overlay in the shower he puta very nice like solid surface palette panel in it so it looked nicer and wepainted the whole house we had the outside painted and we also added thewasher dryer and when we moved in it actually did not have a condenser unitin it someone had like taken it so we did have to get another ac unit althoughat least it did have the ductwork so let me talk a little about the pros and thecons of taking on this type of project
this type of house so obviously one ofthe huge benefits is a very low mortgage i think we put about five thousanddollars down on the house ten percent and our mortgage payment was like fivehundred and thirty dollars in fact at one point our property taxes were threehundred dollars for the year for the year so our mortgage and if you're notfamiliar with mortgages the payment has your like property insurance rolled intoit and some other your taxes so so the mortgage companyactually puts into an escrow account what you need to be paying in taxes andwhat you need to pay for homeowners insurance and it takes it out of it sothat five hundred and thirty dollar a
month payment includes all of that theonly thing it didn't include i believe was flood insurancei believe we paid that separately i can't remember off the top of my headbecause we lived in florida the flood insurance was fairly high it was $1,400a year but you know what that's that's the breaks of living in florida so thatwas all right so it was definitely a lot cheaper than renting at the time rent inthe area we lived in was between $1,000 to $1,200 for a decent two-bedroomapartments so we were getting a pretty good steal of the dealwe did have some maintenance to the house obviously there's a lot of thingswith homeownership that comes with it
that you don't have to pay for whenyou're living in an apartment and also because the house was so old it did havelike zero insulation so we ended up having to do some things you can addinsulation to old homes you can get it put in after the fact and it willactually significantly help with your utility bills so the utility bills inthat place we're actually fairly high because of the age of the home but againthe mortgage was so low it ended up being pretty okay even then so that aresome those are some of the pros and cons of living in a really old houseobviously if you're trying to get a good deal on a house not all of them aregoing to be old but a lot of those
properties that are very low priced areprobably gonna be a few years old so there is a lot of unknowns about thosehouses there can be definitely problems a lot of homes in the south have termitedamage or mold damage and that's definitely something you should look forif you're looking to buy a house but i'm actually really happy that we did notget more of a mortgage than we didn't bite off more than we could chew thatwas definitely a very manageable amount of debt for us and we also have studentloans which i'll talk to talk about in some future videos but because of thatwe wanted to keep our mortgage as whoa as possible so if you're a youngcouple or if you're a young person and
you're looking to buy a first home iwould tell you this don't don't necessarily think you need to buy themost expensive house you can i know it's gonna be very appealing especially whenyou see all these new pretty homes custom builder homes that you know costhalf your take-home pay but just think about it what happens in the worst casescenario what happens if one of you loses a job what happens if you loseyour job or you get sick and cannot work and cannot afford your mortgage anymorewe personally like to keep our mortgage at about 10 to 15 percent of ourtake-home pay that is an amount that gives us a lot of breathing room andflexibility and you don't know what's
gonna happen in the future maybe youwant to make some changes in your life and your mortgage payment doesn't makethat possible so that's something to think about the other thing to thinkabout is getting a good deal and putting that sweat sweat equity in there itmeans that you could possibly make money on that property and we actually did myhusband did an absolutely amazing job with the renovation the realtor saidthat the kitchen looked like a three hundred thousand dollar kitchen and wegot some cabinets from cabinets to go we got some new appliances the one thing wedidn't do for this particular home we did not upgrade to a solid surfacecountertop and that's because the
neighborhood we were living in wasn'tvery high-end if we were marketing a $200,000 house we definitely would haveput in some sort of solid surface countertop but the neighborhood was avery affordable one so buyers in that area weren't going to necessarily belooking for that feature and we ended up selling the house for $85,000 which waspretty awesome we did put some money into it when it's all said and done ithink i estimated we put in about eighteen thousand dollars worth ofappliances you know renovation costs and the air condition that also includes theair condenser unit so all-in-all i think we sunk about eighteen thousand dollarsinto it that also includes the tenting
for the termites but you know walkingout of the deal i think we pocketed about thirty-fivedollars that certainly wasn't bad of course you have to pay your realtor'scommission and other certain costs for closing but we were very happy with thatamount and at least we felt like living there gave us a bit of a financial legup and we actually used that money from the house the proceeds we used it to payoff one of my husband's student loans so i'm going to be talking about some ofthese house stories and future videos so if you enjoy hearing about this sort ofthing feel free to subscribe to jen tops forever and also let me know what elseyou'd like to talk about but for
anything and i'll see you next time