Buy a House Sight Unseen Off Zillow

It Will Be Fun!!

Feb 18, 2025

The other day a friend told me they missed seeing me on instagram stories. Mainly due to feeling like they are missing something big with my home renovation. And I pointedly stated I have not missed being on Instagram.

Lately, I’ve been fantasizing about deleting my account and never looking back. Not just a social media “break” but a true break up. I decided before I do anything rash I’ll just get through winter and reevaluate my feelings in spring around my birthday.

Although I don’t miss instagram; I do miss sharing my fox house reno updates and Substack is always my safe space for sharing…

My friend’s text of “you always come back” unintentionally became a challenge for me. I remember thinking… Oh, I’ll show her. 😏

Since that convo, my brain has been content stacking updates of things I usually share with my community. Specifically updates on our home renovations.

Buy a House Sight Unseen Off Zillow: It Will Be Fun!!

In December of 2024 we closed on a house that we bought sight unseen. We did get to FaceTime tour it with our realtor; but the first time we stepped foot on the property was a week before closing. It’s a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1700 square foot a-frame house on 4.84 acres. I told my husband yesterday I genuinely feel like we won the lottery with this place. It’s February and we may still be in the honeymoon phase of our new home; but this time I think we made the right decision and I don’t think the honeymoon phase of loving this little land of ours is ever going to wear off.

My husband and I have been working room by room to transform this place. It started as an unmaintained, mouse over-run, fixer upper. We haven’t caught a mouse in our attic in over a month now so I think the humans have finally reclaimed these four walls. Each day we see our modern cozy cabin vision more and more clearly.

I wanted to share a bit of our progress so far and some recent updates we’ve accomplished.

Front elevation:

At the front of our home the prior owners had multiple stones trimming a front flower bed filled white gravel and mulch. I’ve worked at shoveling this gravel to fill potholes in the driveway and reshaped the outline to include the new water spigot we replaced after we noticed a busted water line under the ground.

The final goal is to fill this area with river rock, and install a few drought tolerant low maintenance plants. There is something nourishing for my soul to be outside move rocks around, pulling weeds and playing in dirt. After living in the camper full time for a year it’s been so nice to have my own land to care for and steward. I’m going to slowly work my way around the entire house.

Atlas’s room:

My son’s room has taken three times as long as expected. First I need to show you where this room started:

We called this room horsey room. On all four walls around the horse mural there was a paper machete brown paper sack individually crumbled and glued to the wall to give the room a leathered look. We knew highest priority was to remove the old pet potty stained carpet. And second thing that had to go was the horse mural and “leather” walls. The horse mural was what we thought was the most annoying job ever! The horse picture peeled off in the tiniest sections, and you’d have to take breaks to wash all the gunk off your fingertips every 30 mins. But what was actually the more annoying job was the paper mache’ brown sacks plastering the entire room. In this photo you can see where we attempted to scrape/peel/heat gun the brown paper sacks from the wall, but this was simply not feasible. Our two options were to paint over the brown sacks and leave the textures look or to skim coat all of the walls and respray texture. We decided we paint over it. In the areas we had attempted removal we had to go back in a paper mache new brown paper sacks to match the original wall texture. PSA! Never do this to your walls. I do not care how long you plan to live in your home. Just don’t.

Once we had primer over all the walls we were finally feeling like we were making forward progress on my son’s room. We got all of the popcorn ceilings scraped and were really on a roll. We found a really unique ceiling fan and I was feeling inspired to go bold and playful with his room. I even made a mood board that included the grand bed nook we planned to custom build. Things quickly came to a screeching halt.

We bought an ikea bed for my son for Christmas to do the bottom built in of a phase 1 of this blue bed nook for the corner of his room. Looks pretty cool, huh? We plan to do a similar version of this in the future. But first we needed to paint!! I was certain that since the color Bosc pear was one of Sherwin Williams 2025 colors of the year that I was going to have an earthy bold and bright play room! My mood board was moodin’. The ends of the ceiling fan tips matched perfectly. Surely it would all tie together. Look how it actually turned out! 🤪🙂‍↔️😱

Pictures don’t do it justice, it was even worse IRL. lol

It was hideous! And I wish we could say we laughed about it, but we didn’t it. We were irritated and discouraged. I wanted it all to go away immediately but neither of us wanted to be in the room for longer than 5 minutes because the colors were so awful. So we pulled the door shut and didn’t go upstairs for a few days. Lol it is kinda funny now.

After we scraped up some motivation, I decided to throw out my mood boards and leaned into my husband with approving my color selections. My husband used to be a manager at Sherwin Williams and truly does have an eye for paint colors, hues and design. He liked the color direction I was going with the blue for the accent wall around the closet but encouraged me to find a more muted version. I landed on a blue called Distance. He approved it. And Pinterest blessed me with a complimentary color wheel and I spotted an awesome neutral color that’s not quite tan and definitely not gray. Gossamer Veil! He approved this one too!! My amazing husband painted over all of that disastrous Bosc pear color with gossamer veil. I walked in and I felt like I could breathe in the room again.

Distance:closet Dover White: Closet trim and doors Gossamer veil: walls

I really hesitated on pulling the trigger on some really neat Star Wars wallpaper. I’ve never done wallpaper before in any of our prior homes and I was worried it wouldn’t apply easily. I also had undiagnosed DIY Home Reno PTSD following the Bosc pear incident so I was really nervous about any new big ideas turning into another disastrous fail. It turned out to be the best $70 bucks I spent in this entire room and maybe took us one full hour to apply. I wish you could have seen Atlas’s face when he saw it for the first time!!

It was now time to tackle installing the vinyl plank floors. I won’t go in to detail about this install. It was actually surprisingly uneventful, no major oopsie daisies and we kicked butt on having the smallest amount of waste!! We lost so much money in paint on this room; I was determined to minimize our waste costs for our flooring. We only had one area that was really tricky around a floor vent that butted up to the closet opening but we took our time and made focused cuts. We ended up with 3 full leftover boxes of flooring that we get to use for our master. ($90 worth of flooring to spill over into the next project)

We used a brand called Lifeproof that doesn’t require any underlayment due to the thick material on the other side. For some specialty cut areas we did have to use a saw but it worked drastically better with a box blade. I was also shocked by the mess the vinyl plank flooring made when cut with a saw. The material not only went everywhere but it stuck to the walls and was difficult to clean up. If you ever install vinyl plank flooring, limit the use of the electric saw, opt in for a box blade, and if you do have to do speciality cuts set you up a station outside for easier cleanup. Trust me on this one.

All we have left for my son’s room is nailing the trim pieces along the base. We were actually able to repurpose the crown molding trim from the down stairs living room to save on material costs since it’s the same cedar that was used in this room. Next is to build my son’s bed nook with custom shelving. We are really please with how his room turned out, despite the screw up’s and slow downs. The leathered walls we painted over appears like a Spanish drag texture style and actually brings quite a bit of character to the space. We are also glad we kept the framed out area where the horse mural was and applied a transformer decal in the center. We have some more art we plan to hang and it will be fun to change things out in this space as he grows and his interests change.

The Boring Stuff:

Along with the big fun transformations of revamping entire rooms, there’s a lot of boring stuff that I'm trying to not take for granted on this reno journey. Today I restocked our battery organizer and decided on cabinet that would be their designated home. I love creating functional systems and finding “homes” for things.

Also from my camera roll is the shelf above the washer and dryer that appears to have not been properly cleaned in years. It’s important to recognize the smaller tasks on a home reno project. When you have a project list that’s a mile long, it can be easy to feel swallowed up by to do’s and lose sight of enjoying the journey. I’ve found my camera roll littered with pictures like these examples. I want them to continue to remind me all of these tasks, even the small ones, are making up our brighter and bigger vision for this home.

Thank you for allowing me to share this journey with you of making this house into our home. I’ll be sharing all Reno updates here on Substack. I invite you to comment with specific questions or comments and always feel free to email me. I actually adore emails and much prefer them over texts these days.

On Substack I also enjoy writing about some of these things:

Organization/systems, my experiences as a hospice nurse, non-toxic waterless skin care and holistic wellness, the practice of breath work, understanding myself as a multi-potentialite and sharing evocative essays inspired by my personal life events like one of my favorites: Heaven's Barn Door .

Before you go, do you mind if we take a breath together?

Breathe in…2…3.

Breathe out gently…2…3.

Buy a House Sight Unseen Off Zillow

It Will Be Fun!!

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