Millie the Fliphouse

Millie: Week 20

I hope you enjoy these weekly updates as I learn to navigate through the business of flipping houses.  This flip, Millie is the most challenging and most exciting yet! You can find more about this house and about my 3 previous flip houses here. I feel like a broken record on this flip- Things are happening, but not as fast as I want!  I'll admit, right now it's tough to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I know it's there and I know it's gorgeous.

I spent another week in the bathroom. Before I show you where we are today, I like taking a little jaunt down memory lane.

Millie-bathroom-1

As of today, still sans fixtures, but a breath of fresh air.

millie-w20-bathroom

I can just picture this space with the wall-hung sink and army green claw foot tub.  It's a dreamy bathroom, I promise.  Soon enough, you'll see what I see in my head.

At least I can always rely on a side-by-side before and after to remind me how far this house has come.

millie-w20-bath-comp1

Last week the built-in was looking pretty rough:

millie-w20-bath-builtin

But thankfully this week, rough is not a word that even crosses the tongue

millie-w20-bath

Quite a bit of time went into that bench.  The original bench was a hack job built from an old door.  I ripped that out in the original bathroom demo as you saw in last week's image above.

millie-bath-bench-before

You know you're glutton for a never ending flip, when you decide to replace the bench you just demolished.  It just makes sense here in the dead space.... but, ya know, a working, non broken, non hideous one.  Like this:

millie-w20-bath-bench2

Clearly it still needs a top- that's getting painted in the other room currently.  Once the doors are finished with paint, the built-in will look something like this:

millie-w20-bath-bench

I also started polishing up my sink legs in anticipation of having installed plumbing in the near future (wishful thinking probably).  I'm under the firm belief that all sinks should have legs.  Just you wait until you see how sexy these are going to look and you'll start craving sinks with legs too.

millie-w20-sink-legs

Still left to do in this bathroom:

  • Install built-in doors
  • Touch up paint
  • Touch up wall grout (at the top rail)
  • Grout floors
  • Install fixtures & lights
  • Repair/replace window privacy film
  • Happy dance

Having this one space almost done make's me able to better ignore the sheer construction explosion mess of the rest of the house.  At least one room is pretty!  Well, one and a half pretty rooms- the kitchen floor is mid-refinish and has one coat of seal on it.

millie-w20-kitchen-floor

Worlds better than the laminate flooring parfait that used to adorn the kitchen, no?

Millie-Kitchen-1

I have quite the plans for next week's progress.  I'm crossing my fingers that I can get to even half of it.  The end is near... it's just buried in piles of construction supplies at the moment.

Millie: Week 19

I hope you enjoy these weekly updates as I learn to navigate through the business of flipping houses.  This flip, Millie is the most challenging and most exciting yet! You can find more about this house and about my 3 previous flip houses here. Ah, another weirdly short week and a house flipper in serious need of getting back into a routine!

My contractor popped by for a day and got started replacing the trim on the new, smaller, opening to the soon to be master bath.  Once he patches in a few more pieces, you'll never know it wasn't like this originally.  He'll be building the pocket door over the weekend... kind of a little excited for that.

millie-w19-master-trim

I think I also may have him thinking that I'm a mad scientist or something because he was a little concerned with what I was cooking in the thrift store crock pot.  Cabinet hardware naturally.

millie-w19-hardware

These particular pieces are for the bathroom built-in and were caked with layer upon layer upon layer of badly slathered on paint.  Luckily, with a little soap and water in a crock pot over night, the paint comes off with ease (and steel wool or a wire brush).  The top pieces have been stripped, the bottom had just been removed from the pot.

Meanwhile upstairs....

I finally finished the last of the plaster repair and patching on the second floor and after just a bit of sanding, there will be paint!!!  Side note for the new year- I need to slow down and take some better pics for these updates.  I know the house is still a mess, but there's no excuse for the pics to be too.

millie-w19-bedroom

Again, I spent the majority of the short week locking myself in the bathroom.  I've put trim back up , patched walls, and started repairing the sad sad built-in.

millie-w19-bathroom2

millie-w19-bathroom

While this may look like just another mess to most, I see paint in the VERY near future.  A bit of sanding left, and a little caulk and this puppy'll be painted!  One of the fun things about painting bathrooms is the fact that there's so little to paint that it should go pretty fast and by next week's update I'll have a pretty shiny bathroom to show off.  I'm practically bouncing off my seat in eagerness for this.

I need to start HUSSLING on this house... not that I haven't been already, but it's time to see some BIG changes!  I'll admit, it is a little disconcerting when my contractor looks around and tells me "you still have a lot of work to do, huh?"  Yes, yes I do.  Gotta put the blinders back on and focus.  I'm not going to finish this house any time soon if I'm overwhelmed.  It's like eating an elephant- one bite at a time.

Millie: Week 18

I hope you enjoy these weekly updates as I learn to navigate through the business of flipping houses.  This flip, Millie is the most challenging and most exciting yet! You can find more about this house and about my 3 previous flip houses here. I hope you had a wonderful Christmas week.  As promised, just a quickie update for today.  It was a short work week, but a big week for progress.  When last we saw the wall between the new master bedroom and master bath it looked a little like this.

millie-w13-framed

Now, care to join me in a happy dance?  We have walls!

millie-w18-master-walls

Finally starting to look like 2 separate rooms instead of the wide open area from when I got the house.

Millie-future-master

Also the first time since owning this house, I can't walk from the kitchen to the new master bed through the closet.  Pardon the blurry pic, apparently it's the best I got as I was on my way out for the holiday.

millie-w18-kitchen-walls

What's exciting about this is that the kitchen ceiling is also newly drywalled and textured where previously it was cracked and damaged plaster.  The texture was necessary to hide the waves of the 100+ year old ceiling- don't worry, it's not popcorn!  I'll be patching in the beadboard wainscoting, but right now it's showing where the door used to be through to the new master.  No more!

While the pros were doing the drywall (why pros? what took them 2 days would have taken me a month and looked very amateur)... anyway, while the pros were doing their thing, I was doing more patching upstairs and other smaller patches in the house that wasn't worth paying the pros for.  All this dusty work, though means we're almost ready to paint!

That's all the excitement for this week.  Onward to next week and more progress!

Have a great weekend!