Life is funny sometimes, isn’t it? When I first started this blog in 2020, I had the intention of updating it regularly, like “on a schedule, once a week, let’s really do this” regularly. And then COVID hit.

You’d think that with all that extra time on my hands I’d have jumped into one project after another and documented it all. But if anything, all that extra time spent Googling pandemic trajectories and on video calls with family and friends, completely cut off from any real contact, made me dread this page. Humans are weird, no?

I think that’s always been one of my weaknesses though – if I do something, it HAS to be done right. It can’t just be a hobby, it has to have a plan, a timeline, a long list of goals and its own resume before I feel like it’s worth doing. Aaaaand that’s how I burn myself out.

So, I can’t promise that I’ll update this or anything else regularly, especially with baby girl on the way, but, as an old roommate used to say, “golly gee, I’m tryin’.”

ANYWAY. The real reason you’re here, because everyone has had just about enough of my existential crises for today – the Salmon House Flip. We finally finished the dang thing and I’m FINALLY taking the time to sit down and document it. It was long. It was painful. It was grueling. My husband insisted on installing the bathrooms last, so I regularly drove my pregnant self home to pee a million times and try to get my morning sickness under control. (Someday I’ll laugh about that. Today is still not that day, even though we’ve had tenants in there for two months and I’m now 7 months pregnant.) But it’s done!

This place was in rough shape when we finally got our hands on it. Honestly, we don’t really like to speak poorly of our past and current tenants publicly, because that’s just rude and unprofessional, but the state of this townhome was probably 40% the previous owner’s fault and 60% the last tenant’s fault. In our few short years of owning and flipping rentals, we’ve seen some pretty nasty things, but this one just might take the cake.

1. Why did I name it the Salmon House?

Easy – the tenant had a penchant for painting EVERYTHING very poorly, but the downstairs bathroom was a glowing salmon hue. I’m talking the walls. The ceiling. The baseboards. The vanity. The towel bars. The toilet. YES. EVEN PART OF THE TOILET. I can’t tell if they were just a messy painter or a secret art prodigy in the making…

2. All we were missing were the roaches.

In the kitchen we found it all – grease, stains, moldy appliances, enough random spice packets to start your own market. The smell from the kitchen sink was enough to take down a grown man (trust me, although he’ll never admit it, I think Grayson almost succumbed). But alas, no roaches. At least there’s that.

Also, please note the glowing salmon bathroom in the reno photos. I swear, it’ll never get old.

3. The time we almost died…and almost blew our budget.

The living room was probably the easiest fix. Apart from having to fill what felt like 3,209,230,852 nail holes and scraping and skim coating the ceiling, everything else was pretty straight forward. Paint the walls, install the LVP, new baseboards, new electrical, new electric fireplace insert… OH AND DON’T DIE WHEN A SLIDING DOOR ALMOST FALLS ON YOU. It’s fine. We’re fine. Everything is fine.

4. Is it still a bedroom if there are more holes than walls?

Alternate title – should we be concerned about the hooks on the outside of the doors…? The bedrooms really weren’t that bad. I mean, apart from some very, very deep stains in the carpet and the fact that clearly every wall and door had been beaten to smithereens, they really weren’t bad. Oh, and the hooks on the exteriors of all the doors to keep them shut from the outside. (Yes, we reported it to the appropriate authorities. No, we had no reason to suspect anything the whole time they were our tenant. No, no one we told cared. Yes, we’ve seen worse… like the time I’m 98% certain we walked through a serial killer’s unit while touring a property we were interested in buying. But that’s a story for another day.) Did I mention humans are weird?

4. The pièce de résistance

The bathroom upstairs was probably what was in the worst shape. Yes, worse than the salmon bathroom. Worse than the kitchen sink. Worse than potentially being crushed to death/being cut to death by glass shards from a fallen sliding door. Why? THE SINK.

Let me paint you a mental image. You walk in to the bathroom and are greeted by a shell-shaped sink, discolored from years of use, or perhaps just bad design taste. At this point, it’s honestly too far gone to tell. You can overlook the crusty toothpaste stuck to the bowl, even the used tampon in the vanity. You’ve seen worse at this point. But what you’ve never been confronted with is the level of horrendous contained in the mixture of 36 years build up in the drain. A respirator alone wasn’t enough to conquer the smell.

Don’t worry, we replaced all the plumbing. Yes, even in the wall. It was that bad.

Also, here’s some friendly advice: if you find yourself in the middle of a global pandemic that’s causing record orders of home improvement supplies and massive shipping delays, don’t try to order a tub surround. It’ll come broken…twice. And then the shipping delay will cause the third one to be delivered months after you need it. Just tile the dang thing from the get go so you aren’t outside using a wet saw in December like us. Plus, it lasts longer, looks better, and actually ends up being cheaper anyway.

I can’t believe it took me so long to finally document this renovation, but I think I honestly just needed to take a step back from the project and focus on some things I’m passionate about before I could cope with sharing this one. Hopefully my personal therapy session was at least somewhat entertaining!