Today Is A Good Day For: A God-Story * A Friend's Podcast * And A House

Hi friends! I promised you a post about the house we flipped last year, and started this in December. I apologize for the delay, and as it works out, my friend Amy Bennett is starting a new podcast about faith stories and asked me if I had one. (You can click on her name to find out more).


Right away I thought of this little story, and so it works perfectly to finally blog about it and publish my post on the same day as the podcast goes live.


TODAY you can go online and listen to me tell the story!


You can find the podcast by clicking here: FEATHERS and then come back and read the post for a few more details and our “Before & After” photos! EnJOY!!! (The other two stories go live today as well! #000 is Amy’s story, #001 is Jessie’s story, and mine is #002)


Once upon a time, this crazy couple decided to flip a house.


It all started when we were still waiting for our farm to sell. I met our WI realtor at a little house in our little town that was listed for $29,000.


I was emailing photos to my husband who was working in another state. As we were deciding over phone conversations that it would be a good investment, the realtor hollered from the back steps where she’d been talking on the phone, “They just got an accepted offer!!!”


Really!? After all that – it was not happening for us there that day.


But the light was lit.


And after we closed on the sale of our farm, we decided God had been working this dream into our hearts.


So after a few months and a dozen showings during #snowmageddon2014 (our poor realtor!) we found a little house.


It’s not that the couple are really crazy, really.


They had fixed up each of the former five homes they’d owned, and made their sweat and bloody-knuckles into equity.


They enjoyed the product, and endured the process.


There is satisfaction on the other side of every hard endeavor. Plus, they are gifted. She in decorating and color-coordinating, and he’s . . . I guess they call guys like him “Jack of all trades.” He’s been a farmer, a mechanic, a cabinet-maker, a concrete dude, a builder, a foreman, a supervisor.


He’s says, “I built the Excel Energy Center.” And they tease him at church sometimes that he single-handedly built the Excel Energy Center. And then we all laugh. 


He’s always told his wife, “I can do anything.” And has proven it a thousand times. [And it is true! There’s nothing he hasn’t set out to do and not followed through!]


So . . . with an electrician friend, updates were made on the electrical, and the furnace was updated from fuel oil to natural gas, and the chimney was lined, and a bathrooms fixed up and a kitchen remodeled. Closets were added to bedrooms and the entryway. Gravel to the driveway, yard weeded, shrubs planted, sawdust and sheetrock dust created daily – then vacuumed again, and [for yours truly] paint, paint, and more pain (t).


We saved a ton of money by purchasing used items on Craig’s List (we purchased cabinets and removed them ourselves, out of the servant’s quarters on the third floor of a mansion on Summit Ave in St. Paul, MN) and we found many fixtures and furniture pieces for staging at Habitat For Humanity’s Restore shop.


It was a wild journey led by God and you can listen to the podcast about it here: FEATHERS and FLIPPING A HOUSE


PHOTO JOURNEY:
[The Mess]


The Bathroom before:

The Kitchen before:

The Porch before:

Stairway and landing before:

In the craziness of the journey, I’ve lost some of the “before” photos of the bedrooms, but I have some ‘in process’ here:

The Landing upstairs in progress:

I found this (below) decal for around a dollar at Walmart one day, and put it on the wall in the entrance to the stairs, so one would see it coming down for coffee in the morning.  We found out THIS caught the buyers eye. And I’d had a feeling about it when I bought it . . . 

[The Masterpiece]
WELCOME!

The entryway and laundry area:

The kitchen:

The bathroom:


The front entryway and porch:


The Living Room:
The only thing we did in here was new trim, switch lights, spiffy up the floor and paint the walls.
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The Bedrooms and Upstairs Bath:


Thank you for visiting! 

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