We Bought A House!

But not just any house! We bought our first investment property!



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It may seem  a little odd to buy our first investment property before we've bought a primary residence. But as we work our way through our 20s and all the adulting and "figuring it out as we go" that comes along with that, we've come to the realization that building wealth is something we want to work on, and retiring long before we hit 65 is the goal.

This realization led us to the question of how do we build wealth? We've explored some options but ultimately settled on real estate investing. It combines my love for all things home decor and DIY with Cody's interest in real estate. And so here we are, with our very first project house, that I've affectionately named the Rental Ranch

The inspection came back with no major issues so we moved forward with what's a mostly cosmetic renovation on it. Today, I'm showing how we updated the exterior. Here's one more look at the before:


You may notice we started swatching exterior paint near the garage, luckily we loved the first color I chose! But, the first project was power washing the bricks


We had dirt daubers doing their best to take up residence/build nests between the bricks and I was not having it (spoiler: this city girl does NOT like bugs. Are you hanging out with me on Instagram? I'm sharing a whole bunch of city girl in the country there!) Turns out I enjoy power washing, and I handled my dirt dauber problem, so 2 birds, one stone. The bricks also looked much better clean!

Next up is paint. Cody is the real MVP for this part, since I don't love bugs (and they love to bite me) he handled the majority of this project. He power washed the rest of the exterior, and then as you saw, we did a test spot, and ended up loving Valspar Hampton Surf. We also invested in the Graco x7 cart airless sprayer and it's worth every penny. It has this awesome little hook on it and when you're carting around (very heavy) 5 gallon buckets of paint, that hook is a great feature!

Also, as usual, I failed at taking pictures. The prep work for spraying is the most important part. Cody taped off everything. Because if you don't want paint on it, it needs to be covered in tape, plastic or both. He also got one of those large paint shields but after giving it a shot he didn't find it as helpful as he hoped. Here's where we were at once the house was sprayed


Crazy difference already, right? Next step was to take our hand held paint buckets (and trust me, get the liners for them too) and paint the edges the sprayer couldn't get neatly, and then the trim! This was remarkably not as time consuming as I thought it would be, but I got voted to do all the final trim painting because apparently I have the steadiest hands. Ready to see what it looks like with paint complete?


Next step, shutters! The old black ones just didn't match what I had in mind. Turns out replacement vinyl shutters are fairly reasonably priced (check these out!) and easy to install! Unfortunately the holes in the wall didn't line up with the new shutters, so I used exterior caulk to patch any existing holes. Drilling new holes and hanging them wasn't hard though! Check out this timelapse to see them going up!


The transformation of just paint and some shutters really amazed me, and even some of the neighbors have complimented us on the change. I've always been a firm believer that paint can work magic but this is definitely proof!


I have one more set of shutters to be hung on the brick but those are a little more difficult to get up there, and I'm concerned about wasps trying to make a home behind them so jury is out for now if those are going up. 

Moving on to the back of the house! The back has a really nice sized deck off the back sliding door that really just need to be sealed, but we opted to stain it as well, Valspar has exterior stain and sealer all-in-ones so to make life easy, we chose the shade Ferret in a semi-transparent stain (I swear Valspar is not sponsoring this, I'm just super happy with their quality!)

Oh, and guess what? I can use the sprayer for stain too! Like I said, that thing is worth every penny spent on it! Here's where we started:



And here's what it looks like now!



I'm going to be honest, the sample color was a much lighter, more natural wood color. I think because the boards of the deck are older and weathered it picked up a lot of the blue/grey tones out of the stain, but I'm ok with that! The house is blue after all!

And that, my friends, is what we've done with the outside. I'm considering some landscaping but it's not a huge priority right now. I'll definitely update if we do! From here on out is going to be interior work, and I'm excited to share if with you guys! In the mean time, drop a comment below and tell me what you think of the exterior changes. Thanks for hanging out!




1 comment

  1. This is amazing! I love the blue color that you have chosen. Can't wait to see more

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