The owner of this home was a true Saint. She had purchased it from the original owner as a favor – he needed cash for medical procedures but could not refinance due to being out of work and disabled. Their agreement was that she would buy the house so he could cash out and then he would rent it back from her to cover the new mortgage. However, he ended up passing while they were in escrow and the Saintly Buyer felt forced into buying the home by the seller’s sister. After close, she spent several exhausting months trying to do some cleaning herself, but it proved too big of a project. She was stuck with a mess of a house with no additional capital for renovations.
She reached out via a mutual acquaintance so we took the home off her hand. This bungalow sat on a beautiful, quiet residential street in a very hot neighborhood. It had a large lot and good bones, but the interior was completely useless: The only way to get from the front of the house to the back of the house was to go through the only bathroom!
The unfinished basement had high ceilings – an unexpected gift, allowing us to double the living space without having to add to the exterior footprint of the house.
Every repair had been done by the original owner who, needless to say, was not in construction. It was mismatched, dirty, uninhabitable, and there was evidence of vermin. It needed to be fully gutted and redesigned with a modern open layout.
