Medford Oregon Fixer Upper

Transcript of Video

Fix This House! Medford Oregon House Rehab with Greg & Kathy

Alice Lema: [00:00:00] Hey fans, Alice Lehman here, broker John L. Scott again in one of my favorite situations with two of my favorite people we’re talking about rehab. You know what I love about rehab? Well, this is Greg and Kathy and they just got the deal of a lifetime, but they were nice enough, kind to let us go through the middle of their fixer upper.

[00:00:26] Just so you can see the pluses and minuses. So Greg and Kathy, you've only been here. What two weeks? Three weeks, two weeks, almost four weeks. About four weeks. Has it been that long? Okay. And this was, this was a tough situation, cause this was off market.  It was  an estate. The estate was not always easy to deal with.

[00:00:47] Plus we had a house to sell and that was hard, but we got it done. And now Greg, you and Kathy are doing a lot of this stuff yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about what's going on so far,

[00:01:02] Greg: [00:01:02] Putting in the heat, moving the heat pump from that side of the house, to this side of the house. So I can get to that side so I can have access to the back.

[00:01:10] Alice Lema: [00:01:10] Yeah, that's really smart. Was it hard to do?

[00:01:14]Greg: [00:01:14] No, not really, but I had knocked down the chimney and all that.

[00:01:17] Alice Lema: [00:01:17] We wanted that, that chimney was falling down anyway.

[00:01:20] Greg: [00:01:20] Yeah, it was falling down anyway.

[00:01:22] Alice Lema: [00:01:22] So let's start, go inside and let's talk about what you guys did in here. Okay. Okay. So here on the right, when you bought this, this was a sunken living room.

[00:01:33] Greg: [00:01:33] Yeah. It's a sunken living room. It's popular in the sixties and seventies. And, uh, so that's one of the first things I did.

[00:01:41]Alice Lema: [00:01:41] So how did you do that?

[00:01:43] Greg: [00:01:43] Uh, first that, uh, rip up the press board off the bottom, but then I just ran a two by six stringers and glue down on 16 inches on center and, uh, put the three-quarter tongue and groove on top.

[00:01:58] Alice Lema: [00:01:58] How long did that take?

[00:02:00] Greg: [00:02:00] Uh, it probably took a couple of days.

[00:02:03] Alice Lema: [00:02:03] That's not that bad.

[00:02:05] Greg: [00:02:05] And then I insulated it too.

[00:02:06]Alice Lema: [00:02:06] Awesome. And you know, what's interesting is that this sunken living room is a deterrent to selling or renting a house. Now, even the millennials don't like it because it's a tripping hazard.

[00:02:18] Um, and it will interfere not only with selling or renting something, but it will also bring the value down. So, I don't know what this cost you, but it's probably triple the value on the resale. Yeah.

[00:02:32] Greg: [00:02:32] Yeah. I'd say it cost $300 for me to do it.

[00:02:37] Alice Lema: [00:02:37] Yeah. So let's go over there to the living room because you used to have a fireplace over there. What happened?

[00:02:43] Greg: [00:02:43] Oh, the chimney was falling off the house. So. I just, I wanted, I got all the gas here, so it was electric and electric, so change everything to gas. So I'm just kind of a gas fireplace there instead of the chimney.

[00:02:59]Alice Lema: [00:02:59] Oh, that'll be nice.

[00:03:00]Greg: [00:03:00] Yeah. So I had to, I knocked out the chimney take me about a day and it,  it wasn't that hard, but I got the hearth out too.

[00:03:10] Yeah. So let's just shoot, like, this is all the leftover fireplace right there. Oh my gosh. So did you do that yourself?

[00:03:25] Kathy: [00:03:25] He did it while I was working.

[00:03:27] Alice Lema: [00:03:27] Isn't that nice. He did it while she was working. Fantastic. There are new footings. Yeah. So this used to be the hearth.

[00:03:41] Yeah. It wasn't that rad. Wasn't the red brick here.

[00:03:44] Greg: [00:03:44] It was a color out there in the yard right there.

[00:03:51] Alice Lema: [00:03:51] Oh, what are you going to do with that?

[00:03:54] Kathy: [00:03:54] Maybe use it in the garden.

[00:03:56] Alice Lema: [00:03:56] Oh, that'll be nice because you really do have a green thumb. Kathy's an amazing gardener. So, and that's what this place needs. So what's this hole.

[00:04:05] Greg: [00:04:05] This is just a hole. So I have excess underneath the house I had to rip out all the insulation and the, heating and air stuff that was under there.

[00:04:18] Done all the duct work.

[00:04:19] Alice Lema: [00:04:19] It was disgusting to be honest, this house was when you walked in, it smelled like pee didn't it.

[00:04:26] Greg: [00:04:26] It had rats! I had a hundred, but a hundred traps down there. Right?

[00:04:31] Alice Lema: [00:04:31] Oh. The other owner had that many traps.

[00:04:37] Greg: [00:04:37] The rat guy exterminator they're out there. But, uh, yeah, so I had to do all that. So I said, I'm just opening the big hole. I had a hole over there too, where the sunken living room was. So, and I filled that up already,

[00:04:52] Alice Lema: [00:04:52] but yeah, you got it all cleaned out now.

[00:04:57] Greg: [00:04:57] New insulators coming on Monday. He's going to insulate it all.

[00:04:59] Alice Lema: [00:04:59] So you’re having that hired out. . Okay. And that's the thing about rehab, you know, it's like you can pick and choose what jobs you want to do yourself or not.

[00:05:10] Greg: [00:05:10] And I put in the ducting myself though that a guy is going to help me though. Save a little bit of money there.

[00:05:18] Alice Lema: [00:05:18] Well, let's check out the kitchen. Cause last time I saw your kitchen, there were cots in there, so, well you got a table. That's cool. That's cool.

[00:05:29] Greg: [00:05:29] So. Yeah, we're going to knock out this wall right here. This is height right here.

[00:05:36] Alice Lema: [00:05:36] So pony wall, we call that pony

[00:05:37] Greg: [00:05:37] yeah. Pony wall with a, with a side here for your switches and stuff.

[00:05:42] And then it will be a counter over here. Oh. All the way until right here. And the refrig will be on the other side of this. Yeah. And you can do that now because you have a level four. It won't look weird. Yeah. And nobody will fall over. Plus we're getting into this beam, putting it up high, or you're going to stop that up into the rafters.

[00:06:03] Okay. So we're going to want to come back and see the next step, but let's talk about, are you doing this wall? Is this one we want to take all those out? Yeah. We'll have to put a post there. I don't know. I don't know. Well, you know, uh, support is good. Right? You can also do like these beams up in the attic, it's more expensive, but then you get that true openness.

[00:06:34] So you guys will just have to decide because some people like a little corner post support, cause it. Gives, um, a little bit of, um, delineation of the space and then other people just want to know to be open. So you guys get to decide. So how are you holding up with all this? Because you just go to work and come home and you've got to help him in the evening.

[00:06:57] Yeah. Um, yeah. it's been cold lately since it's been getting. Um, you know, we're in fall now, pretty soon we'll have our heat, so I'm looking forward to that. And then once that is in, then that's when I'm going to start working on the popcorn ceilings. I'm going to, are you going to scrape?

[00:07:20] I'm going to scrape them. Yeah. Wow. So that's your down? Yeah. Wow. Wow. What kind of floor we're going to put in throughout the whole house? What's it called? The vinyl plank. Oh, I love that stuff. Water. Little bit of squish. What color are you doing? Well, haven't decided yet because, um, we have cabinet colors, but then we need to decide on our granite.

[00:07:48] Oh

[00:07:52] yeah. Killer. Then I'll see, from the granite and the counter, the stain color of the cabinets. And we'll see how it looks with a floor, how fun. So what's the ETA on that? Well he's, I guess he's making them already the cabinets. Wow. So this is happening really fast for four weeks. So the next four weeks you'll probably have a lot done.

[00:08:14] Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah, I got it. I got it all this out, you know, in the cabinets out pretty soon. Yeah. A couple of days or, yeah,

[00:08:32] Well, let's go outside so we can show everybody where the chimney was and all that. And we've got some fireplace leftovers. I just wanted everybody to see.

[00:08:44] And thank you again, and for letting us do this, it's interesting, everybody, you know, about doing rehab and, and then some people do it. Some people don't and then some people wish they had it. And this is the worst part. Don't you think it's like, it always sounds good, in the beginning. It's always fabulous when it's over, but when you're right in the middle and that's where we really went into kind of right now at its worst, like a rollercoaster, you know, sometimes you're on top of the world and it's going really good, but other times, right.

[00:09:15] And we talked about, about when we bought the house, right. There's gotta to be moments. When you're going to wonder why you did this most of the time. I'm, I'm really excited. How about you? Write down. Be honest. I'm doing good. She's doing better and better. She was, yeah, it was, it was really rough the first couple of weeks.

[00:09:33] Yeah. Yeah. Did you feel like you made a big mistake? I don't know if mistakes, the word it was just, I just, it just felt like there was a huge, huge amount of work in front of us. And that's real, this particular house had a lot of work in front. Yeah. So now that you're four weeks into it. Are you just like used to the overwhelming or it's actually less overwhelming.

[00:09:58] It's just every day, just, it gets a little better every day because you're seeing things done, getting things done, getting organized or, or we're not sleeping on a cot. It's the little things, right. Well, you're really brave to go through this. And Greg, you know, you've got a lot of skills, so that helped makes it work.

[00:10:20] But, um, but it still is, uh, it's, it's hard. It's a hard thing. So yeah. Well let's show us, show us the, well, first of all, this is what was on top of it. This is the top of the chimney that was on the roof. Yeah. I got to take it off first. You're going to save that and put it in the garden. Yeah, actually it was really easy.

[00:10:42] I just had a road, a hammer. And does the zing zing, zing. They didn't just, what's a brighter hammer. Is it a saw? Yeah, it's right over there. I'll bring it up. I thought I knew the names of all the tools. I don't even know what that is. He borrowed it from her friends, um, friends or so, so how do your friends and family.[00:11:03] What do they think of all this it's been well, they're excited.

They're always thinking they're excited. And you got your work cut out for you. We had to keep it a big secret for a long time, because it was as an off-market situation. It was done very privately. That's a road, a hammer. And you use this drill and well, it doesn't drill on this one.

[00:11:24] It does go like that. With that drill, that drill. Is that what I had to use on the footage? Well, there you go, folks. The hardest part, was it getting the steel chimney, which is right around the corner. Uh, but yeah, there's a lot of brick there and, and then I had to put, uh, a new STEM wall in and, uh, with those packs of cement and mix them up in the wheelbarrow all and do that.

[00:11:54] So it was, it was. It was kind of challenging, kind of intimidating when I started you get that hole up there. What are you going to do with that? I'm just going to, uh, try to copy just what, how they did there. Maybe put one or two of those in there and then put, fly what, you know, I'm just kind of winging it.

[00:12:12] It won't even show you're winging it. We just what rehabbers have to do, right? Yeah. Yeah. So let's go around the corner and see what's left of the chimney. Does that look pretty interesting when they walked out? Oh, the poor fence. Yeah. Well, it was already down a little bit. I'm going to have to get fixed.

[00:12:31] Yeah. Here's the chimney solid steel hamper still works. So what are you going to do with that? Probably take it to South stars. Have it melted down. I, gosh, whatever they do. Well, maybe somebody will see the video and they'll give you like 20 bucks for it. Put it in there. And then here's your leftover brick.

[00:12:53] Yeah. The furnace, the where it sucks all the air in any way. My, my down there, it was just a big old pile of granite and the bottom of it's rotten and it sucked it all in from, uh, from underneath the CMN. And so as blowing through the whole system and throughout the house.

[00:13:17] So you really have to make sure that your, your heating system is good and it doesn't have any holes in the ducting or any of that. You don't, you know, people will go home. I just think too, cause there's actually an inspection you can do. Uh, we already figured this was toast just because of the condition of the crawl space, but you can have a scope.

[00:13:36] You can pay an inspector to scope or you can scope yourself. Your doctor can see what's in there because people don't realize you can actually pay somebody to clean it too. Yeah. And you should, so you don't have 1970 dust and yeah. Rats. I'm trying not to gross you guys out. Yeah. But it was pretty gross down there.

[00:13:57] Wasn't it? Oh, it was terrible. Yeah. So did you clean that out yourself? Uh, yeah. Yeah. I cleaned it out myself. Did you do like a shotgun? Oh, this right here. Yeah, I know. I just used the shovel. I was that bad. Yeah, it was, uh, it was how do you like this deep? Oh, that's terrible. I put it, I took it to the dump, so that's probably never, ever been cleaned?

[00:14:27] No. Okay. Yeah. So not to self clean your duct work. Yeah. s. Uh, not really. We're just really careful. We just I'm just like staying home all the time. I sometimes I don't even go anywhere all day. Okay. Well this is like your new job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Greg and Kathy, your work is amazing.

[00:14:52] It really isn't for four weeks. You're doing great. And you haven't lost your enthusiasm. And I think the worst is probably over, you know, as soon as you get your heat, which would be one a week, a couple of weeks. Yeah. Coming in right here and the gas meter is going to go right there. It might be two and a half weeks.

[00:15:13] So, but I'm having the, the gas spot, man. Run all the pipes to the heater there, the hot water heater, everything in the whole house. Are you getting a gas stove for the kitchen? Super cool. I love that. Love that. Well, we want to check on you again in a few more weeks if that's okay. So. Well, thank you for believing in the project.

[00:15:36] Um, I think when people are able to see have vision, uh, even when it's not completely obvious in the beginning, not only do you have the greatest opportunity, but you actually get the house that you want. So, but it's not always an easy road, so yay for you guys for sticking with it. Yeah. Let me think.

[00:15:54] So thank you. All right, so we're going to get back. Let them get back to work and we'll check on you guys in a couple of weeks. Okay. Bye .