Our First House
Bam, More Square Footage
How did we gain a ton of extra square footage to take our for-sale casa from 1300 finished square feet to 1550 in the last 48 hours? We’ll give you a hint: we didn’t add an overnight addition. We just added a permanent heat source to our existing sunroom… and now it counts as livable square footage!
A realtor friend of ours advised us that rooms don’t need to be heated and cooled to count as “finished” here in Richmond - just heated. Meaning the only thing keeping the biggest room in our house (our sunroom) from getting counted as official square footage was a source of heat. So we called a few electricians and got some estimates for a six foot baseboard heater to be hardwired and installed, which should definitely keep the room nice and toasty on a crisp winter day (assuming the sliding doors are all closed of course). The winning bid was $250 and within 48 hours it was done-zo. Yup, our former three season room can now be used year round.
Here’s what the breaker box looked like when the job was in progress:
Let’s just say that we’re glad that we didn’t attempt to DIY it ourselves (messing with the main breaker box while the house was on the market just sounded like a bad idea, and the installers actually had to drill through the concrete sunroom floor and wire things up through the basement and the crawl space so we’re glad we left it up to the pros).
The most fun part of the project for us? Changing our fliers from 1300 square feet to 1550, which makes the dollar per square foot ratio even better for any potential house hunters (and now we won’t lose people who’ve set a must-be-at-least-1500-square-feet search parameter). Plus with our sunroom being one of the most awesome rooms in our entire house, we must admit that it definitely hurt when it couldn’t be counted as anything before. Doesn’t that room deserve a little love? Well, the problem is now officially solved. Sunroom: you count.
We like how crisp and streamlined the baseboard heater looks installed at the foot of the brick wall. And the easy-use dial (marked off, low, med, and high) is all anyone needs to heat things up whenever the mood strikes.
The more expensive solution would have been to install a one-room heat pump system (estimates for that ranged from 2-3K) but our realtor friend actually recommended the baseboard solution over the heat pump since it’s such a simple and inexpensive upgrade (and it’s usually all that people need from a sunroom anyway). So that’s how we gained 250 more finished square feet – for only about a dollar per square foot.
Have any of you guys “finished” an almost-finished space in your house (either to sell it or enjoy it)? We’re kind of sad it took us this long to tackle Project Baseboard in our sunroom since it’s definitely one of our favorite rooms. Who knows how much we could have used it in the last four winters that we’ve spent here!
Note: For anyone who goes this route, we suggest getting an impartial appraisal so the updated square footage can be verified and recorded on record for your protection! Also remember that you may have to inform the county that you’ve expanded your square footage and may need to pay taxes on that area (we already pay taxes on the sunroom, garage, basement, and other unfinished areas but we still plan to double check that we’ve done all that we need to do for this square footage to officially “count”). And remember that different areas have different rules, so check yours out before diving in.
Breaking Out The Creepy Bird…
Halloween is in just a few short weeks so we broke out the old creepy raven along with a bunch of other spook-tastic props from last year (see our big Halloween ’09 set up here). And other than springing for some candy for the kids in our neighborhood and some candy corn for ourselves we didn’t spend a dime (hindsight: candy corn is the worst- it’s basically just a stomach ache waiting to happen). Oh and we grabbed some $4 carnations too. So here’s the console table all decked out:
Nothing too fancy, just a piece of burlap as a casual runner with things like some eerily titled books that we dug up along with some feathers from last year and my new little white ceramic frog (further explained here). And of course there’s the bird, a faux antler candlestick, and the black votive from last year’s Halloween dealy-o.
And see the photo above Mr Frog? Here’s the close up. John made us skulls in photoshop last year and we loved it so much we brought it out again this year. John’s cavernous hole-like eyes are so handsome.
And can you tell what I shoved under that glass dome?
Last year I stuffed a framed black silhouette of Burger in there, but this year I picked up some $4 white carnations and painted them black for a gloomy-ish look.
Now we just have to resist the Three Musketeers and York Peppermint Patties instead of eating them all before the 31st. Honestly, that’s probably not going to happen.
And here’s the coffee table full of faux pumpkins, round votive holders (I liked how they mimicked the shape of the pumpkins), and two vases with dried grasses for a little fall texture and height.
And see the dining table beyond our little pumpkin and candle fest?
That’s where I broke out the tummy torturing candy corn (maybe we just eat too much but it always makes us want to die about five minutes later) along with my spray painted faux gourds and Lumiere (the Beauty & The Beast-esque yellow spray painted candlestick from Goodwill).
We also added three votive cups (also from Goodwill a few weeks back) with faux candles flickering inside of them and a manzanita branch for height and more of that seasonal stick-y vibe.
I guess you could say our theme for this arrangement was bold lemon yellow (as seen in the candlestick, the two-toned metal cups, and that dastardly candy corn).
So that’s how we added some “creepy” to our living room without spending any money (except for the aforementioned edible items and those white carnations that we painted).
What are you guys doing to get your place Halloween ready? Is anyone with me on the candy corn is evil theory? Does everyone else have to buy two rounds of Halloween candy since they eat the first batch well before the 31st?
Psst- Wondering where we got our Halloween props above? Peep last year’s post for a full source rundown.
Pssssssst- Don’t forget to check out our weekly BabyCenter post, this time it’s about animal themes, from owls to rhinos and beyond.
By Accident: A Semi-Creepy Porch
Last October we transformed our porch into a spooky display complete with pumpkins, spiders, and creepy branches (read about that here). Well, this summer we sorta achieved the same thing by accident. But more in an “is this house abandoned?” way. Here’s what I mean:
Our best excuse is that caring for a newborn resulted in us neglecting the porch plantings, meaning we got dead bush…
…after dead bush…
…after so-dead-that-the-squirrels-must’ve-taken-it-and-given-it-a-proper-burial bush.
It’s embarrassing, we know. So we bucked up and finally decided to rectify the situation. Not just for ourselves, but also to earn back some of our curb appeal for the whole Project Sell This House initiative. And all it really took was a quick trip to Home Depot to grab some colorful plants (two mums, a pansy, and a hosta to be exact):
The mums were for the two big square planters on either side. So the first step was to say good riddance to the old somehow-they-turned-orange boxwoods that used to live there. Sayonara suckers.
Now here’s where I normally would’ve dug in the new plant. However, we’ve realized that plants on this porch will inevitably have an expiration date. They don’t get much sunlight nor any water thanks to the roof above (although we do our best to water them ourselves), so we agreed it’d be silly to waste our time trying to establish a permanent bush again. Hence the reason we snagged this seasonal mum in a square container (see where I’m going with this?) so that we can just plop the thing right in over the leftover dirt, planter and all…
Voila. Instant update. And it can now easily be swapped out for other planter-ready pot when the seasons change (by us if we’re still here or by the new homeowner if we’ve already moved).
Plus because it’s still in the original container, we can easily take them out and place them on the lawn in the sun every once in a while to help keep them happy since the porch is such a shady place.
So anyway, with the mums just dropped in (which took about ten seconds), I did take the time to dig in the other plants since I wasn’t going to be able to pull off the same trick in those other containers. But they were small enough that it took almost no time. And I can also place them out in the sun a few times a week to keep them looking perky (and opposed to dead).
Then we gave the porch a good sweep to freshen it up a bit. Happily our painted stripes from last spring are still going strong and showing nearly no wear and tear, which is nice since we feared that the light colors might end up looking dingy. And after sweep-fest 2010, just like that we were back in business. No more unintentionally creepy porch.
It’s amazing how under $35 in plants (the mums were $12 each, the rest were $10-ish total) freed us from our previous porch shame.
We even proudly introduced ourselves to a neighbor the other day by saying “we’re the house with the yellow flowers on the porch.” Hey, it beats “we’re the house with the dead orange bushes.”
What’s the deal with your porch – or your front entryway in general? Anyone else with curb appeal shame going on? Or do you also have mums in action in an attempt to keep things looking good?
Video House Tour 2010
We know you’ve seen lots of pictures of our house. But lots of video, not so much. In fact, we realized it’s been over a year and a half since we’ve posted a room-by-room tour of Casa Petersik. And in that time we’ve swapped a spare bedroom for a nursery, added a two-person office/playroom to our guest room, and totally gutted our bathroom. And although you’ve seen pics of those makeovers we know sometimes it helps to see ‘em in 3D (and now in HD thanks to our latest purchase: the Flip Mino HD). So you can finally visualize how the rooms all connect. No breaking and entering required.
Plus we’re not gonna lie. We’ve been cleaning the house like crazy to put it on the market, so it’s as good a time as any to document this baby. Without further ado, we give you fine people The 2010 YHL House Tour (view it on YouTube here):
Yes Clara farted at the end of the video. How’s that for keeping it real?
And if you’re in the mood for a blast from the past or two, you can see our original half-house tour from November of 2007 (warning: the kitchen is mid-renovation) or the updated full-house tour from March of 2008. Oh, and there’s also the better production-quality version of the tour, shot by The Nest in November of 2008. So much self-conscious cringing, so little time.
Psst- What’s been around my lady’s neck lately? Not my hands. Check out our BabyCenter post of the week for the scoop.
