Renovating Our Vocations

“What happens if you love it so much you want to live there?” It’s a question my husband and I have been asked by family and friends about the waterfront home we bought earlier this month to renovate and sell.

My initial answer was, “we can’t afford it,” which is true. After two years without a job, my husband has launched his home renovation business, and it would be bad business not to sell the product.

 

Beginnings of sunset from the project house bulkhead

Recounting my latest, “we can’t afford it,” response to my husband, he reminded me of another more important reason we will sell the project home: It’s illegal for this corporation, which we’ve started with Kevin’s 401K, to buy property for us to live in.

But I think there’s more to both the question we’ve been asked and the answers we’ve given, something that goes deeper than the property’s projected beauty and it’s stunning location, a question along the lines of: “You’ll be pouring your heart and soul into this house, how will you be able to part with it?”

It’s in our nature to be drawn to beauty, humans crave beautiful environments: architecture, design, landscapes, and art. We surround ourselves with objects we find beautiful, and we often go to great lengths to procure or create beauty in our lives and in our homes.

When we focus that creative energy outward, we are by design, asked to give away the things and ideas we have birthed and labored and loved into being. Parting with our creations is a dilemma most of us confront in our vocations but maybe not always in our jobs (when I worked in fast food and at a restaurant, I had no trouble parting with the food I prepared).

In my experience as a homeowner, when it came time to sell both of our former homes, we wanted everyone who toured to love our houses the way we did, but they didn’t, and they couldn’t. They didn’t have any history there. They hadn’t birthed and raised children and built decks and added rooms like we did with our first house. They didn’t see raw acreage come to life with water, electricity, septic, a house, and a swimming pool that was filled with teenagers and church folk and extended family, like we did with our second.

 

Our second home which we had built on acreage.

With our second house particularly, sold at the trough of the recession, we felt insulted by the initial (and even the final) offer our buyers made. Neither offers were close to the appraisal or the actual costs (mostly sunken costs of utilities and septic and grading) we accrued to build the house. It was painful to see our home devalued so, to lose money upon selling it.

The experience has made us wiser. We were careful in purchasing the home we live in now, making sure we could spend a hundred thousand dollars on necessary improvements and come out ahead should we need to sell in a few years. And now, as we’re renovating a property with the express purpose of selling, we are constantly asking ourselves, “just because we can, should we?”

As people who are flipping (buying, fixing up, and selling) a property we find ourselves wanting to create the most beautiful home that appeals to the broadest spectrum of people: nothing quirky and original, no fabulous amenity that has no resale value. A third bedroom yes, a garage yes, a new roof yes, but will the more visually appealing metal be worth it if we have to spend thousands on septic improvements? Bulkhead and landscaping improvements, yes, but how elaborate?

And so we are tempering our creative genius against the dollar, which, I think is what a wise businessperson must do. We are learning to expand our thinking not only to the physical: shingles or metal, but to time as well: custom sized-windows cost more than standard, but that means no labor costs for reframing window openings and replacing siding. How do the final numbers compare?

My husband and my daughter (who is an architecture student and our intern for a month) discuss bathroom fixtures and window and door placements and treatments over dinner, prepare drawings, and enter data in spreadsheets while they work at the job site each day, finding an equilibrium between beauty and practicality. I chime in my opinions, and I marvel at how we have come to this place.

My husband branching out from the corporate world, and me from full-time motherhood and parish ministry, both of us having been engaged most often in tasks where the results are intangible, are now working in the most concrete terms (and with actual concrete). My husband has been remodeling homes since he was seventeen, always for and with his family, always as an avocation, a hobby.

But now, we step into the stream of laborers, craftspeople, and artisans, a handful of whom we have met while getting bids for work on our project house. Each of them has an eagerly shared story, a compelling path to this work they love. We join them now, as the literal work of our hands becomes the effort that will put the actual bread in our mouths, the wine in our goblets.

As creatures born to create, we will devote our intentions and our visions into transforming dilapidated dwellings into homes that are beautiful and functional and we will part with them, selling them to the highest bidder.

Months from now, this house will belong to its next inhabitants, and become a stranger to us. In the meantime, before it is gutted and chaotic here, we are pretending it is our summer home, kayaking some evenings, roasting marshmallows around a bulkhead campfire, and even camping under the stars (clouds actually) one warm night.

 

My husband kayaking from the project house

Roasting marshmallows with our daughter, an architecture student

Camping on the bulkhead

Renovation and sale has become our vocation, but it’s also a blend of art and commerce, of soul and body, of the bewildering mixed bag that constitutes our lives as humans, unfolding before us in one 2100 square foot home on one acre of land on the banks of Puget Sound.

Living in an Incubator

 Back in March, my husband and I began the conversation about what he might do if he could do anything and what emerged from that dreaming was this: starting his own business renovating homes with the goal of hiring and training veterans in residential construction skills.

Shortly after that though, he found himself interviewing for more corporate positions, making it to the final rounds, and after months in limbo, not getting the jobs.

“I guess I’ll be a carpenter,” he said after the last “No.” “Then I’ll be a lady,” I answered ready, finally, to take the leap of being fully self-employed.

Yellow RibbonHomes is now a reality (you can like us on Facebook and follow our progress). Kevin has rolled his old 401k into his own corporation, has joined REAPS (Real Estate Association of Puget Sound) and has become a licensed general contractor in the state of Washington, and on August 1, we close escrow on the first home we are going to rehab and sell.

Reading and researching “home flipping” since March, we thought we’d start with what the experts recommend: a tract house in a suburban neighborhood that needs mostly cosmetic touches—updated flooring and cabinets, new paint, a bit of landscaping.

But two weeks ago the greeter at the Poulsbo (our neighboring town) REAPS meeting—and the only person Kevin had met at the gatherings—announced he’d obtained a waterfront property he planned to sell to an investor (it’s called wholesaling).

Kevin made an appointment to tour the property, and we drove a mere 6.5 miles from our home over the Agate Passage bridge onto Sandy Hook Road to a narrow driveway barely accessible from the street, overgrown branches scraping the car. We parked in front of a dingy brown house that had been added onto once, maybe twice.

Original structure on left. Addition on right.

The house’s best feature: a glass entryway flanked by a mature Japanese maple, with more glass on the opposite wall, drew our eyes to the water, the view partially obscured by blackberry and salal bushes and droopy cedar boughs, but so close we could hear the tide lapping in.

Glass walled entry with the water beyond.

The wholesaler gave us a tour, pointing out what we could plainly see: everything in the house needs replacing—flooring, windows, counters, toilets and vanities—and the floor-plan is terrible. He and his father had drawn up a plan for an addition. He handed us the paperwork and left us to wander on our own.

After months of visioning and building in our own home that transformed a submarine basement into an open den and master bedroom, and a boxed in kitchen into an expansive one, I wasn’t much interested in adopting someone else’s plan.

Here's a quick before and after of our most recent remodeling projects:

Hallway and stairwell before

Den before

Hallway and stairwell after

Den after

Unfinished basement before

Master bedroom closet and sauna after

Basement bedroom (with temporary double-paned windows) before

Master bedroom after

Kitchen before

Dining room looking into kitchen before

Kitchen after

Dining room looking into kitchen after

I walked next to Kevin through the musty rooms mouth-breathing to avoid odors. We began brainstorming and all the glorious potential in this home became clear to us, and I knew we were supposed to be the ones to rehab it.

We went home. We thought about it. The asking price was double what we’d planned to spend on our first flip house, but it would mean that the sales price would be much higher, and we could flip fewer houses to support our family.

Just before dinner Kevin pulled out binoculars and located the shoreline of the property across the water. “I could ride my bike to work,” he said. “Or kayak,” I joked, imagining him with a ladder and tool chest strapped to our plastic yellow kayak.

The waterfront from the flip house

A peek of Mt. Rainier from the flip house. Our house is in the trees below.

“I don’t know if it’s just emotion, or if it’s logic,” he said, “but I’d really love to fix up that property.”

“If it’s emotion,” I answered, “you better do it.”

Why flip two tract homes in Tacoma, more than an hour away, just because it seemed like the prudent thing to do? One of the many things we’ve been living into in these years of transition is listening to passion and following the energy.

Kevin called the wholesaler. Would he like to partner with us? No, he wanted someone who had “cheaper money.” Since we are new at this, we are borrowing construction money called “hard money” at a high interest rate from a company that specializes in real estate investing.

Once we’ve done a few projects our hard money will be cheaper—loaned at a better interest rate—and we plan to bring in our own investors since we’ll offer a better return than a bank CD (If you’d like to discuss investing in our business email kevin@yellowribbonhomes.net.

So, Kevin wrote up a full-price offer, the wholesaler thought about it overnight, and three days after we’d first seen the house, the two of them signed a purchase agreement.

It’s been a whirlwind of activity since then: designing, measuring, number crunching to get an expense estimate to the lender before escrow closes.

We'll turn this old bedroom into the kitchen

Some rotten siding but newer electrical wire

Looking from waterside of yard up to house

Without knowing it would be so, our year-and-a-half home renovation has been a long apprenticeship in a living laboratory, allowing us to translate much of what we’ve already done—limbing trees to enhance the views, knocking out walls to bring in light and water views, converting unfinished basements into living space—to another house.

Unlike my husband’s search for a traditional job, which felt slow and frustrating, important details are falling quickly and providentially into place:

Kevin has lined up a local contractor, a veteran, to fix this house and work with Kevin in the future as he assembles a team of veteran owned businesses and lays the groundwork for training veterans. Former colleagues have also expressed interest in partnering with Kevin as this dream grows from one waterfront home into the pulsing and thriving endeavor it will become.

This entry captured our imaginations

Between the two of us, my husband and I began two small businesses. Our home, he says, is “an entrepreneur incubator.”

Our entrepreneur enjoys  a view of Mt. Rainier from Home Depot's picnic area

We are creating not just jobs for ourselves, but life-giving livelihoods of potential, of possibility, of rampant creativity living into and out of our gifts in an ever expanding “yes.”

May it be so for you as well.

Our next project?

Be My Guest

Six months ago I hosted my first writing guest in our newly remodeled studio. Derek, who graduated in my creative writing MFA cohort (and is a MagicalTeacher), was my test guest. For three days as the new year approached, he holed up in the studio and wrote while his friend painted.

Seattle Pacific University Summer '11 Cohort
at Camp Casey, Whidbey Island for our Spring '11 residency. Derek is on the left, I'm standing next to him.

They checked my instructions for Wifi access and Comcast music channels and thermostat setting and recycling sorting and scoured the room and my information sheet for anything missing. On their last night here I made borscht and they joined my family for dinner. We toasted to 2013 and to thriving in the midst of change and Derek paid me in wine and chocolate and great reviews and a few things my studio needed: olive oil and cheese knife and rock ice-cubes (they never melt!).  

Two weekends later another MFA alum, Todd, wrote while his wife explored the Island. 

Students studying creative nonfiction with guest faculty Scott Russell Sanders (second from top).
 Todd is on the left in the back row.

The weekend after that, the first guest I’d never met before booked through airbnb and spent a cold January weekend working on her resume and journaling. Since then, I have hosted twenty-six reservations (many for couples) through airbnb, and two writers through my business website.

Memorable guests include a writer in her twenties working on the first book in her science fiction trilogy set in an alternate history of Siberia, a travelling nurse working twelve-hour shifts three days a week in the Emergency Room at Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle who spent most of her week here sleeping, a copywriter living in Germany who stayed three weeks (my longest stay) working after dinner until 2 a.m. and visiting local relatives during the day, a Seattle nightclub owner who made a reservation at 11 p.m. (I get a lot of late night reservations) and arrived at 9 a.m. the next morning to work “away from the craziness of the city.”

A lawyer who'd gone on a mission trip to Africa with my prayer partner sent her husband here from Central California to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. He started a blog about parenting an adopted baby at this age, and submitted pieces to devotional journals. 

Michael, a stay-at-home father of four, who is president of his local writing organization found me through my volunteering with Field’s End writing community, came from Utah to spend a week working on a science fiction novel and plotting a romance. He took my husband and me out to dinner (now that’s a guest!) and we took him on a driving tour of the island. I may edit his book when it gets further along.

Michael on his island tour with Seattle in the background.

A woman from France who’d gone to college in Seattle brought her daughter to the US for the first time and stayed here two nights. One couple told each other stories using my Storymatic game and burned chorizo that set off the temperamental smoke detector more than once. 

Kelli and her husband rode their bikes to and from the Seattle ferry for the weekend so she could edit and illustrate (and take photos in yoga poses on my lawn) her upcoming book: Pedal, Stretch, Breathe.

Kelli Reefer, author of Peddle, Stretch, Breathe

I’ve also hosted students: a senior at UC San Diego came for a long weekend. Two graduate students at UW in Seattle worked on their theses without distraction. The student speaker from the most recent graduating class of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute came from San Antonio, where her sustainable business project has been assisting laid-off Levi-Strauss employees to form a worker’s cooperative that makes organically grown cotton jeans and clothing. 

Jeans with Justice presentation by BGI students

A man put the finishing touches on his master’s thesis in sustainability from a Swedish university (he’ll be working on a PhD studying the effects of climate change on coffee crops) while his wife perused my bookshelf, and read some of my own work.

So far, Derek has been my only repeat guest (and cat-sitter extraordinaire), but the trilogy writer says she’ll be back to work on her second volume next year. Other guests have expressed their desire to return in my guest book and online reviews, which have all been stellar—and I’ve worked hard to make it so.

Now that it’s summer, I’ve been hosting regular folk on vacation. They aren’t writing, but I’m happy to have them here as they borrow mountain bikes and kayak and peddle and paddle and simply relax in the studio and on the deck in this beautiful neighborhood with it’s lush view, long daylight, and ever-changing view of the Olympics. 

Our mountain bikes

Kayaking in Manzanita Bay near our house

The studio deck with rocking chairs

When I’m not in our garden battling weeds, I am washing a lot of sheets and towels vacuuming floors and cleaning sinks, counters, shower, toilet (Clorox wipes are my new best friends), and have come to appreciate compulsively neat guests, the kind who wipe crumbs and hair out of drains and strip the bed and fold the used sheets in a nice pile.

Today I interrupted my cleaning to order a new shower curtain liner and pillow protectors. Tonight, as I write about my guests and new life as innkeeper, I sit on my rooftop turf, cat and computer both in my lap, listening to the birds sing goodnight as the sky pinks and the water glows pearlescent and I give thanks for my great good fortune to be in this place at this time.

Sunset from the rooftop turf

Come be my guest, I’d love to share the magic with you.

Sunset over the Olympics

I'm Floored

I haven’t blogged for months and there’s so much I want to write about flooring. Yes, the surfaces underfoot.

I’m a wall-to-wall carpet kind of woman. It’s easy care, cushy under foot, hides cat hair, and despite the plethora of colors and textures, I’ve never had any trouble choosing carpet I like.

Since our house is mid-century modern, we branched out and bought two boldly patterned area rugs, one in the studio, and one in the living room. 

Studio rug

Living room rug

They’re colorful and fun, but not cushioned, and I don’t think I can use my carpet cleaner when they get dirty without soaking the floor below.

A few days ago, after months of extensive remodeling, we carpeted the majority of our basement, which is now a den and master bedroom. The area was instantly quieter (so long echoes) and warmer. A transformation with insulation.

New master bedroom

 It’s replacing our hard surfaces that trouble me. And it needs doing. The dark areas in our kitchen linoleum are thirty years of dirt, not part of the pattern.

30 year-old vinyl sheet flooring. Durable but dirty.

 My choices are dominated by wood, tile, plank laminate (Pergo, etc.) that mimics wood or tile, linoleum that also mimics wood or tile, there’s even tile that looks like wood. 

Everything is trying to be elegant as if I lived in a Spanish villa with terra cotta flooring, or an English castle with stone tiles, or a Cape Cod with the original wood floors, or a tract home in Pacifica with walnut stained Pergo in every room.

Today’s flooring is so serious. Where’s the whimsy? In the mid 1970s my family moved into a house with kitchen-dining vinyl sculpted with giant neon daisies. I loved hopping from sink to table, jumping from flower to flower.

I had the perfect vinyl once. I saw it in a friend’s house first. When my husband and I remodeled our first house in 1993, the pattern was on its way out, but still available. It was cheerful in our long rainy winters, and it hid everything, including frozen peas.

 

The vinyl and the dog I adored.

All I want now is something inexpensive and durable with a bit of personality and dirt hiding capabilities. Give me vinyl sheet flooring that’s not trying to pass itself off as printed stone, or photographed planks, something that says: I’m completely manmade.

I’m going to settle for this.

It doesn’t end there. One must choose baseboard, or quarter round, or coving—that strip of wood, or plastic that forms a seal between floor and wall.

The thing about baseboard is that you never pay attention to it until you do.

In the doctor’s office, draped in a paper gown, waiting for an annual exam, I scan the covers in the magazine rack, count the acoustic ceiling tiles, and the squares on the floor, eyes moving down the wall and there it is: ugly, yellowed, plastic strip three inches wide with a coat of dust along the fork-tine thin upper edge.

It’s there again in the library restroom, the ferry terminal, the supermarket, leading to the inevitable conclusion: baseboard is disgusting. And even worse, not only are the baseboards in my home old, painted, and scratched, but I must choose new baseboard for the rooms we’re remodeling.

 

Old baseboard with quarter-round trim.

At Home Depot the choices are ridiculous: ornate coves and scoops with ropey undulations that cover six inches of wall, baseboard that screams for attention from human eyes and dust. All I can think of are the many discrete surfaces collecting dust.

When I dust, especially if I use a wet rag, I only succeed in pushing dust into the corner where the wall meets. Over the years it grows in mass, slowly, like a wart, until it’s thick and firm and I poke at it with toothpicks and wet Q-tips.

I’m told baseboard is required. Carpet or bamboo or tile or vinyl can’t fit precisely against the wall in a seamless transition, so there must be trim. When I think of trim, I think of bias tape, and how you use the smallest width possible when sewing.

So my husband and I comb the aisle for the narrowest, plainest strips of wood we can find. And we don’t paint it a contrasting color to set it off from the wall, which is the current fashion.

My new trim is inconspicuous and modest, fitting for a house built in the early 1950s.

If you visit my house, I hope you will like my mod area rugs, enjoy the plush carpets downstairs, nod at the sustainable bamboo in the dining room, ah over the heated tiles in the master bath (to be installed), be impressed by the restored stairs, understand the potential in the original hardwood floors we have yet to refinish, and never notice the baseboards. Not once.

Refinished stairs, new den carpet, new hearth, paint, and yes, baseboards.