The Quick Flip: A Mid-Century Rancher

In the embarrassingly long time since the last post (has it really been 9 months?!), a lot has happened. Progress has been made on the garage, though it's not done yet. Progress has been made on our house, though it's not done yet either. But those are stories for another day. 

We spent much of the time between the last post and mid-January making an 8 hour round trip drive on the weekends to prepare my mother-in-law's house for sale. Some of that time was spent packing up the house, but the rest was spent prettying it up and fixing anything we thought the home inspector might pick up when we tried to sell it.

The house is a brick and frame mid-century rancher (historic now!) so it needed some updating. Fortunately, much of that had been done over the years. We had already upgraded the bathrooms and she had had the maple floors refinished and the outside repainted in recent years. We wanted people to see the unusual features like the sunken living room with the diagonal wide pine paneling and 2-sided fireplace and the high bedroom windows as positive elements and not as liabilities.  

We did that by modernizing as many other features as we could while still keeping the mid-century charm. We replaced the front door with more modern model, replaced the attic stairs with a less rickety model, adjusted doors that didn't close properly, repainted all of the rooms with fresher colors, upgraded the electrical panel, and many other smaller tasks.

We did a larger makeover of the kitchen. While we didn't want to spend too much money in case someone came in and redid it completely, we wanted to make it look as modern and inviting as we could while keeping the pine cabinets. We shortened the peninsula and curved it to make more seating at the breakfast bar. We added a glass tile back splash, replaced the vinyl floor, and flipped the electrical panel to a opposite side of the wall.

Our hard work paid off, because despite putting it on the market in January during the snowiest winter that part of Virginia has had in a while, the house has sold. And we're back home working on our own projects. Stay tuned!