And so the anxiety begins! Kirk and I have suddenly found ourselves to be the proud owners of a lovely early 1900’s detached brick home on one of Riverdales prime streets. We weren’t necessarily anxious to find a new home as we had just nearly completed renovating our first starter home that we liked and that was comfortable… but we kept our eye on the market if a good opportunity arose. When I say suddenly, I mean the new purchase and sale of our current home transpired within 12 days! We received word on the Friday of the Labour Day long weekend that the Sellers had accepted our offer and by Saturday we had our long “to do” list established in order to get our house market ready for our Real Estate Agent Greg MacTaggart’s ReMax Agent walk thru the following Wednesday. We knew that we needed to get top dollar for our current home because our new home although having incredible potential is definitely another fixer upper. More about that later…

Here’s a list of everything we did within those 4 days:

• found a fabulous new self storage facility in our area to move out extra pieces of furniture that were taking up space, excess toys and sporting equipment as well as bins of books etc. that we had shuffled to the basement laundry room after converting both the spare bedroom and office of our 3 bedroom home into rooms for our toddler and 7 month old baby. All Canadian Self Storage located at 1 Laird Drive, East York.

• sanded and repainted spots that needed touching up on our front porch as well as replaced our sisal runner. Sisal Carpet, Home Hardware.

• spruced up existing front and back gardens. Added in a few pretty fall annuals for a touch of colour. Plants, Loblaws.

• touched up all trim paint in the house including the fireplace, bannister, around door frames. Ralph Lauren Brilliant White Trim Paint from Home Depot

• primed and painted all window frames as we had just had beautiful new Windows installed the week before by Dennis Windows

• touched up Melamine paint on Kitchen cupboards. White Melamine, Home Depot

• oiled our oak counter tops. Wood Oil, Ikea

• Steam cleaned the carpet in our t.v room and stairs. Steam Cleaner Rental, Home Depot

• removed a door that was located between the dining room and kitchen to open up the space. The door had also lovingly been chewed on by a friends new puppy.

• touched up paint in living room and bedrooms where there were little dings. You can buy small pots of Benjamin Moore touch up pots of paint for $5 at Pro Glow Paints on Queen St. East

• Fixed the electrical on our dining room light that we hadn’t gotten around to for a few months. Thank god a friend of ours who used to be in the contracting business had a great contact for us and it was just a loose connection so they didn’t have to open up any walls!

• applied new caulking to bathtub and sinks

• hung a few pictures up that we hadn’t gotten around to before

And now for the big stuff:

• replaced the tile, fixed missing drywall and re-painted our downstairs 3 piece bathroom that we had always intended but never got around to doing! Since neither Kirk nor I tile OR drywall we had to call in extra help. A desperate measure over a long weekend! Spencer Dennis from Dennis Contracting had just installed our new windows and we called upon him to point us in the right direction to find a reliable tiler and drywaller. What a life saver! I think fate intervened here. Although we only get to enjoy our brand new windows for a few short months, we never would have been able to pull off finishing off our bathroom without Spencer’s help.

• Spencer to the rescue again. We needed to have a small masonry job done on the side of our house, a concrete stair leading to the side of the house was crumbling. Spencer was able to call someone in for us to get it done the Wednesday morning of the ReMax Agent walk thru day.

Finishing Touches:

• made sure that everything was sparkling clean and decluttered!

• bought leaves and a few flowers to arrange throughout the house. Avenue and Davenport Flower Shops

• fluffy new towels for the bathrooms and pretty hand soaps. Towels, Winners. Handsoaps, Belle de Provence, Method.

In between bouts of anxiety attacks as to whether or not we had made the right decision to buy another fixer upper with 2 small children and the long to do list we had, we managed to pull it off! Our first starter home which Kirk and I had purchased on November. 1st, 2002 for $340,000 sold for $595,000 5 years later. I would estimate that we probably put in about $80,000 in renos over the years as well as lots of our own labour.