ABOUT US

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY...


She was a classroom teacher for 17 years who started a website to help other elementary teachers set up, organize, and manage their classrooms and engage their students with teacher-made resources. It accidentally turned into a business.

He was a project manager working in the printing industry but soon became an important part of that accidental business, which has since grown into something much bigger than either of them ever imagined.

BUT... 

there was a downside to that business. It required a whole lot of screen time.

After far too many hours spent in front of computers over the years, they decided they needed a hobby that would get them away from their keyboards and give them an opportunity to learn new things.

HOWEVER... 

They didn't own any tools (unless you count a hammer from Dollar Tree and a collection of those little Allen wrenches that come with every IKEA purchase), but they did have the kind of wildly misplaced confidence that only comes from watching decades of HGTV.  And they believed that was enough.

SO... 

with that, they purchased their first fixer-upper in their small town on Florida's beautiful Gulf Coast.

The plan was to operate it as a vacation rental. 

But not many vacationers come to the beach dreaming of staying in dirty, extremely outdated accommodations...even if the property was structurally sound and had "good bones."

So they rolled up their sleeves, fired up the YouTube tutorials, began to navigate the aisles of big-box home improvement stores (where, at the time, they very much felt like strangers in a strange land), and informed their three children that they were about to become contractors...or more accurately unpaid apprentices...potatoes-potAH-toes.

SPOILER ALERT: THAT STORY WAS ABOUT US. WE'RE THOSE PEOPLE.

And...despite having absolutely no experience renovating a home (unless you count years of armchair quarterbacking home renovation shows), we dove in headfirst and left virtually no surface untouched.

We scraped popcorn ceilings, ripped out filthy shag carpeting, removed cabinets, repaired drywall, and stripped away more wallpaper than we care to remember. We channeled our inner Chip and Jo by installing shiplap, discovered how a little decorative trim around windows could completely transform a room, created accent walls with millwork, and even tackled the landscaping. 

We even found a creative solution for an entire wall of mirrors that I'm sure had been all the rage at some point in history but had long since fallen out of favor. Well, unless you're a ballerina or a bodybuilder, neither of which was exactly the demographic we were hoping to attract.

In fact, we were so happy with how our first fixer-upper turned out that we decided to sell it instead of renting it. We received our first offer within an hour of listing it, had multiple offers to consider, and closed on the sale just three weeks later.

Somewhere between demo and staging, three things happened:

  • We became people who own tools (like real, grown-up power tools...RIP IKEA Allen wrenches) and learned how to use them. 
  • We embraced the challenge of problem-solving and adopted the mindset that mistakes can be fixed and learned from (important because we made plenty of them).
  • We discovered that we love the transformation process and especially enjoy using thoughtfully sourced pieces, creativity, and DIY skills to create beautiful spaces without an extravagant budget.

We've now transformed seven properties, including that first fixer-upper. We still own two of them as rental properties—one in Venice, Florida, and another in Portland, Maine. The other five have all sold, with two going under contract within just 24 hours of being listed and none staying on the market longer than 13 days.