Last updated: March 15, 2024

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I’ve been wanting to get this post published for a while, but your girl has been busy! Maybe you’ve missed me… I know I’ve missed you! 💗

There are so many chapters in the book of life. We’ll call the 2022 – 2023 chapter of my life “That Time I Lost my Mind and Moved to Indiana and Thought it Would be a Good Idea to Live in a 576 Square Foot House”. Okay, so that’s a bit exaggerated (and a horrific run on sentence). I actually did thoroughly enjoy this flip, and when I say flip, I mean FLIP.

To set the stage, we sold our cute-as-a-button Somerville house and made a bit of a profit. Frankly, I just didn’t want to spend it. Yep, I added that chunk of change to my collection and just couldn’t stand the thought of giving it to a bank for a house that wasn’t our forever home. For the record, I knew whatever we did in Indiana would not be permanent. I am, and forever will be, a Southern girl. The company Kris was with was global and had many companies in the south, so for me, this adventure was temporary. Maybe five years, maybe ten, but I just knew deep in my heart of hearts it wouldn’t be forever, so that made it even harder to buy a house. Looking back, it would have probably been better to have rented BUT, when Kris found the two car garage with a living space on top that had been on the market for 9 months, we decided to make a ridiculous lowball offer and to our surprise, it was accepted.

This place could not be purchased without a vision and let me tell you; I had it. I knew I could make it beautiful, despite everything that said it couldn’t be done. The place was trashed… a dump. The lady left everything except for her bed. It smelled… bad. It took weeks to empty the house of all the junk. I’m talking probably 100 garbage bags. I literally kept nothing.

Once we got it completely cleaned out, we spent the next three months renovating. We removed every single wall. We took out the four types of flooring (??) and replaced it with luxury vinyl tile throughout. I had a floor to ceiling tile fireplace built. We had the ceilings scraped and put fresh paint throughout the whole place. I back-splashed and designed my little heart out. All of this sounds crazy expensive, but because the space was so small, everything was extremely affordable. I mean, I had 4 windows installed and the average house has at least double that. Not spending a lot in materials is was one major appeal of buying a small home which is exactly what I wanted!

I really wish I had a drawing of how the house was laid out before we ripped out all the walls, but I do have this magical document that I drew to aid the contractor I swindled into helping me (thanks, Mike!).

I honestly can’t believe I came up with this… I didn’t know I had it in me to design a whole house (even though the house is so small, it’s still a whole house!). I worked on this for weeks and went though many erasers. It was really fun for me to figure out the most efficient and practical way to lay this puppy out. I’m really proud of what I created!

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for… enjoy these fun photos of what this place looked like when we bought it, along with what it looks like after I gave it some magical Jessica love.

Garage

This was the worst if it all. So much stuff. We removed all the pipes that were used for radiant heating, sheetrocked and painted the walls, added a ceiling, replaced the garage doors and got a new washer and dryer.

The only thing left was to epoxy the floor, but I decided for the sake of saving money to just clean it instead. I’m really proud of the difference here!

And here’s what she looks like today!

Kitchen

The kitchen was so strange in that right when you walked through the front door, you were met with a wall of cabinets. I know this place is small, but that really made it seem tiny. So I completely removed the wall and reversed the design so that the cabinets were along the stairwell wall instead.

Tada! Bye natural wood cabinets! Bye tile! Bye double sink and laminate countertops!

Living Room

This was the largest space so I’m happy to say I made it even larger. We had already began taking up the laminate flooring in these photos but you can see the layout pretty well here.

And here is what we did with the place!

Bedroom and Closet

Obviously, this is a one bedroom home. The most significant thing I did was just remove the wall to make it a studio and moved the closet to the bathroom. I kept the bedroom in the same place and just made it a bit bigger and removed the window you see on the left (where we put the bed).

Bathroom

I go into a lot more detail on this post about the bathroom renovation, but still want to quickly highlight it here. This was located right when you walked in the door to the right (across from the garage stairs). It left so much to be desired.

I completely moved to the other end of the house and made it comfortable for two people. This is the best part of the house if you ask me!

Office

The original layout did not include a dedicated office space, but because I worked from home, it was important for me to have this. The little office nook I carved out provided a cozy space to do work. Because it was only 9 square feet, I thought it was important to have some light so I installed a window. This really made the space nice and I didn’t feel cramped working in there up to 12 hours a day.

We entered and exited the house from the garage this way. I liked these stair treads I found!

Here are some photos of the whole space to give you an idea of how open it was.

Exterior

We replaced most of the siding and added new garage doors which really helped with how ran down it looked. Believe it or not, we also cleaned up the yard immensely and added a fence and storage building.

Last but not least, enjoy these photos of us working on the house! A busy three months while working full time, but I truly enjoyed it. Making houses beautiful is truly my passion!

And that, my friend, is what I did from June – December 2022. It took us about 3 months to make it livable and then we continued to work on it about 3 more months after we moved in. Such a journey but I learned a lot and poured a ton of energy into making it beautiful. I can honestly say that I didn’t mind the size and could have lived there longer had it been situated in Alabama. I mean, I kinda made it luxurious so it was fun to live there! Plus I was a five minute walk to the Cardinal Greenway which lead to Thistlethwaite Falls! These falls were absolutely stunning during the winter!

I hope you have been living your best life and that it’s been less chaotic than mine. 😃 I’d love to hear any questions you have or see your before and afters!