Home Renos...They never end!!

We purchased our home in October of 2020...got the keys on October 2, 2020 to be exact (happy birthday to Trystan!). As I stated previously, this house was a wreck!!! It needed so much work done to it, but the potential was definitely there!

Fast forward to a few weeks ago...we got a call from our mortgage company letting us know that interest rates had dropped again and the market had skyrocketed, meaning our house already had some great equity! We agreed to have an appraiser come out and see what our house would appraise at, and see if we could possibly reduce our monthly payments.

We received the appraisal back on Friday and the value of our house has already gone up $100K in 10 short months!!! We were shocked!!

Now on to the not so fun part of the appraisal...the items that have to be fixed before we can refinance! Fortunately it was only one set of things...but UGH...what a mess!! It's always something!

When we purchased the home, on one side of the house, all of the windows had bars on them.

Like "we're in jail" bars! We hated them, but they definitely were not on our list of "firsts" to get done when we moved in. With an FHA loan, those items just had to be noted...well with a Conventional loan (what we are refinancing to), those bars either have to have an emergency latch or they have to be removed!

Who wants bars on their windows anyways?! Not us!! So removing them was the only option!

Here comes the FUN part...figuring out how to get these bars off the windows!! They were attached with one-way, tamper resistant screws!! That means they are not meant to come out! We weighed our options...going to Home Depot (our second home) and purchasing a $30 one-way driver tool, which probably wouldn't work anyways because that is more to install the screws, not take them out, and then have huge holes in our stucco once the screws do come out; or cut the bars clean off and worry about removing the screws when we're ready to repaint our house!

We liked option number 2 better!! Let's cut those suckers off!!

We used our Ryobi Reciprocating Saw ,with a metal cutting blade, to remove most of the bars...until the battery died! We honestly love all of our Ryobi tools, however, sometimes having the battery die right in the middle of a project is super frustrating!!!

Then we brought out the bad boy...our corded Makita Angle Grinder!

For bigger projects, that might take some time, Jason prefers his tools to be corded. That way we don't run into the issue of dying batteries!

Jason wasn't taking any chances with the sparks or metal flying into his eyes, so he put on the heavy duty Respirator Mask.

I was supposed to be spraying the water hose on our dry ground, but I was too busy videoing Jason working!

Needless to say, all of the bars are now off the windows and we are ready for the appraiser to come back out and approve the removal!

What will the next home project be?! Do we want to paint the outside of our house? Maybe epoxy our kitchen countertops?! Who knows!!

Stick around to see more fun reno work...coming soon!!