Better With Age.
How a teacher and realtor found a 100-year-old bungalow in Bend, Oregon.
Get outside and take a walk.
In 2020, during the middle of a global pandemic, my wife decided to get outside of the house and take a walk. She stumbled upon a disheveled-looking old Bend bungalow with a for sale by owner sign in the front yard. She got excited about the idea of bringing an old house back to life. She took me to see the house and asked me what I thought about buying this thing.
My response was, “NO WAY!”
After the dust settled on my ‘NO WAY’, I called the number on the FSBO sign and left a message. I figured if this purchase was meant to be, then I’d get a call back and we’d explore a purchase. Crickets. I didn’t hear anything for nearly a month. Then I got a phone call.
The phone call was from an old timer who was looking to sell his old house to a family, someone who would move into the neighborhood and live there. He’d had several calls from folks who wanted to buy his house for its development potential. Something they could buy and flip, or demolish and start from scratch.
If you’re lucky in life, smart, and work hard, I believe life should get better with age. My wife and I have benefited from the help of others along the way, including our recent home purchase. There are about a hundred things that lined up perfectly for us to be able to purchase this 100-year-old home and bring it back to life. Below you’ll find the list, and I’ll stop well short of one hundred. What I’d love to do is share the whole story with you in person.
So let’s go for a walk together.
If you’d like to jump into some of the photos and restoration process, check out my wife’s Instagram feed @block8bungalow, where she has documented a large portion of our purchase and project along the way.
A LIST OF ONE HUNDRED THINGS THAT LINED UP PERFECTLY ALONG THE WAY
Taking a walk by the house.
Seeing the FSBO sign in the yard.
Getting aligned on the idea of purchasing an old neglected house
Left a message with the owner and didn’t hear back for over a month.
Got a call back from the owner, and set up a walk-through to check out the house.
Called a builder friend to see if he could join us for the walk-through, and he could.
He did walk through the house with us.
The house was old, and needed alot of work, had old knob and tube wiring, original plumbing, had been a rental for 30+ years, was a duplex with an upper and lower unit, there was alot going on with this thing, but our builder friend re-assured us that the house was solid and had “good bones.”
At one point, our builder friend looked us in the eye and said, “If you don’t buy this house, I’m going to buy it.”
Without really knowing how or what the next steps were to buy a house FSBO, we made up our minds, “We’re buying this house.”
Rewind a month, we’d recently sold our 1965 Aristocrat Lo Liner Camp Trailer for $4,000, so we had a little money in the bank.
The owner of the house was willing to carry the contract, FSBO, and be our banker.
We asked what he wanted for a down payment, and he said $5,000. We said, “Yes.”
We immediately got to work on getting our existing home for sale. We’d need to sell it to use the money to restore this 100-year-old house we were about to buy.
I called a realtor friend and asked if he could help me with an FSBO deal. He said yes, and printed me a blank real estate contract.
I filled out the contract with the owner of the house. We set the financing at 3% fixed over 20 years.
Our house sold in a few days, we had multiple offers, and we accepted an offer over asking price.
This sale left us with about $185k to work with.
We walked through the 100-year-old house we’d just bought for $5,000 down, again, with a plumber, our builder, and some other contractor-type folks, and they told us we’d probably need twice what we had to really complete this project. $370k? WTF! We didn’t have $370k, but we moved forward anyway.
Then came the work of figuring out how to rework and restore this duplex into a single-family dwelling.
Since our house was built in 1925, the city of Bend records and details about our house were not all on file. I spent several hours on dozens of calls with folks in the planning and permitting office. They were friendly and as helpful as they could be without having access to much info on our house.
We met with an architect, who tried to help, but this was a challenging project.
We settled with a drafting guy to get us some drawings of what we wanted to do, we paid him, but he was not helpful. If you know a great drafting person, we’d love to meet them!
Halfway through working with a drafting guy, we fired him.
We got aligned with a builder who knew a lot about old houses and was a true craftsman. Jon Lemke from Timberfram Construction.
We've got to work on the rework restore.
We’d hired Jon for four months of work, and he tackled everything we needed him to.
We managed and GC’d the rest of the project. Our hands were on nearly every part of the project. If we didn’t do it ourselves, we managed and hired GCs who did the work.
Building material costs shot to the moon at the height of our project, and we paid 3x-6x for everything. Lumber, electrical wiring, you name it, we paid a premium for it.
Wildfires were raging in Oregon.
We filled up a thirty-yard dumpster five times with junk, construction debris, and landscaping materials that needed to be removed. After we were getting near the end of needing our dumpster, I called to have it returned, and was told, if you need it again, you won’t be able to get it, they needed the thing for fire camps. So we said goodbye to our old metal friend. We were happy to see the thing go.
This is where my list fizzles…there are so many little things that have lined up along the way to bring our house back to glory. Let’s grab a walk, coffee, or lunch, and talk renovations and remodels.
I’ll be compiling a list of all the subcontractors, material suppliers, and vendors we have worked with on our house remodel. We have a great list of people we trust and recommend!
Justin Scott
(541) 797 - 9939
Pictured below: Many projects all happening at the same time, in this picture: jacked up the front porch, reinforced with new headers, newly replaced windows, new trim, new roof, brick demo sitting in side yard, siding repair, house numbers, exploring paint colors, all while celebrating Christmas.
Film Photography.
In high school, I took a dark room photography class.
That class was nearly thirty-five years ago, 1995 - freshman year.
Last year, my daughter asked me, “Dad, can we get a film camera?”
I was STOKED! I immediately began hunting thrift shops and eBay for the perfect, or discarded, old film cameras. Needless to say, I found a few! Rather than bore you with all the details on the cameras I found and purchased (we currently have four film cameras, all old, all interesting, and all fun to shoot with). Call me if you wanna hear more about the cameras I found, or if you’d like to borrow one, I’d be happy to load you up with a fresh roll of film and let you shoot a roll yourself.
Here are some of my favorite shots from last Summer.
Film photography has a certain nostalgic element to it that I love. Framing a shot, capturing a moment, and then having to wait till the roll of film is finished, and then sent to the lab for processing, the waiting has been fun.
We found a photo lab we love working with - Legacy Film Lab.
Legacy Film Lab is located in Tustin, California.
They process rolls of film the same day they are received. They offer some great options; they scan and send you digital versions of all your prints. You can order physical copies, and they will also send you back the actual film if you want it.
We’ve had a lot of fun capturing memories and moments along the way this past year. From Bend to Europe and back, weddings, anniversaries, weekends in Sunriver, Camp Sherman, friends, family, and much more! We’ve managed to shoot more than a dozen rolls of film this year, about a roll per month, and we’re still shooting!
I hope you enjoy some of these candid shots, and I’d like to invite you to call me if you wanna talk film photography, or if you’d like me to set you up with a camera and and roll of film to shoot on your own. Now that we’re in real estate, I even shot my first listing in Sun River on 35mm. I’ll probably do a whole different blog post on that, and share a reel on Instagram at some point with the images from the listing shoot. It was fun for sure!
Enjoy!
Justin
(541) 797 - 9939
Justin@varsityoregon.com
Pictured above: My 1987 F250 parked outside our family cabin in Camp Sherman, Oregon. Camp Sherman is the perfect spot for rest, relaxation, fly fishing the Metolius River, reading a book, and taking long walks. A must-visit!