• Nowthen, MN.
• 4 bed,  4 bath, 3200 sq ft rambler
• Purchase price $172,500. Bank-owned

This 2001 built rambler required:

A new roof, clean up of landscaping, opening of the kitchen to the living room, main floor laundry room, paint, light fixtures, carpet, wood floors, bedroom addition, granite countertops, refurbish of the fireplace, basement bar, work out room, and updating bathrooms. The deck, brick landscape work, fireplace, appliances, basement carpeting and some decorative trim pieces were removed in the foreclosure process. This seems to be common in many bank owned homes.

The outside of the house was run down but aside from the curling shingles, it was in good shape. A new roof  was put on, the shutters were painted, a new front door and garage doors were installed,grass was   planted in areas of need, deck was replaced and new landscaping was done where needed. Whenever possible I save broken down trees and shrubs. If you are able to trim them, stabilize and fertilize they will usually come back. This save tons of money on new trees and shrubs! Notice the unsightly propane tank? Since, natural gas was already available in this neighborhood we were able to remove the propane tank and run a natural gas line to the house. The utilities were changed to natural gas and this fairly easy and inexpensive upgrade gave this home a major boost in practicality!

A new deck was built in place of the old one that was removed. Instead of replacing all of the grass with sod, which would have put us over budget, this is what we did; regular fertilization treatments to remove the weeds & crab grass, thatching & aerating and, lastly, over-seeding! You can see the huge difference in the lawn in the before and after pictures in this post!