In Ireland, the people responsible for remodeling this gorgeous schoolhouse did it right!

The Schoolhouse in Annaghmore, County Sligo was built in the 1860s to educate local children. From the ‘before’ picture, we can tell that, at a certain point, either the pupils or the teachers stopped turning up for class. After years in the undergrowth, the ILT did their homework (get it? School? Homework? Never mind) and turned the schoolhouse into the kind of fairytale spot where you’d expect to see Snow White leaning out the window, chomping on an apple with a suspicious look on her face.

This before and after picture is definitely a WOW!  It looks like a new roof was clearly needed and the brick (or stone) was scrubbed. I would love to see photos inside the house as well!

Photo pinned by Tracey Sartino.

This is true no matter what part of the country you’re in, no matter if you’re a house flipper or first-time home buyer. From Realty Times,

Kitchens, however, can be one of the most expensive rooms to renovate. These projects can also be the most labor and time intensive of all home renovations. It’s not just a new layer of paint.  

Instead you find a complicated array of flooring, tiling, cabinets, and counters. This means buyers may want a home with an up-to-date kitchen but they aren’t willing to tackle this problem themselves. Most buyers want a kitchen that is ready to use the day they move in.

If you’re ready to sell, pay careful attention to the kitchen!

It is our forefathers self reliance and ingenuity that needs to be revitalized,  recharged, nurtured, mentored and grown into a new way of thinking about the utilization of valuable preformed high quality resources that we will never see again.  We already recycle many things, but why not just take structures apart and reuse the pieces rather than make or import replacements.  A brick is a brick, a board is a board, a door a door, or many more good things, like a bed, wainscot, or headboard.  None of it is trash and should not be thrown away with a few hundred years of useable life left in it.  It is the image of what we can do instead that will make this concept of Pure Salvage Building succeed.  I have built enough houses to plant those images deeply into the minds of men, women, and children such that they are inspired to do the same.  It is that belief that nearly anyone can be part of it that will make it possible for this grand solution to succeed.

Mr. Kittel offers blueprints and plans for people interested in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and FINDING materials needed to build.  Kudos to him for embracing the true American spirit!

I am in complete agreement with making the upper area of this a sitting area and placing your bed on the wall opposite to the bathroom opening. It appears the walls and the ceiling are the same color so you might want to consider changing one or the other to create some further visual interest.

I think this is a great space and I know many of my clients who are buying older homes which they had this kind of room to “figure out”

Houzz is a wonderful web resource.

The Open House Tic. This is a hybrid online and offline version of the fixation exhibited by those who get online every Friday and Saturday to prepare their plan of attack for Sunday open houses. This behavior is completely normal and, even, advisable, in actual house hunters — people who are actually in the market to buy a home, or even home sellers who are (wisely) seeking to scope out the competition.

But it takes on a compulsive element when people who have just bought a home, or have no intention of buying a home anytime soon keep open-house hunting as a weekly habit.

To be fair, this goes on the list of relatively harmless vices, except to the extent that it signals or churns up that feeling of constant discontent, that sense that the home you have is never quite enough.

This goes with the old real estate adage that people LOVE for realtors to drive them around to look at houses. Beware the obsessed!

Get real about “Spring Cleaning”: Now is the time to scrub every surface of your home– from ceiling moldings to hardwood floors. Assume any potential buyers will be wearing white gloves. Wash or dry-clean curtains and bedspreads, get the carpets professionally cleaned (or replace them), make all the windows shine. Don’t forget vents, fans and behind appliances.

Clean, shine, replace, unclutter. It’s a great plan!

While the hay barn still looks like a barn from the outside, its interior has been completely transformed into a dramatic three-level living space with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms.

The main floor holds a gourmet kitchen with two-story living room and stone fireplace. Below, the ground level holds a family room, office and bedroom. The master suite occupies most of the third floor and includes a loft area and full bath.

Except that barns – if not properly remodeled – could still attract field mice, I’d be all in!

My seller spent 30 minutes yelling at me. It was terrible and one of my worst ever real estate memories. I had done MY job, but I had no way to know whether the buyer’s buyer was good.

Don’t shoot the messenger when they deliver bad news. When You hear that it hurts us as much as it hurts you, that’s true.  Alan May of Evanston, Illinois shares his own experience about bearing bad news,

I contacted the agent, told her that the inspection had been horrific, and we were canceling the contract.  She asked what the issues were… I told her she didn’t really want to know.  To her credit, she said she DID want to know… and I told her.

She took the information I gave her, and went back to her client with many of the issues that we’d found… and told him that these things needed to be fixed.  He summarily fired her.

The seller should have been grateful to have an agent who was honest, even when delivering bad news. I don’t get people sometimes.