Back to the Studs

The before and afters on the unglamorous truth of old houses, hard work, and building what lasts. A renovation project.

Here’s the thing HGTV doesn’t show you: unless you’ve managed to land a national television syndicate that plays in every hospital waiting room across America, you probably have to do the work yourself. And if you have to do the work yourself, you either have to be loaded, cash liquid, or good with a hammer and fine with getting dirty.

My husband and I are the last option.

Four years ago, returning from being stationed abroad, we found ourselves in a housing market so inflated it was nearly impossible to enter without a six-figure escalation clause. We didn’t have that kind of money, and the military won’t pay for that kind of hotel time.

So, as any sane couple does, we bought a house — sight (and smells) unseen — from abroad.

When we arrived stateside, a couple of suitcases in hand, we found a home complete with raw and sticky counters, urine so soaked into the carpet it had ruined the hardwood floors beneath it, and a parade of wildlife that didn’t take kindly to our eviction notice.

There was not an inch of this house that didn’t need to go back to the studs. And we did it with too few tools.

The military destroyed the vast majority of our belongings in transit — we had none of our stuff for many, many months — but that’s a story for another post.

Because this renovation deserves to live somewhere worth revisiting, please enjoy our before and after photos.

We did every single thing ourselves, minus the electrical work, hardwood floor patching, and mudding — because mudding is, objectively, terrible.

Every room went back to the studs. Every. Single. Room.

In some spaces, walls were moved or removed entirely. Ceilings were scraped. Tile and floors were laid. Tears were shed. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent.

I want to stop there for a moment to dispel something important. I hear occasionally about what a privilege it is to own a home — and people are right, it is. But homeownership becomes significantly more attainable when our generation is willing to see possibility in renovating decay. In reversing the waste that happens when a country lets buildings disintegrate while homelessness persists.

We believe in taking care of what’s been left behind. We wish it had been better loved, but we don’t blame the people before us. We take the keys and make it beautiful again. For us, that represents potential, wealth accumulation, and yeah — a lot of risk.

Every picture you see was self-funded. Every dollar I made from my day job, for years, went into this flip. I skipped hair appointments, bought cheap coffee, and slept too few hours. My husband did the same. We went to work, came home, banged on things until the early hours, took a nap, and got up and did it again. Cried a handful of times. Cussed a lot. Like — a lot. Mostly at walls. Occasionally at each other.

Despite all of that, we still managed to bring two babies home here.

This house taught us a few things:

Our generation needs a better understanding of how to care of what we have - homes, clothing, cars. Things are not nearly as disposable as we treat them.

Blue collar work is deeply undervalued, and because of that, hiring skilled labor is getting very expensive. If we want to take care of what we have — and make that possible across a range of incomes — we need to talk more honestly about what can happen without a surplus of money, when you’re willing to roll up your sleeves.

We need to be better at telling the difference between privilege and genuinely hard work — and honest enough to acknowledge when it’s both. Military benefits made homeownership more accessible to us, and that’s real. So is the fact that those benefits come attached to pay that would make most people laugh, that make career advancement difficult for me, to moves that uproot your entire life every few years, to missed funerals and births and ordinary Tuesdays that add up to something. We’re not saying the trade is unfair or that you should feel sorry for us — only that the full picture is more complicated than a before-and-after photo, or a hot take about who deserves what. The system is broken in ways that hurt a lot of people, and we’re not interested in pointing fingers sideways. We’re interested in showing what’s possible when you stop waiting for conditions to be perfect.

And it’s okay to produce quietly. Not everything needs to become a social media moment.

Had I documented this on social media, viewers would have seen us living for months on an air mattress blown up over piss-stained carpet, sleeping among work zone debris and Taco Bell wrappers. That is the actual reality of flipping a house on a budget. The house is beautiful at the end — but along the way, you have dust in your hair, you never feel clean, the sex on the air mattress is mediocre at best if you even feel frisky at all, and you quietly wonder if you’ll ever live in a finished house again.

If you are like us, you might even accidentally cut the poop line while the water is off and have to beg your new neighbors to let you borrow (and never return) a bucket and a rag to clean up the mess, and then borrow their hose to rinse off in.

Cheers to our fourth house flip in our fourth state. We laughed. We cried. We cleaned up a lot of fecal matter. We peed in our own yard a lot. We broke a lot of things — most of it on purpose. We had babies. We loved the house well. And then we handed the keys to the next family to make memories in.

Please enjoy a walk down memory lane — until next time, when we take on the 126-year-old house we just closed on.

P.S. — HGTV, we are ready for our moment.

P.S.S - Eric, you are the hardest working, and most dedicated man I know. It’s an honor to love you, and swing a hammer alongside you.

Love,

Taylor and Eric