THE POPLAR COTTAGE

We’ve been sharing tidbits of what’s going on at the Poplar Cottage on IG stories and we owe you a big juicy update here on the blog. So we’re doing that today. Because there are BIG THINGS going on! Like lifting-the-house-and-increasing-square-footage kind of things. Poplar may be the smallest house we’ve ever bought, but it needs the most work, and we’re not even close to done yet. Let’s get into it…

Eek! The house is lifted! (And look at that yard 😱)

Lifting

The Poplar Cottage is currently 8’ + in the air, sitting on cribbing and steel beams. It’s crazy and nerve-racking, but necessary for this house to get a new, continuous concrete foundation. So we hired a contractor to come in and lift the entire house. It took him about a week of prep, one day of lifting, and one day of dirt work below the house. And once the new foundation gets poured, he’ll come back in and set the house down on top of it. When it’s all said and done, the Poplar Cottage will sit pretty close in elevation to where it was before.

Garrett put together a video of the lifting process (which is so SO cool to watch) and you can see it below. He goes into the nitty-gritty of the lifting process and shows you what was wrong with our existing foundation (what wasn’t wrong with it?!), if you’re into that, too.

Did we know there were foundation issues?

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about whether we knew there were foundation issues when we bought the house, and the answer is yes. The house had a pretty good slope to it, and it was obvious there had been some settling over the last 100+ years. Like many old houses in our area, Poplar didn’t have much of a foundation under it, just a few spread footings and wood posts, many of which were rotted out. Of course it was hard to tell the full extent of the rot and lack of foundation when the house was on the ground because the ‘crawl space’ was too small to have much of a look around. But Garrett had planned to do what he could to shore it up by pouring new foundations, replacing beams, and generally doing what he does (i.e. fix it himself the best he can). But those plans changed a couple of months ago and I’ll explain why in a second.

Of course now that the house is 8’ plus in the air, we wish we had done this first thing. Just gone ahead and lifted the house and done the whole foundation before we ever touched the inside. Then we wouldn’t have had rotting posts holding up the house and Garrett crawling around in that teeny tiny crawl space to wire and plumb the house. Hindsight, ya know?! But we’re not too late to tackle this foundation in a big way and we’re happy for the house that we’re doing it now.

Are we worried about cracking drywall and breaking windows?

Yes and no. I spoke with Don, the contractor, about this and he wasn’t too concerned. He’s lifted over 1000 houses in his career (!!!) and never had a window break. He said it’s really common for the house to be partially renovated when he starts his work, so the semi-finished state of the Poplar Cottage didn’t worry him. He said that houses with bowed floors tend to have cracks in the walls when they get set back down level, but a house as sturdy as the Poplar Cottage with shiplap on the walls (underneath the drywall), shouldn’t have too much cracking. And if we do, we’ll deal with it when it happens.

Just to be on the safe side, we didn’t glue down any of the quartz countertops or backsplash and only loosely leveled the new cabinets making future adjustments easy. We’ll see when it’s all said and done, but so far we’ve only seen a couple of hairline cracks in the drywall and aren’t anticipating much worse. And don’t worry, the beautiful curved hood vent is so far unscathed! Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Why now?

So why did we decide to pull the trigger on a full lift and foundation replacement? Because we just really love this house. Yes, really, that’s the short of it. The longer we’ve worked on this house and seen how nice it’s turning out, the more we love it. It’s got an incredibly cute kitchen (if we do say so ourselves 😉), all new JELD-WEN wood-clad windows and doors ready to install, and this really special, cozy old-house feeling. Plus the housing market has gone up and the property is worth more, making us less worried about overspending on it. But most of all, Garrett and I found ourselves saying, “gosh I just love this house” every time we came over here and that turned into something more like “I think it’s worth finishing that attic after all”! I guess you could say that we decided this house was worth ‘maximizing’ - spending the energy, time, and money to make it everything it can be. The Poplar Cottage is worth it. And our future financial health is worth it.

So that’s our plan…to finish the tall attic and give this house another 450-ish square feet. We hired an architect and structural engineer (for the first time ever!) to draw up a finished attic space with shed dormers (!!!), which we’ll share more about in the coming months as all the details get hammered out. But step one of finishing the attic, was to get a poured concrete foundation underneath of the existing house as soon as possible. And that brings us to right here…

Money

How much is all of this costing us? We’ll tally up all the foundation costs and share it at the end. But we’re anticipating the final lifting + foundation bill to be upwards of $25k. Not cheap. But on a bigger picture, we’re feeling confident that a new foundation + finished attic will pencil out for this property. A 580sf 1 bed/1bath house is a lot harder to rent/Airbnb/sell than a 2-bedroom house with 1000sf. (For the record, we have no plans to sell, we just like to keep that price in mind when spending money on remodels.) And these changes should earn us a good return as a rental (Airbnb, office, or long-term rental), and extend the life of this house another 120+ years. All good things for the house and for us.

For the record, 10 years ago we probably wouldn’t have spent the money to do the full foundation + attic, choosing instead to use that money for a down payment on a second small rental property. But the older we’ve gotten the more we’ve appreciated the ‘quality over quantity’ approach. We don’t want a lot of properties, we just want a few good ones like this cutie right here.