Duplex Diaries (The Beginning): Renovating a 1940s Duplex

We bought a duplex!

Before getting into the details of our renovations, I thought I would start with a little background on how we ended up buying a duplex as our first home purchase, rather than a single family home.

In August of 2020, we decided to move out of our rental house in Smyrna, GA and move to Gulfport, MS to live with family. At that point during the pandemic, we really weren’t sure what the future had in store for either of us in terms of careers, and we were faced with three options: 1) renew our lease, 2) buy a home or 3) temporarily live with family.

To save our cash and give ourselves flexibility in case something did happen to either of our careers, we opted for the latter of the three options and moved ourselves to Gulfport, MS. When doing this, we anticipated being in Mississippi for a few months, but a few months very quickly turned into four. At around this four month mark, we decided it was time to start trying to make our way back to Atlanta, and began the home-buying process. This was in January 2021.

Little did we know how complicated the housing market had become and we then spent the next nine months making outrageous offer after offer, with none being accepted. We felt uncertain, discouraged and worn out. However, we trusted and had faith in that the Lord was calling us back to Atlanta (not to mention Ryan’s job was calling him back as well), so we continued to push through.

Finally, after 14 months of living in Mississippi, our offer was accepted on a duplex in Marietta, GA. If you’re any bit familiar with the area, our duplex is a couple of blocks off of the square, one block off of the historic Cherokee Heights neighborhood, and walking distance to some of our favorite restaurants and coffee shops.

So how did we end up with a duplex instead of a single family home?

During the home buying process, we encountered many different desires in terms of what both Ryan and I were independently desiring this home to be. Although our desires differed in a few areas (i.e. Ryan wanted to be close to the airport so he could have a short commute and I wanted to be walking distance from a cute coffee shop), one of the common desires was in relation to a big dream we both have of owning a property to welcome others in to and to show them how to see God through nature. That dream heavily influenced the properties we were looking at, in addition to my personal desire to have an old home.

At some point in the process, I became so desperate (and so frustrated with the Atlanta housing market) that I started looking at homes in Chattanooga. There were a plethora of cute old homes (particularly Tudor-style) in the area, and we both agreed that Chattanooga would be a good investment long term. However, Ryan’s work is in Atlanta, so these conversations lead to more complex conversations around how he would get to and from work.

During the nine months we spent looking for homes, our realtor (who is also a close friend of ours) recommended I start reading a book called The Artist’s Way. The book is created for anyone experiencing any sort of creative block and requires you to do something called the morning pages: three pages every morning of stream of consciousness. The whole point of the pages is to 1) help you just write and 2) be a form of meditation between yourself and the Creator God. The pages, although seemingly easy, are actually quite challenging and force you to get past your surface level thoughts into your more subconscious ones each and every morning. The more you do your pages, the more you start to recognize the things that come up each and every day, helping you to recognize what items you need to work through or what things are actually most important to you.

As Ryan and I both started to do our pages, we simultaneously began to resurface the dream of living abroad. So when we got to the point of Ryan being ready to talk to his manager about the potential of living in Chattanooga, I recognized that Chattanooga was just a distraction from our big dream: to live abroad. So rather than talk to his boss about living in Chattanooga, he talked to him instead about the potential of living abroad.

Once this happened, conversation after conversation popped up with people all across his workplace regarding “expat” opportunities. At this same time, the duplex we now own hit the market and we both felt comfortable making an offer with the hope that at some point in the next year we would be able to move abroad.

Our offer on the duplex was surprisingly accepted and we closed on it on November 2, 2021.

The remainder of this post will walk through the renovations we have done on the duplex so far. We own and are renovating both sides of the duplex and I will clarify which side the work is referring to throughout the post. To start, below are photos of the duplex as it was when we purchased it!

WEEK 1 + 2

As you can see in the images above, the duplex was in a mostly fine state upon closing, however there were some imminent things we needed to figure out such as purchasing washers/dryers/refrigerators for both sides of the duplex and whether or not to leave the washer/dryer hookups in the kitchens.

After closing on the duplex on November 2 (a Tuesday), we immediately moved our stuff into the sunroom on one side. We really didn’t bring any furniture with us, other than our bed, dresser and a small twin bed, and all of our other boxes fit in the sunroom.

The first thing we did (after putting towels and sheets over the windows) was work to figure out what paint color we wanted to paint both sides. The color upon purchase was a bluish/grey and I knew I wanted something white. After testing about 1000 and one white paint swatches, we decided on a color called celery root, an HGTV by Sherwin Williams paint. We still haven’t painted any of the walls at this point, because unfortunately they all need to be scraped, puttied and sanded due to the poor paint job they had prior, but at least the deciding process is done!

Duplex B

For the sake of this post, we will call the sides of the duplex Duplex A and Duplex B. Duplex A will be the side with the sunroom and the one we are currently living in, and Duplex B will be the other side.

That first weekend, my dad drove over from Alabama to help us with some of the work, and we started renovations on Duplex B, in order to try to get renters in ASAP and to not disturb our current living space. One of the first things we did was take down the giant, oversized fan in the small living room, as well as the one they had hanging in the kitchen. My dad is an electrician, so he added some can lights to the ceiling in the living room, which makes a huge difference in that room.

On Duplex B side, the fireplace was boarded up (see image below), so we decided to take the board off to see what was behind. Once the board was off, we discovered that at some point, someone had built a new fireplace within and around the original fireplace. The “new” fireplace bricks were already crumbling, so we decided to risk taking them out to see what was underneath. I was so excited when we discovered the original brick fireplace, in tact, with its beautiful arched design. Since we will be renting this side of the duplex, the fireplace will be closed off and unusable, but we will keep the original fireplace as a focus-point of the living room, because she deserves to shine.

The other main thing we did on the Duplex B side that first weekend was start taking off the trim around the doorways in the living room. My dream was to create arched doorways in this main portion of the house to help the space feel slightly more modern and pleasant.

To date, we haven’t done anything additional to Duplex B, other than get an exterminator out to handle a fun roach problem (yay home ownership!) and get an interior designer to help us look at how to configure the tiny kitchen, where the washer and dryer will continue to live.

Duplex A

That same weekend, my Dad helped us work on moving the washer and dryer hookups out of the kitchen on the Duplex A side into an unused nook in the hallway (pictured in images at the beginning of this post). This process took up most of the weekend and even resulted in some fun water flooding the hallway at one point, which we were able to quickly fix.

Once my dad left, Ryan and I decided to start tackling the guest bedroom on Duplex A, with hopes that we could easily finish it in order to move all of our stuff into that one finished room. Of course, home renovation projects never go as planned and we created more work for ourselves as the week went on. Due to the aforementioned terrible paint job, here’s what we had to do to the room before we could paint:

Scrape the walls (to remove all of the bumps and bubbles)
Putty the walls
Sand the walls

At this point, we also decided to remove the old crown molding (that had been layered with years of paint) and quickly discovered it was the original crown molding put on in the 40s. I decided that rather than put up new crown molding, I wanted to have a seamless corner, which meant a lot of extra work for Ryan. Here’s what finishing out the corners required:

Taking down the old crown molding
Scraping off any remaining paint
Mudding the wall and ceiling
Adding sheet rock tape with mud to the wall and ceiling
Sanding the tape
Patching and re-mudding any spots that had been missed
Sanding, again

After all of this is complete, we will finally be able to paint the walls in this one guest room! That is our goal for the end of this week, before my dad arrives again for the weekend to help us with some of the larger projects.

On Duplex A side, we also had an interior designer look at the kitchen layout to help us reconfigure the small space, and we took down the giant fan in the living room on this side as well. This living room already had can lights installed, so no additional lighting was needed.

That’s a Wrap

And that’s it for weeks 1 + 2, other than some contractors we had do the boring maintenance things like putting up gutters and grind a huge stump that was left in the backyard. Pictured below is what our daily living situation looks like right now, and living in a bit of a construction zone reminds us of the importance to take one day at a time.

My goal for this home section is to update you guys weekly or bi-weekly on all of the progress we’re making. In all honesty, it can be hard to find the mental energy to both write and renovate at the same time, but I’m challenging myself to do it for both you and for myself so I can remember how far we’ve come each week.

I hope you enjoy reading and watching our little duplex get renovated into a place of comfort and love, and as always, I’m so thankful you are here!

If you have any questions, ask in the comment section below and we will do our best to answer.

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