When the owner of this townhouse called me and said they needed a local company to transform their rental into a freshly updated home they called the right folks! StackHaus Realty of course!
Nicky and I got to work removing the old carpets and garbage left by the previous occupant, and gave this home a beautiful turnover in just a matter of weeks. No renovations needed! This property was updated as a tenant turnover, which involves fixing things that have broken over time like shower curtain rods, toilet lids, replacing fixtures like door knobs and updating appliances. Then cleaning and painting every surface!
As a former NYC Building Superintendent Nicky has turned over plenty of co-ops and apartments (or condos as we say here:) We’ve implemented the NYC co-op paint scheme (UWS Manhattan, you’ll see the same colours used in many listings there). Ceiling white for the ceiling, two coats, walls got Linen White with built in primer, and trim and cabinets are painted in crisp white no tint semi gloss, doors as well.
There’s a great Rustoleum product that gives countertops a fresh update - buy it on Amazon. We went with plain white but you could bring it to a paint store to tint it any colour you like.
We donated the plants to friends and used Atlas Junk Removal for the bin rental, they were great with their timing and dispatch. They took the old fridge and stove and were extremely good with timing the removals (we filled 4).
The garbage removal took a week, including removing the upstairs carpets. The deep cleaning and paint prep another week. Each wall was scrubbed, literally, with a big scrubbing sponge and a TSP solution, then rinsed. Your reminder that when washing walls with TSP you want to be extremely careful to wear goggles and long rubber gloves, it’s nasty, but the best way to get a perfect paint finish.
After the entire place is washed up we started on the other step to paint prep. Replacing some baseboards and damaged trim, caulking everything everywhere, filling ten million holes, waiting for them to dry, sanding and repeating :) It’s a lot of work and very time consuming but necessary. Taping the flooring downstairs, covering windows and baseboards, the prep is WERK.
Painting the walls seems to take no time at all, but I would argue painting trim takes years off my life. Door frames, doors and doorknob removal, trim, window trim, trim on trim. The kitchen cabinets got a fresh coat of paint and so did the countertops.
Outside we pressure washed, gave the outside landscaping a hard pruning and clean up. Usually carpets take forever to coordinate installation in Victoria with a month lead time, but the folks at End of the Roll got us an awesome deal on high traffic berber and coordinated with us on a speedy installation.
One of the toughest things about scheduling a cosmetic makeover like this is timing the flooring and appliances. Appliances (and furniture I would add) take forever to order when not in stock. We didn’t replace any cabinets so the oven and fridge were replaced where they were before, just now in shiny stainless steel. They came after the listing went live so we did some virtual staging to show potential buyers what the kitchen would look like with the fridge.
We’ve put the listing live on the market and have had a lot of interest! Leads have been coming in from Realtor.ca, buyer’s agents and open houses. Thanks to our Seller for the opportunity and very excited for the new owners to take over this space and call it their own.
We had the nice folks at Real Foto do our photos and floor plans (including the virtual staging) and got to work marketing the property with online marketing and open houses. The open houses were super busy and we SOLD QUICKLY thanks to all the attractive fresh updates.
Here’s our video again showcasing our before & after process. StackHaus Realty is YOUR Greater Victoria FULL SERVICE Real Estate Brokerage.