Happy Street: 30(ish) Day House Makeover | To make half a mil?

My wife and I bought our first house in 1999 for $172,000. The only way we could afford this was because it had a separate basement unit that we could rent out. We were house hacking before we knew what that was! After moving into our new house in 2008, we kept our first house and rented it out.
But now it was time to free up the equity in the house, and we felt like we had limited time left with the hot housing market. Still, the house needed some work, so I got the old band back together (with a new drummer), and we embarked on a 30(ish) day house makeover. We chose a number of elegant projects to get it ready to sell.
Our primary projects included leveling the front porch concrete slab, polishing and finishing the new concrete, tiling the old front steps, reusing the old wrought iron railing, refurbishing and opening up the decaying back deck, cleaning up all the landscaping and paths, remodeling the basement bathroom with large format tile and new plumbing, texturing and painting the basement unit, modernizing the main floor kitchen (butcher block counters!) and bathroom, adding new light fixtures, refinishing the hardwood floors, painting, and lots and lots of little projects that popped up along the way.
Could we actually make half a million dollars on the first house we ever bought?
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Mindy Jensen, primo realtor in Longmont: [e-mail]

[@ia5662]

loved watching this whole series of videos, super cool how transparent you are about the price, what you bought it for, how much went into and it just goes to show that sweat equity gets you the prize more times than not. Will you do any more reno videos now that this is over and profit has been made or is the plan to relax now haha?

[@PoppasCottage]

Thanks! Funny you should ask about future projects. The Northwoods Cottage continues to provide fun projects - more vids forthcoming on that. And we did end up putting some of the proceeds from this sale into another property in Wisconsin - with a number of old cabins and structures, all in need of work, that one will provide projects for years to come. Stay tuned...