I’m Back…

Hi everyone! It’s been a minute so I thought I’d catch you up on what’s happening with the Heffrons! As we get closer to full-time retirement (still 3-5 years out), we have been thinking a lot about where we’d like to live. Keith and I both love the mountains. And as much as we LOVED our little house in Scaly Mountain, we knew that long-term that wasn’t where we wanted to live full-time. We’ve talked a lot about the Asheville area, and that may still be on the table. But another area we’ve been talking about is closer to Atlanta (1:15 minutes away door-to-door) and it’s in the foothills of the North Georgia mountains. It’s called Big Canoe, and it’s a gated development with a lot of amenities (a beautiful clubhouse with indoor and outdoor dining, 3 9-hole golf courses, two swimming pools, a few small lakes, tennis, pickle ball, bocce ball, lots of hiking trails, etc.). As we started talking about it being a contender for retirement, I came up with the idea that we should sell our Scaly house and buy something there to really dip our toes in the water. We met with a realtor in Scaly and mid-September put that house on the market. Lo and behold if we didn’t have our first offer less than 24 hours after we listed it! We ended up with 11 showings in 100 hours, 7 offers at or above list and we finally accepted one well above our listing price. Needless to say we were thrilled! A big thanks to Rachel Wavra for being our terrific realtor in Scaly. If you are ever interested in buying a place in the Highlands area, please use her!

We didn’t have a place to buy yet but had been looking for several weeks with my long-time friend Sheila Lantier, who is an awesome realtor in the Atlanta area! After looking at several places that just didn’t fit us or were WAY more of a project then we wanted, we finally found one. After quite a bit of back and forth with the sellers, we finally came to an agreement and we closed this week on Monday.

We are really excited about the new house so I thought I’d take y’all along on the ride as we put the Heffron touch on the house! I mentioned that we closed on Monday at lunchtime. Well, at 1 p.m. we had our flooring guys starting with refinishing the hardwood floors on the main level and ripping up the carpet in the lower level so that we could put down LVP (luxury vinyl planks which look like hardwood). Carpet is a bad idea in a basement and the LVP will really update the house and the breeding ground for mildew and mold that carpet can have. Plus, the carpet down there was older and kind of a baby poop color! For flooring, we are using BEC Flooring which is owned by Keith’s old business partner, Craig. They do a great job if you ever need flooring work done!

On Saturday our painters will start and will be repainting the entire interior of the house Dover White. Right now it’s a bit of a greige color and it’s just kind of blah. We want a fresh clean slate. If we want to paint some color, we can do that later ourselves.

You may notice a theme that’s a little different from om our Scaly house. We are paying people to do some of the hard stuff and/or stuff we just don’t want to do ourselves. Especially with the painting, there will be some need for scaffolding, etc. and that’s just more than we have the resources or energy to do.

Now, let’s take a little tour of the main level of our new house and I’ll share what our initial thoughts are of what we will be tackling. The exterior is fine – nothing particularly gorgeous but not offensive either. One selling factor was the house had a two car garage that will be Keith’s (and my) workshop. He kind of took over our Scaly garage and we have enough stuff that it really does almost need a two car garage for. The house also has a carport, so at least my car will be (mostly) covered from the elements. It’s a little bit of a short carport so my car sticks out a little bit in the back but it’s better than nothing! What we don’t like about the front of the house is the little octagon window, but we have no intention of getting rid of it just because it would be too much work. We also don’t love the front door. It’s dated. It has ugly little medallion things all around the oval glass. Our painter is going to pop off all the medallions and then paint it out black on the outside and white on the inside and we’re hoping the glass will just kind of fade away. If it doesn’t then one day we may invest in a new front door. But that would be not be any time soon. One more note before you look at these pictures. Big Canoe has a LOT of restrictions. I mean a LOT. And one is that you leave your landscaping fairly natural. No grass whatsoever. Our yard is a little too “natural” so we’ll at least trim down the weeds and put down pine straw or something. So don’t judge too much on the overgrown landscape!

Now moving back indoors. As you walk in, there is a coat closet and a powder room to the right of the front door. The powder room has a vanity that I consider to be ugly. You may love it, but we don’t. So one of our first projects will be to replace it with one I bought a few weeks ago and put in a new mirror and lighting and a new comfort-height toilet. More pics of all of that as we do it.

As you continue into the house, you’ll see we do have a really nice view. Not as good as our Scaly home but still quite nice. We’ll get some vista pruning done eventually but even right now we’ve got a lovely view. The main level has Brazilian cherry floors. Not my favorite as they read a really red tone, but they’re expensive and when we refinished them they lightened up. We paid extra to have them finished with a UV light protector so hopefully they won’t darken up to the reddish color any time soon. Here’s the newly refinished floors.

I mentioned the view. Here it is at an angle, prior to the floors being refinished.

Notice that the floors aren’t reading as much red now, thankfully. Now let’s chat about this fireplace. I HATE the stone. I really do. But I think I’ve found a project that we’ll attempt where we will “overgrout” it and possibly lime wash the stone to lighten it up. So expect an upcoming blog post on that!

To the left of the living area is the kitchen/dining area. The kitchen looks okay in these pictures but in real life the cabinets are a little beat-up looking and could use a refresh. Our plan is to build new shaker-style doors and drawer fronts. You may recall that we did that in Scaly in our hall bath. It’s not hard and not expensive and will be a huge improvement! When we do this, we’ll paint out the kitchen to be a much lighter color that will go well with the pretty granite in there.

Now let’s chat about the lighting situation. It’s awful. There is a mishmash of lighting throughout the house. There’s boob lights, farmhouse style lights, overdone scrolled heavy lighting, old dated ceiling fans, etc. None of it goes together and most of it just needs to go! So we’ll be addressing that almost immediately! I’ve already bought two new pendant lights for the island, a new light for over the sink, and a new light to go in the dining area. I can’t wait to get rid of the stuff that’s in there now. Not a big fan! So let’s take a look at the breakfast area. It’s kind of a turret. Not a lot to change in here other than the lighting. I may add some curtains. We will see!

On the other side of the fireplace is the master bedroom. It’s quite large. There are no window treatments at all on the windows. I mean, I know it’s a private space but that is just creepy! Plus who wants to be woken up with sun streaming in at 5:30 in the morning in the summer. So I’ve got light-blocking curtains on order and those will be going up immediately. We’re also having our painters patch up the wall where they had a TV and I’ll put some sort of tall dresser there eventually.

On to the master bath. It’s also quite large and has been mostly renovated. Not entirely to our taste (the master shower has some seriously questionable tile choices). And you may note I said “mostly” renovated. They left the giant jacuzzi tub there. Not a smart choice. That being said, we would prefer to not have to rip it out as that would cascade into having to put in all new flooring. We have a project idea that we’ll try in there and see if we can make the tub look more intentional, so stay tuned for that. While our painters are there this week and next, we are having them paint out the cabinets to a lighter gray color to coordinate with the countertops a little better. I’m also going to likely put a plantation shutter on the window in there.

So that’s it for the main floor. Upstairs there’s a bedroom with an ensuite bathroom and a lofted area that will be Keith’s office. Downstairs there are two more bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a den and what will be a game room. It’s a big house. It’s a lot to furnish! But it will be a lot of fun.

More to come on all of that, but I’m tired and you’re probably tired of reading! So we’ll call it a night. But welcome back to At Home with the Heffrons!