When we tell people we live in an old firehouse, everyone around here knows exactly where it is and which one it is.
They say, does it still have a fire pole?
And then Steven always says, I don't know, but for $5, I'll give you a tour.
Gotta make the money back.
But it never had a fire pole in this house, but it does have a cool fire roll staircase.
Hello, and welcome to our home.
Come on in.
I'm Steven.
And I'm Ashley.
And in 2016, we bought an abandoned fire station for $90,000.
And today it's worth about $400,000.
So our home is approximately 6,200 square feet.
We only have two bathrooms, four bedrooms.
But we did make one room a movie theater room.
We made one room like a stadium soccer room.
We made one room a workout room.
So the firehouse is actually located near the high school that we both attended.
It went up for sale and we thought we'd come check it out.
We actually had to sign waivers to come inside because there's mold covering the entire thing.
So the thing that attracted me the most to the fire station, the fact that it's concrete and steel.
The bones were solid, like the house was level.
Any other house would have fallen over easily by now.
Everything needed to be fixed.
And it didn't have any walls, no running electricity.
It didn't have a working toilet, no shower.
You make a list of what needs done, along with the purchase price, and then how much all that stuff will cost, and then what it'll be worth once it's done.
And if you have 20% equity, technically you can use it as your down payment.
It was essentially supposed to be a flip and sell and make a profit.
When we talked to the bank initially, we said we were gonna just remodel the house.
We're like, okay, we can turn it into a commercial building.
We can maybe move in it.
We would love to move in it, but we didn't know if that was even gonna be a possibility with how much work it needed.
I looked on the assessor site initially and it said like 3,100 square feet.
So I calculated everything based on that because we couldn't come back in and remeasure stuff because of all the mold everywhere.
And then come to find out it was like double that.
And so it ate through our budget very quickly.
The first thing that we had to do was get the roof on.
Yeah, at the time that was a huge like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do?
That's so much of our budget.
How are we going to finish anything else?
Some of the bigger expense items that we did in the remodel, the roof was $22,000.
The flooring was between $4,000 and $5,000.
Our kitchen at the time was like $10,000 for everything.
The drywall was $4,000.
We spent $1,100 on the ceiling paint.
We had to get extra thick ceiling paint to seal in the rust and everything on the ceiling.
This is the main area of our house, and this is our living room.
It's where we spend most of our time.
Just super open and inviting, especially when we have company over.
My favorite room in the house is our brand new kitchen remodel.
I am obsessed with how the space came together.
Before, our kitchen was still beautiful.
This was just kind of like a dream kitchen that we were able to design.
So one of my favorite things about the new kitchen remodel is this stove right here.
It's a $15,000 stove.
I got it for 750 bucks.
It has a wok burner over here.
It's got a grill burner in the middle.
It is old, but it's a gem.
This is the atrium.
It's actually my favorite part of the house because it has the giant skylight.
They also got a 100-inch ceiling fan up there.
And then, of course, Stephen had to put in this tornado slide, which the kids absolutely love.
This is the lower level of the atrium.
I actually have so many plans.
This is where I want to build the little town.
I want to have a little fire station, a bakery, just a little playhouse, and then oh, we can even put like a tunnel, slide from here into the soccer stadium like a tunnel, and they can just go through the wall and then we can block this off with like that glass wall.
I'm excited for that wee stuff.
Yeah, when we found out we were pregnant, unexpectedly this became the nursery, and i actually love it way more.
And since we live in an old fire station abriel, how do you have a fire bed?
Yeah, but he is getting older, he's kind of growing out of the fire truck theme, so now he wants to do bunk beds in this room and i really think this whole wall would be really cool as like a built-in bunk bed wall.
This is our theater room.
It was one of the first rooms we finished, but we have recently redone it again.
Another thing that we love is, over here, The candy stand.
So we got popcorn, different candies.
Stephen built this also.
We priced it, it was going to be like $1,200 and I did it for like 300 bucks.
Yeah.
So way better.
Now we're going into the stadium.
Growing up we had friends that had a soccer stadium inside their house like an indoor soccer field.
I'd always thought it was the coolest thing ever and I remembered it even as an adult.
So I decided to create one down here, and we have the lines all painted all over the whole place as a soccer field.
The Nerf armory.
When we first bought it, I'm like, how could this be too much house for someone to handle?
I easily get how it's too much for someone to handle.
It's a lot to maintain.
Stuff breaks faster than I can fix it.
You know, it's like an acreage.
You have acres to mow and the yard work and the outside stuff and the shoveling.
It's literally a full-time job to like being a groundskeeper here.
It's crazy.
The one thing about this fire station being a home now is the lack of storage and closet spaces.
The reason we didn't really change the layout of how the original owners, who turned it into a home, had it is because, in order to do that, you have to go down to the city and it was really expensive.
So we're like, okay, we can work with the layout how it is now.
We talk about what it would be like to live in a house that was already finished all the time.
We're like, man, it would be so nice to go home.
Come home and watch some TV.
Yeah, you don't have anything to work on.
You have no project.
You're not constantly cleaning up after projects and how amazing it would be.
But also I can't imagine living in a house that was completely new and that we didn't put any blood, sweat and tears into.
People always ask us if this is going to be our forever home, and our answer often changes.
We always tell ourselves it's because it's a great place to raise a family.
Even if we move, we'd never sell this home.
Definitely a dream home, I think, for our kids to grow up in.
And just for us to be so proud that we can provide for our kids to grow up in this home.
It means a lot.
We're very blessed.
