I think our first thought was this house needs a lot of work.
A realtor was calling it a money pit, but I just saw the vision.
I was like, this house has so much potential.
Whoa.
All the things that we have found in the walls when we were renovating.
You just can't get that from a newer built home.
I found a vintage breast pump in the walls, the Stan Musial 1948 rookie baseball card.
And then all the handwritten letters are just so cool.
They're from like the 1930s.
We do really appreciate the history that this house holds.
It just needs a little bit of TLC.
Maybe a lot a bit of TLC.
Welcome to our home in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey.
My name is Amanda Durice and I'm 32 years old.
My name is Vinny Durice and I'm 34 years old.
We bought a 140-year-old Victorian home for 550K.
And we've been renovating it ever since.
We knew that this house was the one.
Location was huge.
So we're two blocks off from the water.
I still walk to the ferry every morning to get to work.
This house is a five bedroom, two bath.
It was originally six bedrooms but we tore down one wall for one of the bedrooms.
I have always been like enamored by old homes and victorian houses.
Growing up with a dollhouse and everything like that.
I always thought that would be so cool to own a house like that one day.
I never thought that was a possibility, just because you see all these grand beautiful, victorian homes and you're like those must be so expensive and i don't think Finney thought about buying a house that was going to require all of this work.
So we really started saving for this home in 2021 when we moved into that apartment in Tribeca.
That was $1,600 a month, which is really unheard of in Manhattan.
We opened up a high yield savings account.
Any money we got along the way, mostly just from our income, we just put into there and just continued to save up until we got to a little bit over a hundred grand.
Once we started our home search, I think we quickly realized like any sort of renovated home or any sort of new home was way out of our budget.
We will have to find a fixer upper or an older home One day.
My dad sent us the listing of this house.
I thought, what do I need a six bedroom house for?
But I really wanted to see what the inside of it looked like.
When we first saw the house, it was old.
Everything was old.
I mean, I think our first thought was this house needs a lot of work, but it felt like a dollhouse.
With the condition of the house, we thought that it could be possible to negotiate the price that seller's agent had mentioned.
It is an older man who is selling the home.
He raised his family in this house and he does not want to sell to an investor.
I wrote a nice letter to the older man that we want to take care of this house and bring it back to its former glory.
We settled at $90K under asking price.
We closed on October 31st, 2024, Halloween night.
Our down payment was $82,500, which was 15% down on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.
Our mortgage is just under $4,000 a month.
Our interest rate on our mortgage is 7125, which honestly was a little bit of a tough pill to swallow, but we thought we had to close on this home, so we made it work.
Living in a house while you're renovating it it's a lot.
We lived in the living room while we were renovating the second floor.
So we put our bed in the living room, which also needed a ton of work.
We would wake up every morning to wallpaper peeling on the walls.
I would say that was probably the hardest part of the renovation.
Windows were being like blown out as we're living in here.
I was also working from home.
So there was a lot of times where there was people in and out of the house having to deal with contractors.
The home was always a construction zone because it was pretty major projects going on.
So there was a lot of action going on while we were living here.
I would say we've been living a pretty much no-frills lifestyle for a while.
Any ways we could kind of cut costs, we downgraded our car.
There could have been a world where we didn't have to live in the home during the renovations, but obviously having to pay rent would cost some money.
The most expensive renovation we had to complete was the siding and the windows.
It was about $50,000 to do the installation and included the materials for the siding.
And then the windows we actually purchased separately, which were $20,000, which totaled at $70,000.
So we spent about $175K on renovations so far.
We funded that through personal savings, a 401K loan, through some equity that I sold from my former employer and then honestly, just through personal income as the time has gone by.
One of the nice things has been working with flexible contractors who are able to work with you along the way as well.
So we've also been consistently posting on TikTok, which has been helpful in joining the Creators Fund, which has helped us fund a little bit of the renovations.
So this is the living room.
I would say we spend most of our time in this room.
My favorite part is the big bay windows.
You can see the water from here.
When we bought the house, the trim looked exactly like this.
I wanted to make sure that the trim looked like the original, just to keep the charm of the house.
Here we have our dining room table.
We eat every meal here.
A lot of the furniture that you see in this room was left by previous owners.
As we were peeling some of the wallpaper, we came across this piece of wallpaper here, which I think is the original.
We think this is the original light fixture.
There's definitely some pieces that are hanging on by a thread.
So this room definitely needs some updating.
I don't wanna make it feel like a modern kitchen.
I definitely wanna keep the charm of like an older home.
This is a room right off the kitchen.
When we first moved in, I think it was just being used as some storage.
This room, I would say, was our first DIY that we did, just Vinny and I.
There's some details that we added, like the cafe curtains, this little cushion that complemented the green paint color.
We added some toile pillows just to give it a cozy Parisian cafe vibe in here.
One of my other favorite parts is what they would call the butler steps.
A very narrow staircase here that goes up to the second floor and like right into the kitchen that we use a lot.
So the second floor we took down to the studs and added central hair and central heat to the entire floor.
So this floor.
We were also a little more lenient on renovating and we were okay with being a little bit more modern up here.
Welcome to my office and what will be our future baby's room.
I didn't realize how much I like antiquing and thrift shopping.
It was something that I learned about myself.
I just feel like they have a little bit more meaning to them and it's a little bit more special.
Welcome to our bedroom.
This floor originally had four bedrooms.
They were tiny rooms though.
So we took down this wall.
This window had to get shifted over.
This way we tried to make it as symmetrical as possible so we could fit the bed in here.
I thought this bathroom was really cool.
It has like an old feeling to it.
The porcelain sink, porcelain tub, this big mirror.
I also love the wallpaper in here too.
We definitely need to fix it up a little bit.
Again, I don't want to make it like feel like a modern bathroom.
We're making our way up to the third floor.
We still haven't renovated this yet.
This is currently my office.
I'm really excited about this because I feel like it's going to be, when it's done, an awesome place to work.
I also have a great view that looks out to the ocean.
This is the attic, which is actually still the third floor.
It's all exposed, but it's really cool to see the bones of the house.
And the other interesting thing is we have two chimneys that are actually slanted.
People on the internet have told me that they slanted their chimneys back in the day so that witches wouldn't come through them.
I don't know if that's true, but it's just a fun little fact.
Right now we're in our basement.
We have the laundry room down here.
Eventually we'll try to move this upstairs, but it gets the job done for now.
We get the question of when we'll be done with renovations all the time.
And I think the joke is that we never think we'll be done with renovations.
I think there'll always be something to do.
I would say maybe in five years, we'll feel a little bit more finished.
I'm expecting an in May of this year, so that's just really exciting to continue the renovations in this house as well as growing a family at the same time.
We were so excited when we found all the things in the walls from 100 years ago and we thought why not put our own things in the walls for the future people to find?
Maybe someone in 100 years looks at some of the work that we've done around the home and sees our touch on it.
