Appraisal

I'm a terrible blogger lately but I refuse to fade out like so many bloggers do.  I'll get back on track, promise!  With that being said.  I STILL haven't taken pictures of the garage (I'm not at home right now so it's not like I can run out and do it real quick).  But something I do have pictures of is a door I painted....

Ya see, we've talked about refinancing for awhile because believe it or not the interest rates have dropped even more than when we bought our house last year.  So after talking to our friends that recently refinanced it motivated us to go ahead and try it.  To be able  to refinance without paying PMI and without having to bring anything to the table our house has to appraise for 10% more than it did just last May. 

Well our appraisal was yesterday, so here's hoping it went well!  We didn't do a TON to get ready aside from finishing the garage and like I said painting a door.  Other than that we really just deep cleaned real well. 

So what door did I paint and why?  Well the door that leads out to the garage has always been disgusting!  I don't know what happened to it before we lived there but it was beat up and then the previous owners tried to paint over the beat up part but the white paint was a different shade and sheen so it looked pretty ghetto(technical term ya know).  I thought that might stick out pretty bad to the appraiser so I went ahead and painted it.  Here is the before...

Now I really should have turned the flash off because it seemed to blend the whites together better than they actually were.  But still you get the idea.  So how did I paint it?  First, I tried to be lazy and leave it hanging but I soon realized it needed to be taken off its hinges.  So I did that and propped it up in the garage.  Then, I sanded down the whole door and sanded off the paint patch job.   Then it was time to prime.  I highly recommend Zinsers Cover Stain Primer, which is what I used for the fireplace, here...

It sticks to pretty much anything even without sanding.  Then after a coat of primer I did 2 coats of paint.  It was paint I already had on hand so this whole project was free for me.  If I were buying the paint I probably would have gotten a semi-gloss but what I had was satin and that works too.  So here's the final outcome.

I'm super happy with it.  But as you can see now I need to do the trim.  But for now it's a lot better than it was.  And as my Mom and I discussed... Why in the world did I take so long to knock out this simple and effective project!?

Before and After again...

 Ta-dah!

Back to the appraisal.  We should find within the next few days if it went well.  If it did,  we will get to knock off about 16% of our current monthly mortgage payment!  I sure am hoping that all the hard work I've been putting into this house has paid off.  We'll see!