When professional writer Beth Franken tackled her first flip in her hometown of Oak Park, she didn’t just enter the rehab world for the first time, she documented the process for the entire Chicago area to follow along.
With a series of columns in the Chicago Tribune’s real estate section, Franken catalogued the highs and lows of turning a Prairie-style two flat into a single-family home.
During the process, Franken learned a lot about home renovations and more about her capacity to handle the challenges that inevitably occur when you open up the walls of a 104-year-old building.
Franken had been looking for the perfect flip opportunity with her Realtor, Linda Rooney of Re/Max in the Village, for months when 109 S. Taylor Ave. hit the market. The two-flat had been in the same family for more than 50 years and wasn’t in the best shape.
Part of making a flip work financially was finding a property that was priced right and ripe for a makeover. The fact that the property was a short-sale property meant that it was within Franken’s budget, but it also meant that maintenance had been deferred and that the timeline for the purchase stretched beyond a typical time frame.
“I made an offer in October of 2015, but they accepted another offer,” Franken said. “In December, when that first offer fell through, my offer was accepted, but I didn’t actually get the property until May 2016.”
Franken says the property had a typical Chicago two-flat layout, with a side entrance opening up to a first-floor unit with bedrooms on the side, living and dining rooms at the front, and a kitchen in the back. The front door opened directly into a walled-off stair case that led to the second-floor unit.
Working with a team from T.U. Ciesielski Architects Ltd., Franken came up with a floor plan to open the two units up to each other and shore up the home. The unstable side entrance to the first floor was removed, and the opening was turned into a large closet. The wall separating the front staircase from the first-floor living room was removed to open up the space.
The first-floor bedrooms were altered to create a full bathroom, a large office that also serves as s first-floor guest bedroom, and a family room off of the kitchen. Franken credits her architect with helping her achieve her vision with dramatic changes to the first floor that took advantage of the home’s attributes.
“He thought of centering the French doors in the guest room on the stained-glass windows in the adjacent dining room,” Franken said.
She also asked him for help implementing her vision of a modern kitchen.
“I wanted to do something that was contemporary and modern but still fit with the traditional house,” Franken said. “Oak Park is a very cosmopolitan town. It draws downtown-y people. I wanted to do a downtown kitchen.”
She removed the back staircase, and tore off a dangerous rear, two-story porch to give the kitchen views of the backyard and incorporate a rear entrance to the yard.
Design choices
In the kitchen, Franken incorporated modern, clean lines to achieve her contemporary feel. Horizontal cabinets, a quartz-topped island, and grey subway tile give the room a sleek feel.
Throughout the rest of the house, Franken balanced modern and traditional to maintain the historic house feel while creating spaces that work for today’s families. On the first floor, she spent days refinishing and cleaning original doors.
When all of the original wood molding could not be saved, she chose a profile for new trim that would complement the original craftsman-style woodwork throughout the house.
She mined the ReUse Depot in Maywood and her own house for antique light fixtures that fit right in to the entry and hall on the first floor. In the home’s three full bathrooms, she went all new, knowing that new plumbing and bathrooms and are on the top of most homebuyers’ wish lists.
Franken calls the master suite bathroom her favorite room in the house. Set off with a sliding barn door, this room was a part of Franken’s learning curve. She bought the sconces for the room at Oak Park’s Divine Consign before she even signed the contract on the house, but other design choices proved much harder to implement.
“I tried three different vanities in here before I found one that worked,” she said. “A standard U.S. vanity is 24 inches deep. I bought a 6-foot-long vanity, but it felt too crowded in here. Then I tried a 5-foot vanity, and it still felt too big. Finally, I figured out I needed something more narrow, and I worked with a carpenter to combine three Ikea vanities with a custom top.”
She sold the first two vanities on Craigslist, and she didn’t lose much money on the experimentation, but says the time spent and headaches involved were all part of the learning experience.
Roadblocks and progress
She hit another roadblock when she chose to tear down the coach house at the rear of the property.
“The village didn’t want me to knock it down, basically, because it was something that was already there,” Franken said.
Franken had to hire a building engineer to assess the coach house, which was determined to be structurally unsound. So, down it came, but at a hefty cost.
“It cost as much to knock it down as it did to build a new two-car garage,” Franken said.
Franken is the first to admit that her first foray into flipping came with a lot of experiences that required navigating the village system and the remodeling world. At the end of the day, she called the process a lot of fun.
“I’m a writer and I worked for 15 years with graphic designers in an ad agency,” Franken said. “I developed an eye for design, but I had never done this before. I learned a lot through this – from people in stores, my architect and my contractors – all in an industry I’ve never been in before.”
Franken finally wrapped up the project in May and listed the five-bedroom, three-bath home with Rooney for $799,800. One takeaway for Franken? Popular television shows on house flipping tend to present the good without too much of the realism that goes into an actual flip.
“There’s a huge interest in those reality shows, but they’re not very realistic,” Franken said. “Everything happens very quickly and doesn’t cost a lot of money.”
For her, cutting corners just didn’t make sense. Not only did she have to pass rigorous Oak Park inspections, but as she notes, “I live in the community, a mile away from this place. I did everything the right way because this is where I live.”
