This Absolutely Gorgeous 1950s House Was Renovated Inside and Out for $50K (2024)

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Natalie Paquin, a realtor with Remax Real Estate, and her husband, Graham Pangrass, basically started renovating this house — a two-bedroom, 1,100-square-foot house incentral Edmonton — as soon as they received the keys! “Our main focus initially was the exterior, where we knew we wanted to remove the sunken front deck, paint the stucco, and replace the torn-up siding with vintage looking brick,” Natalie begins. But the interior needed lots of work too.

“We knew we were in for a big renovation, both inside and out, so every year we set a new goal and a new budget for what projects we wanted to complete that year,” Natalie admits, explaining that the entire renovation budget for the house was $50K for both the exterior and the interior work.

Natalie says they DIYed quite “literally everything except for any electrical or plumbing needs,” admitting that her dad also helped a lot with the renovations, installing all the new hardwood floors and all the tiles in both the house’s bathrooms.

“We’ve saved a lot of money along the way by doing everything ourselves and sourcing salvaged material whenever we can,” Natalie continues. “Just about any supplies we need, I try to find it on Marketplace or salvage yards first. Although we’ve since surpassed our initial budget over the last four and a half years, it’s surprisingly not by much and likely only due to me changing my mind 1,000 times on our designs!”

While Natalie says plenty of the projects in their home could be categorized as renter-friendly, the biggest challenge of renovating this house was “reworking the layout of our main floor. We knew on our first walk-through of the house that we would need to alter the layout. It was really closed off and had an extremely small inconvenient kitchen with NO dining room,” she writes, explaining that they ended up relocating the kitchen across the house, turning an original bedroom into a dining space.

“It was extremely challenging taking on this reno, not only for budget reasons, but because our old kitchen needed to become the new and only guest bedroom in the house,” Natalie continues. “The old kitchen was only roughly 7 feet wide by 11 feet long, so it makes for a very tiny bedroom. But in doing so, we gained our dream kitchen, a dining space, a bigger bathroom, and a now super cozy guest bedroom. It was hard making the call going from a three-bedroom house to only a two-bedroom, but these changes better suit our lifestyle!”

Of course, as with many renovations, there were surprises. “We initially thought we would fully finish our renovations in two to three years and here we are almost five years in, still going! We’ve definitely learned to tweak our timelines as we go (and our budget too, ha!).” Follow along with Natalie’s home renovations on her Instagram account, @natalieapaquin.

Resources

PAINT & COLORS

ENTRY

LIVING ROOM

DINING ROOM

KITCHEN

BEDROOM

MAIN FLOOR BATHROOM

PRIMARY BATHROOM

Thanks, Natalie!

This tour’s responses and photos were edited for length/size and clarity.

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