Better Than New Page 5

  It all made sense. The next week, I dropped E off at school and went to get my real estate license. Sitting in classes for three weeks, I wanted to kick myself for not having done it years earlier and for all the money I had missed out on.

  Ethan Rollerblading in the new house.

  The Minneapolis real estate market was on fire. We were bursting at the seams in our rental, and it was driving me nuts that I couldn’t even paint a wall. For six months, we got outbid on houses. We were used to “Detroit prices,” as one person put it after Christopher and I complained about getting outbid on yet another house. A house would go on the market and by noon, there would be multiple offers. The stress of all that and the arguments over money were too much. I had always been independent, but at the same time, I always did and still do think of the man as the provider. Christopher didn’t see it that way. Just as all hell was about to break loose, we had the winning offer on our Yellow house and our energy and our relationship were renewed. The day we won the bid, we were offered twenty thousand dollars to walk away. I was shocked and saddened when we couldn’t find another house to buy. Can you imagine making twenty thousand dollars in one day? I was intrigued. If the market was this crazy, Christopher and I knew we had to get going. The house was a fore­closure and a mess. It wasn’t pretty, but I spent a week cleaning and painting getting ready for us to move in. Ethan was excited about the new place and took much joy in being able to Rollerblade through the empty house.

  We moved on Easter weekend of 2008. Easter is a spring holiday, but what we soon learned about Minneapolis is that it has two seasons: summer and winter. We ended up moving in a foot of snow.

  From March 2008 to June 2009, I was hustling real estate and renovating the Yellow house. Christopher was devoting more and more hours to work; every day he’d come home and I’d have one project completed and another new idea in the works. Ethan loved being in the city—we were within walking distance of the lakes, and he had many new friends in the neighborhood.

  Ethan steering our canoe through Lake Calhoun.

  Our house was in a section of the city called Uptown, and everything else—Ethan’s school and my office—was in our old neighborhood. Every day, I drove by a 1916 Arts and Crafts mansion on Minnehaha Parkway. The house had seen better days, but I knew that it could be stunning. The architectural style was more Santa Monica than Minneapolis. It had a Spanish clay tile roof, tons of large windows, and a stacked stone foundation and entryway surround. It had such potential. The problem was, it wasn’t for sale. Even if it had been, I didn’t think we could have afforded it. As the months clicked by, we finished the Yellow house, adding a master suite and restoring every inch of it. Once we finished, I was eager to invest in another house. I found the perfect candidate: a fixer-upper on Grand Avenue. I called it the 20K house because that’s what it cost. I made the owners an offer on the low end of reasonable, which was what we could afford. The offer was refused. It was summer vacation, so I scooped up Ethan and my dogs, Max and Polly, and drove to Michigan in our old Ranger pickup truck. These days you won’t catch me on a road trip, but back then it cost a thousand dollars to fly and a couple hundred bucks and two days to drive. I had more time than money, so road trip it was.

  The Minnehaha house exterior, before (left) and after (right) renovations.

  To be honest, as much as I was rocking out in Minneapolis, I was starting to think it was time to reconsider Detroit. I knew I could sell our Yellow house fast, and I was pretty sure Christopher would be just fine being a bachelor again. Once I was back in Michigan, I could see that there was actually a lot of opportunity for me to jump into real estate in Detroit. Ethan stayed on a little longer in Michigan. I was back in Minneapolis and had pretty much decided to bail. I was headed down Lyndale Avenue to check in at my office when God intervened.

  Many years of Christmas photos taken at our Yellow house.

  I noticed a bright red-and-white For Sale sign on Minnehaha’s front lawn. I pulled over and called Christopher. He didn’t answer. I’m known for long-winded voice mails (even though the voice mail on my own phone was always exclusively for my grandparents; everyone else knows I won’t listen to their messages, and my voice mail doesn’t even have a greeting). My voice mails are most of the time not even intelligible. When I get excited about something, like my dream home hitting the market, it’s a mixture of screams, probably a “holy shit,” and more screams. So I said, “This is so awesome. Okay, okay, call me back!”

  The house was wide open and people were walking in and out. A property in that neighborhood on the market in foreclosure was rare, so people were drawn to it like a moth to a flame—it was going to be hot.

  As soon as I got inside the house, I fell even more in love. Everywhere you looked, there was stunning original woodwork and space galore. The house had windows upon windows that brought in tons of light and air. But even for me, the amount of work Minnehaha would require was staggering. The last owner, before it had been foreclosed on, had lived in the house for a year without water or heat. Therefore, almost every wall was severely cracked. Everything in the house was shot. The basement was the worst part. It was flooded and had been for a long time. It was so murky down there that it was actually scary. I didn’t care. I knew it was just a matter of a lot of hard work to turn the house into a unique treasure, a standout in the Minneapolis landscape. Plus, all the damage inside was scaring off other potential buyers. I heard people saying, “Well, we’d just need to tear it down and build something new on the lot.” Horrified at that thought, I called Christopher and left another message, saying, “This is it!” As much as we had our differences, Christopher knew that if I said “This is it!” I was usually right.

  Apparently, every other savvy investor thought Minnehaha was a hot mess and no one put in an offer. I told Christopher, “I’m either a genius or an idiot.” There are only a few people who see the advantage of risk, and I’m one of them. Christopher and I put in an offer, and the bank actually came back with a lower number. I still don’t understand why, but I’ve never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. We just moved ahead.

  The Minnehaha kitchen, before (top); Ethan checking out the progress (bottom, left); and the same kitchen, after (bottom, right).

  A few days later, the agent for the Grand Avenue house called. The buyer who had outbid me had lost his financing. That house was mine, too, if I could still swing it. I thought, This is it. Sink or swim, Nic. I can’t swim, but I think as long as you manage to keep your head above water, that’s good enough. So I told Christopher, “Let’s do both.”

  It was not going to be easy. Between the two properties, we would need about one hundred thousand dollars in cash: twenty thousand to buy the Grand Avenue house, and eighty thousand for the down payment on Minnehaha. We created a spreadsheet of everyone we knew who might loan us money. We decided to refinance my Ferndale house to get the twenty thousand dollars for the Grand Avenue house (aka the 20K house). Then we called everyone we could and put together the down payment for Minnehaha bit by bit. It still wasn’t a done deal, but I said, “If it works, I stay. If it doesn’t, I’m going back to Detroit.”

  I headed to my office to send over the offers on both houses. The receptionist casually said, “Nicole, you know your office voice mail is full?” I didn’t even know I had office voice mail; I always gave out my cell number. One message in particular caught my attention. It was from a production assistant for Magnetic Productions. He said he wanted to line up real estate experts who could go on camera for segments on a TV show.

  The message was two weeks old. I sat there shaking my head. Leave it to me not to check my messages. I called the guy back and, to my surprise, he told me to come in the next day.

  The next morning, I pitched a couple of ideas aloud, using my dogs, Max and Polly, as my audience. A very successful friend of mine from years back always told me to practice aloud before speaking to ot
hers so that it wouldn’t be startling for me to hear my own voice (and if you lose your audience, to smile and say “God bless America”—you always end with cheers). So there I was with Max and Polly. Remember, I was the little bookworm girl whom no one expected a peep out of, and then . . . I got my voice. Psyching myself up was nothing new. For years, I played the flute in school, and every week someone could challenge me for my seat. I wanted to be first chair, which was the “best” player. I traded the chair with another girl from week to week. I would come in with my band book covered in stickies with acronyms: YCDI (“You can do it.”). When the time came to perform for the chair, I’d look down at those notes and think, Hell yeah, I got this. I’m pretty sure my parents let me know that in twenty years no one would remember if I was first chair or last, but—aha!—I remember, and for the most part, I was first chair.

  As I was leaving the house, I thought, if I’m going in to talk to somebody about a TV show, I’m going to walk out of there with my own TV show. I should note that I’d had a Coke for breakfast. This thought wasn’t so much overconfidence as it was something I call “caffeine courage.” I’m already a high-energy person, and the caffeine took it to another level. By the time I arrived at Magnetic Productions in the cool, historic North Loop downtown, I was on fire. I wasn’t a huge TV person. In fact, I’m that parent who believes “screen time” is bad. We didn’t have a TV in the house until Ethan was five, but I knew enough to know that no one on TV was celebrating the kind of home improvement I did.

  I was met at the door by the production assistant, and he started sizing up my qualifications right away.

  “Tell me about your experiences as a realtor.”

  “You know, I’m not just a realtor. I’m also an investor and I renovate homes,” I told him, and launched into my spiel: I save old houses. I do a lot of the work myself. I do this and I do that.

  “No way.”

  “Yep.”

  He looked at me for a second, like he was deciding something. Then he left the room and came back with John Kitchener, the owner of the company. John is a tall, slim man—Steve Jobs without the glasses. I would later find out that he was a cancer survivor, and I think that contributed to his no-nonsense, straight-shooting demeanor. He came in, introduced himself, and gave me a puzzled look. “Wait a minute, now, tell me what you do?”

  I told him that my goal was to invest in the houses that no one else wanted, renovate them in a historic manner, and put them back on the market. I told him about my Ferndale house and my Yellow house.

  John said, “What do you mean—you’re flipping?”

  “Well, technically, yes. But flipping isn’t really what I do. I bring the houses back to life, leaving their integrity intact.”

  He said, “No one is flipping; it’s dead. All those shows have been canceled.” (John was correct. This was 2009, and the housing market was in terrible shape. All the HGTV shows were about design, not real estate ventures.)

  This business card photo led to my days (years) on Rehab Addict.

  I said to him, “Not in Minneapolis; this market is hot.”

  “So you do the work.” He rubbed his forehead. To be fair, I didn’t look like someone who would ever think of breaking a nail, let alone getting dirty. I was wearing high heels and my favorite black suit with a vest instead of a jacket, and my hair was down. “You do drywall, you do plumbing, like all of that?”

  “Yeah, I’ve learned to do it all.”

  “All right, so if we showed up with a camera tomorrow, you’d be working on a house?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “You know what? You need your own show.”

  “Yeah, I probably do,” I said with a smirk.

  The assistant, still standing there looking for a consultant for his project, which I found out was Sweat Equity, wasn’t quite sure what had just happened. “Should I book her for Sweat Equity?”

  John said, “No, she’s not doing Sweat Equity. We’re going to do a show about her.” I actually ended up doing a cameo on Sweat Equity when they were in a pinch for a guest realtor later on after I had my show. I never saw it—my friends told me, “Don’t watch it; you were horrible in realtor mode.”

  The painted archway in the basement, before (left), and the finished basement, after (right).

  When people ask how I got my show, I tell them about everything that led me to it: the house going up for sale, and the random production assistant scanning the Internet for a TV-ready realtor for a cameo finding my absolutely terrible website photo. But most of all, I talk about being in the right place at the right time. John had just started the company. Production companies make their money by producing shows and selling them to networks. He had run Edelman Productions for years, but the company had just closed its office in Minneapolis to focus on the West Coast. John took over the contract for Sweat Equity and started out on his own. But that’s all he had—a few episodes of one show that might not get renewed, which is not exactly enough to keep an entire company afloat. John needed new shows to sell, and he was hungry. That’s where luck came in. Companies like his succeed only by throwing ideas at the network and seeing what sticks. I was determined to make the idea of Nicole Curtis, historic home renovator, stick.

  I called Christopher and told him to meet me for dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant downtown. While I waited for Christopher, I couldn’t contain myself. You have to share good news, but I’m superstitious to a fault. I sent a text to my friend Keith: “I don’t want to jinx myself, but I just had an interview with a production company and they want to shoot a show about me.” He wrote back, “That’s awesome.” I replied, “No jinxes. I just needed to tell somebody. We’re not going to talk about it. We’re never going to bring it up. ” And, true to my word, we never did until I had a signed contract.

  When Christopher sat down and heard what had happened, he got fired up. He had on his marketing guy hat and was thinking a mile a minute.

  According to Ethan, there’s no resemblance at all. Hmmm.

  “This is fantastic. You can be a brand, like Martha Stewart. We can flip houses and get them press so that we can sell them for top dollar. We can build a business off this. What are we going to do for a house?”

  “We can use the Grand Avenue house.”

  The Grand Avenue house (not to be confused with my future Detroit Grand Boulevard house) hadn’t been worked on in maybe sixty years. Anything that had been done was pretty much a combination of duct tape and contact paper. The woman who had lived there since the 1940s had been moved to a nursing home. It was like a time capsule. In fact, Martha, the next-door neighbor, who was in her nineties, had been born right in her house. Two lifers on this street that had seen better days. I was determined to bring back those better days to Grand Avenue. The buyer who had outbid me had plans to tear down this skinny little house. The Grand Avenue house needed everything done to it, and it would be the first house I saved from demolition. While renovating the Yellow house, I had found a carpenter on Craigslist to help me with projects. Slade showed up with a truck full of tools and a zest for old woodwork that matched mine. I called him in on the Grand project, along with a painter I had met. Thinking back to my housecleaning days, I knew I would make more money if I actually hired extra help. We would restore the house inside two months, and have it sold in three.

  Sarah, Keith, and me (left). Me and Keith (right).

  It seemed like the perfect candidate for a TV show. In TV it’s all about the ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan. And even though I thought it was a beautiful house, it looked like everyone else’s worst nightmare. Christopher and I talked all through dinner. By the time we left, we had a whole business model built around the possibility of this show. It was never about people recognizing me; I saw the show as a cash cow, a way to pay for Ethan’s college education.

  The next day, I got a call from Mar
y Kay Reistad, a producer at Magnetic. She wanted to make a short video to pitch my show to networks. Mary Kay gave me a brief introduction about how it worked and what I needed to do on camera. The cameraman followed me as I did my first walk-and-talk. I used it as a chance to clearly state my personal mission, which would become the driving vision behind Rehab Addict.

  “I’ve always seen the integrity in old homes. I don’t want to go in and just slap together a renovation. I don’t want to do houses like everyone else does them. I want to celebrate what is unique about any house. My biggest pet peeve is when I look at houses that have been renovated and they all look the same. When people walk into one of my houses, I want them to be like, ‘Wow, this is perfect!’ I want them to understand what is so special about a historical structure, especially an old house.”

  I had never filmed anything like it. After a few runs, it felt natural. I just talked to the camera like I would talk to anyone about what I love. If you are truly knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, it comes easy. After they filmed the segment, Mary Kay wanted some action sequences. She asked me if I could do some work on my next house. I took her and the cameraman over to the Grand Avenue house—which we hadn’t even started to work on—and did some demolition in the upstairs closet. The shot eventually made it into what became the opening credits for Rehab Addict. It’s a quick shot, but it goes to show how green I was. I had worn a little red T-shirt and my belly button was exposed—on camera. Lesson learned; enter long black tank tops.