I Bought This Fixer Upper for the View (Rainbow Ranch Before Photos)
I fell in love with this house before I ever set foot on the property.
I didn’t need to see it in person. My heart had already signed the papers. We spent the next several years updating almost every square inch of the place, and sold it in 2021. This is the before tour, from the very beginning.
Here is the listing that sold me:
3/3 Country home on 5+/- acres. Tx Mesquite flooring. Easy maintenance in-ground swimming pool w/waterfall. Breathtaking hill country views from your back deck. Multiple outbuildings for hobbies, storage and 1200 sq ft barn wired as a recording studio. 12×18 cedar cabin, 12×18 greenhouse, 30×60 dog pen, raised garden, 2500 gal water storage tank, black top driveway, wet weather creek, fully fenced & gated.
The Description vs The Reality
I read that listing out loud to my husband, way too excited. Â We were about to make an offer on a different house. Â It was a house that we had already toured and that already had multiple offers. Â That description changed everything. I called our realtor on the spot and told her I’d found the house we were going to buy.
Did it matter that we’d already been searching for 8 months? Â That the owner was a smoker? That almost every inch of the property needed attention? Â
Nope, all I could see was the potential and the view – the view that goes on for miles! Â The view that was about to be ours!
That’s how we came to own our little piece of heaven – our fixer upper and the spark for so many projects and ideas. Some are big, some are small and every one of them was just sitting there waiting for us. The listing photos? Let’s just say they were taken on a really good day.
The Tour from the Top
When you drive in from the road you’re above everything. You see is a little cluster of buildings, a lean to, and the house tucked down in a bit of a hole, with hints that somebody landscaped once upon a time in.
Standing at that gate the first time, I saw paint, repairs, touch-ups and a tear-down or two. Every project at once.
The House
This is the front of the house. The sidewalk goes from the front porch around the house and somebody painted it red.Â
I love color. I really do. But, even I have limits, and red concrete is one of them. (If it was hot pink, we’d be having a different conversation.)
The house needed a new roof, new windows and paint, and that was just the outside. The inside was its own “needs attention” story.
The Guest House
The cedar outbuilding is what we call the Guest House. It’s one room with a cute little deck out front and a window unit for heat and A/C. Inside, it’s finished in cedar and plywood. It’s a nice size for guests or an office, and it was in pretty good shape, which felt like a win on day one.
The Barn
The giant red building is what we call the barn. It’s not really a barn. It looks like it started life as a screened-in pole barn that someone later closed in, so technically it was a pole barn, once upon a time.
The previous owner built a recording studio inside it. That means there’s a whole building inside the building. You walk through the giant doors and there’s another building waiting for you. The upside is that it’s fully enclosed and insulated. The downside is that it’s a building inside a building.
Are you catching the red theme here?
The outside paint was in rough shape and the barn structure needed work, but the studio inside was well built. It was also the first thing you saw when you pulled through the gate, and it was not a pretty sight. At first it held storage while we downsized and remodeled.
We eventually updated the exterior of it but it still was just a giant storage unit for us.
The Greenhouse
We had a super cute little cedar greenhouse. It needed some minor repairs, and I was hopeful it would be part of a real garden someday. Bonus building, zero complaints.
The Shanty
We call this one The Shanty. That’s the listing photo, and it’s a generous one. By the time we bought the place, it leaned like one good Texas wind could carry it off. Red paint again, though. At least it’s consistent.
The Back Side of Things
This is the view from the pool, looking up at the back of the house. There’s red (peeling) paint on the concrete around the pool and on the steps up to the house. There’s also a very large deck that needs attention, a big covered patio closed in with screens and lattice, and yes, that roof again.
The Money Shot
Then I’d walk through the house to the back porch and forget every project on the list.
The view.
The view is amazing!
From back there, the property drops away and it’s pure Texas Hill Country: trees, a dry creek and not another house in sight. The pool and waterfall sit right below the house. This is what we call the money shot, the view that makes all of it worthwhile.
Okay, the red pool deck was a little distracting. It didn’t stay long. And maybe the view doesn’t technically go on for miles. But if you can look past the red concrete and see what it could be, you get it.
Every house I’ve loved started as a long list of projects plus one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. Here, it was the view. If your place feels like a to-do list right now, find your one thing and start there. The rest can wait its turn.
Where Rainbow Ranch ended up
We sold Rainbow Ranch in 2021, after updating almost every square inch of the property. The red concrete, the peeling paint, the barn inside a barn.
I spent so many hours using a power washer on red stain that I still have nightmares about it.
We used buckets of paint on the outside and the inside and transformed this house into our little dream home.
This project was the definition of years of blood, sweat and tears and I’m proud of all the work we did here. It was hard to hand it over to a new family but it was time
Projects from along the way
Rainbow Ranch was one of five houses in ten years, and every one of them started just like this: a long list and one thing I loved.
So tell me: what’s the one thing that made you fall for your house, even with everything on the list? Drop it in the comments.
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