Megan Kitt, Author at Eco Club

As I type this, my fingers are stained a deep brown—espresso, as its manufacturer named it—a souvenir from spending the last few days sanding, staining and (soon!) sealing the banister on the loft of my fixer-upper.

I’ve spent the last year slowly renovating a traditional plantation-style house in Hawaii, an endeavor that’s been both fun and frustrating, and promises to yield a nice profit. I have another year until it’s finished, a timeline established by my work schedule and by the fact that my husband is more often at sea working as a submariner than he is home, so I do most the work myself.

Fixer-uppers are common investments these days (thanks, Joanna Gaines!), but I’ve been around them my whole life. My parents own a home-building company, and in their spare time, they flipped homes. We lived in and renovated some rough-looking houses during my childhood. Once they pristine and polished, they’d sell and buy a new one.

As a kid, this used to embarrass me. Now, it excites me.

Over the next few months, I’m going to share some of my renovating stories. I’ve built interior walls to add a new bedroom, rewired my kitchen, laid flooring, and done a lot of painting (seriously, it never ends). For now, I’m going to share what my family taught me about how to pick and renovate the perfect project home.

You want a fixer, not a fiasco

The key to a good flip house is finding one that has the cliché of the industry: good bones. As I was searching for this house, I found one intriguing property that had foundation and roof issues—and I wasn’t about to mess with that, so I moved on.

The house I settled on was an older, plantation-style home with gross carpet, an inexplicable wall blocking the fridge from the rest of the kitchen, and no driveway. I often say that if the owners had simply given the place a coat of paint before they’d listed it, I couldn’t have afforded it.

The house needed a lot of cosmetic work, but it didn’t need anything structural. I found a reliable, well-reviewed inspector who told me what to worry about, and more than that, told me what was solid. Inspectors can’t catch everything, but they can catch a lot, so make sure you get a good one, and research the list of problems they give you. Stay away from the huge problems and stick with the cosmetic, or budget for the larger fixes.

Keep it classic

It’s so easy to look at Pinterest and follow everything you see. Shiplap! Gray and navy cabinets! Butcher blocks!

If you’re planning to flip the house in only a few months, following trends isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, if you plan to buy and live in a house like I am, consider what you say when you look at houses: “Ugh, look at that recessed wall for a TV.” “That sponge paint.” “That carpet over hardwood!” The audacity!

All of those things were trends not too long ago. So when you two-tone your cabinets or spend a nice chunk of money herringbone tile floor, remember: In a few years, people might look at your house and call your reclaimed wood accent wall so 2019. They might wonder if they can negotiate down the price because of all the updates it needs.

My solution? I keep things classic with the expensive things, like counters and flooring, and follow the trends with décor. I once took a “Millennial Apartment Bingo” quiz from Apartment Therapy, and I checked almost every box—my house is decorated according to what’s in fashion, but the home itself is classic. The flooring, paint, and kitchen fixtures I chose are timeless, and won’t date the house. If people can tell when it was renovated, every passing year is a liability.

Location, location, location

Okay, it’s cliché. But it’s true. Every market is different, but on Oahu, traffic is a way of life. I’ve been stuck in traffic jams at 1 a.m. on multiple occasions. So, when I was looking for homes, I made sure to find a house that was centrally located. In addition to its central location, my fixer-upper has ocean, city, and Diamond Head views, which will always be valuable. Sure, I could get a bigger house with fewer needs in the ‘burbs, but I bought my home two years ago, and watching how property has appreciated, I know I made the right choice prioritizing location over size. Do research to determine what matters in your market, but no matter where you are, location will always be important.

Don’t get emotionally attached

This is the hardest for me. Here comes another cliché, but when you pour your blood (literally), sweat (hello, it’s Hawaii!), and tears (of anger) into a house, it’s hard not to get attached. So, when you’re looking at finishes for your home, it’s easy to want to go with what you want, not what is rational and financially sound.

In my house, there have been times when it made sense to go high-end (as with our floors or countertops). There have been times when it made more financial sense to do something mid-range (keep an eye out for an article about how I rehabbed my custom-built cabinets!). When you’ve put so much time and money into something, it’s easy to get caught up in what you personally would like, but it’s important to always focus on your return on investment. Great floors will increase the value of your home. Expensive baseboard trim? Probably not.

Know when to DIY and when to call the pros

As I mentioned, I’ve done the bulk of my renovation projects myself, or with my husband when he’s here, but it’s important to know your limits and when to call in a professional.

My dad once told me you aren’t a homeowner until you wonder what the homeowner before you was thinking. He’s right: I’ve never been so annoyed as I was when I tore down some wallpaper and discovered someone hung the drywall in our living room wrong. You’re supposed to hang it 1/2” off the subfloor to avoid moisture issues, but there it was, brazenly perched right on the subfloor with the telltale discoloration of water damage.

One of the reasons my renovation is taking so long is that I spent months fixing incorrectly installed drywall left behind by our previous owner, and it’s thankless work because fixing it yields no cosmetic difference.

I’m all for tackling a project yourself when you can. In fact, tons of people warned me against hanging my own drywall when my husband and I were building our interior walls, though I considered that a challenge. However, I spent countless hours researching how to do it right, and when it got monotonous, I didn’t cut corners, even though mudding drywall takes forever to do right.

If you don’t have the time or desire to be so meticulous about important projects, it’s better to hire a pro. I’m grateful I caught the drywall issue when I did, because that could have been much more expensive in the long run than the cost of professional drywall installation would have been in the first place.

My parents, my professional advisory, have been very encouraging in all my DIY home improvement exploits, but they’ve also told me when I should call someone in for help. Certain things are better not done at all than done poorly.

So far, my experience renovating has been positive. It’s been frustrating, and a bit more work than I anticipated, but it’s also been oddly empowering completing these projects on my own. As I mentioned, my husband is often at sea or deployed, so I’ve done a lot of the work on our house myself, with a business to run and a baby to raise. Knowing I’m capable of these things has created confidence that’s hard to describe.

Our home’s value has increased, too. We are confident in our investment and our greatest worry about the house is whether we should keep it and rent it or sell it and take our equity. Buying a home is always a risk, and not one to be taken lightly, but with work ethic, a penchant for hard work, and some vision, a fixer-upper can be a rewarding, difficult, and prudent investment.

In the coming posts, I’ll be sharing progress along with my tips for doing DIY right, keeping things eco friendly whenever we can, and as affordable as possible too.

Do you have any questions about tackling a fixer-upper for me? Find more green living ideas here!

The streets of Thailand are swarmed movement: the three-wheeled tuk-tuks, jam-packed songthaews, and zipping motorbikes cram among cars and buses, a mix that earned the country first place in the world’s most congested roads.

But of all the modes of transportation available in Thailand, the most somber is the elephant. Often adorned with colorful ornaments and fabrics with a haphazard seat tied to its back, the elephants trudge along the sides of roads in tourist cities. I couldn’t help but feel something was off the first time I saw them.

Riding elephants remains a ubiquitous part of travel in Southeast Asia: If you can’t ‘Gram a photo of you atop a massive elephant, did you even go? However, the practice is rooted in cruelty.

Babies are ripped from their mothers and subject to a process called phajaan, or in English, “the crush.” Deprived of food or sleep, the elephants are beaten and stabbed with hooks and sometimes even blinded until they learn to submit to the mahouts who train them. The cruelty rarely ends after training, and elephants comply with their mahout in fear of violent retribution. Not only that, but also, elephants aren’t built to support humans on their backs, causing a painful strain on their spines.

Staying away from elephant rides was an easy choice for me. But as I traveled around Thailand, I learned that the issue of elephants in Southeast Asia is much more complicated than simply abstaining from riding.

Asian Elephants are listed as endangered, and their numbers have decreased by 50% over the last three generations. It’s still in descent today. While reducing the demand for animal tourism in Thailand helps, it ignores one problem: there’s not enough empty land in Thailand, or other Southeast Asian countries, for a robust, wild population. Across Asia, elephants have lost 85% of their original habitat.

I deal with issues of land in developing countries constantly in my work with Tuli. In East Africa, colonizers created wildlife refuges that protect big game species today, but no such refuges were established in Southeast Asia and, as you can imagine in such a densely populated region, there’s simply no room.

A solution many developing countries implements is simply kicking people out. Currently, the Ugandan government is rehabbing former wetlands that currently house a dense residential area on the outskirts of Kampala. To do this, the government canceled the land titles for parcels on this plot, without paying title holders—but only in the slums, not in a nearby, wealthier area that also spans the wetlands. Land is survival, people in the slum tell me, and the rehab is forcing the country’s poorest to start from zero. My hope is that, if Thailand takes a similar approach, the poor are not left vulnerable.

In the meantime, however, Thailand sits with its elephant problem. Many opposed to elephant rides are opposed to domesticating elephants as well, and for good reason, considering the abhorrent process of the phajaan. but if released, where would the endangered species go?

While in Chiang Mai, I visited Elephant Nature Park, a nonprofit organization that buys elephants out of the tourism industry and rescues them from the illegal logging industry. It also teaches local mahouts nonviolent training techniques for their elephants, much like the way I used positive reinforcement to train my dog.

My time at the park was, in my opinion, more fun than any elephant ride could have been. We drove high into the mountains to a Karen village, where the park teaches local mahouts ethical training and rehabilitates its new rescues before integrating them into the herd at Elephant Nature Park’s sanctuary.

We walked newly rescued Kham Moon through the jungle, helping her accustom herself to freedom and watching her trample trees and use her trunk to bring bark and grass to her mouth. We then took her to a swimming hole, where we rubbed mud on her to keep her cool under the hot, Thai sun. Splashing around with her and sliding in the mud, I got to appreciate her size and mourn her past.

It’s important when traveling not to blindly trust any animal tourism attraction that slaps “sanctuary” into its title, because the word alone doesn’t make a place ethical. I did hours of research and interviewed its workers while there, and was impressed with what I found. It also seems, to me, like a good solution to the lack of natural habitat for an IUCN Red-listed animal.

But not everyone agrees. At the park, I spoke with a Finnish elephant rights activist who came to Thailand to scope out elephant sanctuaries, and she told me she thought all elephants should be released to the wild. Curious, I asked if she thought extinction was a better scenario than domestication.

“That would be better for them than a life of captivity,” she said.

Personally, I think that’s a bit extreme. However, there’s a vein of thought that agrees release is the most ethical option, and it deserves a place in this discussion.

Regardless, it’s important for us as travelers to know that when we visit another country, we must assess our actions. Had there been no demand for elephant experiences in the tourism industry, these elephants would not have been so mistreated. Now that the demand is waning, the mistreatment is, too.

A friend who lives in Chiang Mai told me that since my visit there’s been a sharp decrease in ads for rides, as well as fewer sad elephants doing tricks and posing for selfies on roadsides. In a few years, she hopes the rides will be gone for good.

This is great news, not just for elephants, but for travelers in general: It’s easy to feel discouraged at the enormity of problems in the world.

How could my singular choice to abstain from elephant rides change anything? The thing is, it alone can’t. But my choice, and your choice, and everyone’s choices, added together, can.

5 Things to Know Before Tackling a Fixer Upper