It took walking through 27 homes for Calder Justice to find a “piece of junk” in Brookhaven. After nearly a year of work and about $120,000, the house was repaired, and the interior now resembles a cabin in the northwest.
Justice, 29, moved here from Montana to work as senior project team leader for Duluth’s AGCO Corp., a designer, manufacturer and distributor of agricultural machinery. He chatted about renovating the HUD foreclosure that he found with the help of Hannah Beaver with Harry Norman, Realtors.
Q: Why did you focus on Brookhaven?
A: Whenever I’m out, I’m doing something with my church (Peachtree Presbyterian), which is off Roswell Road. (Brookhaven is) centered around my life — where my friends live, where I go to church and where I play.
Q: How did you find the home?
A: Hannah emailed me saying, I’ve got this place that you’ve got to see. I think I was out of town. She was like, look you’ve got to come over here. I basically spent all afternoon with Hannah at this house with no air conditioning. (We discussed) what can be done? There were some structural issues. It needed a new furnace. It needed a new air compressor. It needed a new roof. It needed floor support. It needed new floors, new windows. Then we get into it, and we find that there wasn’t any insulation in the home at all.
Q: How did you renovate the home?
A: It was kind of a bit-by-bit thing (with contractor Roland LeClaire, of Chamblee-based Building Knowledge). We’d talk — How do we want to do this bedroom? This closet? That would take a few weeks. Then OK, we’ll move onto the next room.
Q: What do you like about the result?
A: We made it look like a cabin. Roland, being from Montana himself, understood my need to still want to be in Montana, but trapped in the city. We did timbers inside. Instead of a headboard, we made the whole wall out of pallet wood. I also made it a smart home, being able to control my lights, HVAC, security system, TV and stereo all from my iPhone.
Q: Did you expand the size?
A: We kept the same footprint. We changed it to a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath home (from four bedrooms). Downstairs it was two bedrooms, one full bath. It just wasn’t using good space. We made it into … a master bathroom suite. We added a front porch. We took that wood (from a backyard patio) and moved it over to the other side of the house. Then where the wood was, we put in a flagstone patio. We added a dormer in one of the upstairs bedrooms.
Q: What tips do you have for buyers making renovations?
A: If you have to do something that involves getting any permits from the county, surrender your time to them. For one reason or another, sometimes they’ll come the next day after you call in, sometimes they can take four weeks. It’s worth every bit of impatience that I had. It’s like, this is my place. I designed every square inch of it.
At a Glance
Calder Justice’s home, built in 1947 in Brookhaven’s Ashford Park neighborhood, has three bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths and about 1,317 square feet, according to DeKalb County tax records. He moved in during summer 2012. Homes in Ashford Park range from the high $100,000s to more than $1 million.
