Scott Jonathan - Dream Home: The Property Brothers Ultimate Guide to Finding & Fixing Your Perfect House

THIS BOOK PRESENTS THE RESEARCH, EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS OF ITS AUTHORS. IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A SUBSTITUTE FOR CONSULTATION WITH REAL ESTATE AND RENOVATION PROFESSIONALS SPECIFIC TO YOUR SITUATION. THE PUBLISHER AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY ADVERSE EFFECTS RESULTING DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY FROM INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK.

Copyright 2016 by SB Publications, LLC

Interior photography 2016 by David Tsay

Campfire photograph by Chris Large

2015, HGTV / Scripps Networks, LLC.

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Scott, Jonathan, (1978- ) author. | Scott, Drew, (1978- ) author.

Title: Dream home : the Property Brothers ultimate guide to finding & fixing your perfect house / Jonathan Scott, Drew Scott ; photography by David Tsay.

Description: New York, New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, [2016] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037674 | ISBN 9780544715677 (paper over board) | ISBN 9780544715905 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544873346 (special edition)

Subjects: LCSH: DwellingsRemodeling. | DwellingsInspection. | House buying.

Classification: LCC TH4816 .S43 2016 | DDC 643/.12dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037674

Book design by Rita Sowins / Sowins Design

v1.0416

For nurturing our creative instincts; for quenching our thirst for knowledge; for making us the men we are today...
... For Mom and Dad.

Drew gave up his tool belt for a stylish suit and a fancy pen.

WE GREW UP ON A RANCH, and as soon as we could hold a hammer we were helping our dad build fences, decks, and barns, and do renovations to our house. Each spring we had to sand down the white board fences throughout our five-acre property and re-paint each one so the fence would continue to look new and in good repair. There were more than 500 sections of fence, and we were paid 25 cents per section, which included the front and back of every board (three planks high), and the posts on either end of the sections. As you can imagine, we busted our butts after school and on the weekends for weeks to get the job done.

It didnt take us long to figure out how to be very efficient. Drew would work in front and hammer in any loose boards. Jonathan would go along behind, sand the boards down, and get rid of any old, chipping paint. Then Drew would come through and apply the new white paint. We had this choreography down to a fine art, taking less than five minutes total per section. Here we were at eight years old, already working out business strategy and calculating potential profits. Doing the math, it came out to about $3.75 per hour. Thinking back on it now... we may have been scammed. But back then we thought we were cashing in. Thats ranch labor for you. We definitely learned the value of a dollarand a hard days work. The total earnings may have been peanuts, but at that age we felt like big shots.

Both of us have always been interested in aesthetics (and Jonathan has always been interested in his hair). When we were in elementary school we would make the typical mugs and birdhouses, but wed always make them bigger and more colorful than the other kids. Jonathan called them the Frankensteind versions, and our parents were very proud of our efforts, no doubt. We would constantly take on little projects to fix up or create something at home too. Although the solutions were not up to Jonathans standards today, our hearts were in the right place. For example, whenever Jonathan would see a chip in a piece of furniture, hed take a crayon and color it in to mask the flaw.

Or, if we overheard our parents saying they wanted a piece of art for a specific wall, we figured: Why buy when we could custom-make it? Jonathan would find old art that had a nice frame and mat. Drew would draw a new picture to go in it, often using pencil crayons, which are obviously the tool of choice for most famed artists. And when our parents went away for the day, wed completely rearrange the furniture in the house. Jonathan would push the sofa into a new position, and Drew would switch chairs, taking them out of one room and putting them in another and vice versa. That was probably a sign of things to come. Mom and Dad said it was sweet and endearing (although confusing), but were sure they probably also found it annoying to find all the furniture had been moved around.

We were seven years old when Jonathan first saw a magician performand he was hooked. After a few years he became a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and started developing his own tricks, which involved creating props. So his first woodworking projects, at age ten, were his own magic props. After coming up with an idea, hed sketch it out and then build the prop by hand with the tools our dad had shown us how to use. He started out with simple tricks, but by the time he was 15 he was building full-sized illusions. He took over the barn as a workshop and spent many long nights out there planning, sketching, and building while the horses stared blankly, wondering what he was up to. Little did they know he was making the impossible possible. Our parents would bring him a snack every few hours and check in just to make sure he hadnt made himself disappear. Over the years, he learned how to pick stronger, lighter-weight materials and how to work with them better. It was trial and error at its best... but always a learning experience.

By the time we graduated from high school, we were quite involved in the artsboth as actors in television plays and musicals: Drew as a director, and Jonathan as an illusionist (youve probably seen him do some tricks on our HGTV shows Property Brothers and Buying and Selling). On top of all that, making short, independent films was very important to us, so we wanted to continue feeding that creative flame.

On the other hand, we definitely didnt want to be starving artists coming out of high school or going through college, so we deduced that investing in real estate was a sure way to make the big bucks. In order to learn everything we could about investing in real estate, we purchased every property book we could get our hands on. We both had the ability to see potential in a space, and we had soaked up some investing knowledge from our parents over the years. Jonathan at that point knew a decent amount about construction (he had built his first house from top to bottom with our dad by the time he was 16). We figured wed put all this knowledge to work and try to make our mark in real estate... the only problem was, we didnt have the down payment everybody was telling us we needed. Well, our motto has always been, You can sleep when youre dead, and when we were up late one night, we caught an infomercial on how to make millions of dollars with no money down. It was like the TV was talking directly to us! (Yes, we actually bought the product. Dont judge.)