Their dream homes turned out to be renovation nightmares.
In 2022, Sean Patrick Gallagher, 36, and his husband, Alp Cilingir, 41, bought an abandoned house from the 1900s in foreclosure in Germantown, New York — a bucolic Hudson Valley town with views of the Catskill Mountains, a population just under 2,000 and part-time celeb residents such as Daniel Day-Lewis.
They paid $150,000 for the three bedroom-two bathroom home, which was once owned by the Rockefeller family, and budgeted another $250,000 for renovations — some of which they planned to do themselves. They thought they’d get a chic upstate retreat for cheap; houses down the street are now selling for over $1 million.
But, more than two years later, the couple, who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hardly feel like they got a deal — or a relaxing country home. They’ve spent over $1 million on the property and it still requires some fixes, like new siding.
“I just wanted to be the gay Martha Stewart,” lamented Gallagher, who works as a private chef, of going more than $500,000 over budget.
Priced out of newer construction and under the influence of aspirational home improvement content on social media and TV, city slickers like Gallagher and Cilingir are buying old homes with romantic plans for DIY renovations — often to disastrous and even dangerous results.
“I’ve had a client fly across the room after he was electrocuted trying to install his own electricity,” Alexander Sasha Josipovicz, interior designer and editor-in-chief of Objekt International, an interior design and art magazine told The Post, of the uptick in clients cosplaying as unqualified contractors.
Gallagher, 36 and a private chef, and Cilingir, who works in tech, soon found themselves in over their heads with the new home. It was riddled with rats, toxic mold, burst pipes, no electricity and a crumbling foundation. They felt like the roof was caving in — and it actually was.
Off the bat, they shelled out $22,500 for a professional mold remediation company, and even seemingly simple projects they thought they could do themselves proved difficult and expensive.
“I said, ‘We can refinish our doors … I’m a chef. I’m hands on and tactile. I can food style, I have design sense,” said Gallagher. But he quickly realized the skills didn’t translate and that the paint was too hard to remove.
“We had to hire someone to use a heating gun. The paint is so old and there’s so many layers of it it wouldn’t come off,” he recalled.
Repainting the walls inside the home was also much harder than it looked on Instagram.
“I said, ‘Oh it looks like Helen Keller did this,” Gallagher quipped after trying his hand at a few coats in the dining room.
Ultimately, they had to shell out and hire someone to paint.
“Instead of it costing $3,000 to DIY it cost $20,000,” said Gallagher, who will appear with Cilingir on the Magnolia Network reality show “In With The Old” — which follows home buyers as they renovate old, abandoned homes across the country — airing December 27.
The couple hired a contractor to redo all of the plumbing and electric in the house, as well as some of the framing and tile floors, but he made some things worse.
“We had to live with a lot of things that [our contractor] did incorrectly because they couldn’t be fixed. After a year, he still hasn’t even got the drywall up,” Gallagher told The Post.
Influencers Drew and Becky Bilden have more experience with home renovation, but they’ve also struggled with the 3,000-square foot, 1894 home they bought in Indiana last December.
The duo paid $150,000 for the home, and “thousands” of dollars on the renovation, Becky said, noting they had some generous brand partnerships with home goods companies that helped with budget.
“Up until July, the air [in the house] was not safe to breathe without a respirator because of the raccoon feces. A lot of them carry a parasite. We had to wear full hazmat suits, a respirator and eye protection,” Becky, 28, told The Post.
The house was previously owned by hoarders and, in addition to the raccoon poop, they’ve had to contend with; dead raccoons; mold; rats and mice; and lots of junk. The kitchen was filled to the brim with old appliances.
“It took a couple weeks just to take the trash out,” Becky said. They were quoted $10,600 for garbage removal and roped in friends and family to help to avoid the hefty cost.
But, there was treasure buried underneath some of the garbage littered around the house, including a gold coin from the 1800’s, a stamp collection, marble table, silver platter and jewelry, plus stacks of two dollar bills and silver dollars buried in a sock drawer.
The couple, who previously lived in South Carolina, has amassed 710,000 Instagram via their handle @BeckyBidlen, and another 215,000 on TikTok, since beginning the project a year ago. Some supporters were doubtful they could pull it off.
“‘Wow your house is horrible’ is one of the most common comments we’ve gotten,” Becky said of the skeptics.
Others begged the couple — whose daughter is now 1 and was just 12 days old when they bought the home — to hire a professional to address the mold instead of doing it themselves.
“My friend had to move out of their house because of how ill she and her family became due to black mold in the garage and bathroom,” one user commented. Becky assured them that they consulted a professional before moving into the home and were cleared for safety.
Canadian couple Jenna Phipps, a 28-year-old content creator, and Nick Volkov, a 27-year-old program manager, also dealt with mold and various rodents after buying a 3,000-square-foot home built in 1961 in Vancouver.
They fell in love with the property’s dramatic mid-century modern design, and shelled out $1.5 million USD for it, despite it needing extensive work.
The roof of the three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home needed to be replaced, as did some of the drywall. But taking out the drywall caused a domino effect of rubble to fall from the ceiling and lead to a massive leak.
“We have a waterfall in our house now. We so far have had one rat, two mice and three mice in our house so far. There’s so much rat poop in here,” Phipps said in a video she posted to Instagram in March in full PPE.
Earlier this month, she announced they were installing “the last roof” on their house.
But the house is still not move-in ready, and they just gutted a staircase earlier this week.
“This is built terribly, we’re gonna have some fixing to do,” Volkov said in an Instagram post as he attacked the stairs with a crowbar and revealed what looked like mold.
Meanwhile, after all Gallagher and Cilingir have been through, they’re skeptical of the home reno posts they see on social media.
“Everyone [who] is showing this content online has an army of helpers behind them. My kitchen was $100K and it took 22 people working on it. One person does the cabinet, another person installs it, another person does the appliances, another person has to electrically wire it,” Gallagher said. “You’re looking at one image of a kitchen and it took six months.”
But, he finally has his dream kitchen, complete with a marble waterfall-style island that stylishly conceals his appliances. After spending more than $1 million, they’re ready to host guests at their upstate retreat — if they’re not too exhausted from all the renovations.
“Everyone says they’re a subject matter expert and they’re not,” he said. “No one understands old homes. It’s an old trade.”
