After Resurrecting Greybull Motel, Wyoming Woman Tackles The Worst "Unlivable" Homes

Amanda McGrew’s latest Wyoming real-estate redo came with foundation trouble and enough rot to make most homebuyers keep driving. 

For McGrew, a former Los Angeles teacher who revived Greybull’s run-down K-Bar Motel, that’s exactly the kind of curb appeal she wants. 

“I’m looking for the ones that are empty on purpose,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “Like the ones that are borderline unlivable.”

McGrew, who now lives in Shell, is on house rehab No. 3 since taking on the K-Bar. It’s part of a new mission in Wyoming — find and fix the absolute worst homes. 

“That’s where the real magic can happen,” McGrew said. “It gives you a blank slate. When you get into a house that is currently being lived in, oftentimes your creativity or your imagination can only go so far.”

Knock down a few walls, though, and the home can become anything. There’s also just something about knocking stuff down that makes a girl feel unstoppable. 

It’s McGrew’s favorite part of the makeover.  

“I don’t know if that makes me completely insane, but it’s definitely the most fun,” she said. “In my mind — I could be wrong about this — but it feels like you can’t screw it up.”

Smashing stuff is popular enough that some businesses are completely devoted to it, McGrew acknowledged. She’s even had people suggest she should do a class where people come in on a Saturday and just swing hammers at walls for the heck of it.  

“The fact that I get more than one of those suggestions means there’s clearly a market for it,” McGrew said with a chuckle. 

But, for now, she’s having too much fun doing the demolitions herself. She feels no need to share. 

Most Challenging Yet

McGrew’s latest project, a practically unlivable Basin house she’s reworking into a five-bedroom, two-bathroom home, which she plans to sell once the renovation is complete.

It’s her biggest home renovation yet and among her most challenging projects — more challenging, she said, than the motel renovation in Greybull. She’s described that one as “bite off more than you can chew,” and then “just chew like hell.”

“The whole motel was on a concrete slab,” McGrew said. “So it was not as intimidating. This has a basement and had some foundation issues.”

McGrew had post jacks and bottle jacks, but safely lifting a house was new to her. Still, she has never let what she doesn’t know stand in her way.

“I’m crazy enough to assume I can do most of it myself,” she said. “Whatever I have not done, I try to learn. I think it’s easy to get in the habit of trying to hire out and getting comfortable with, ‘Oh well, someone else can do that.’”

But she knows hiring someone else to do a job she can do herself is profit flying out the window. 

“When I came to the motel, there’s plenty of stuff going on there that I hadn’t done before,” she said. “And I found a way.”

She knows a lot of experts she can consult, but she also often consults a little thing she likes to call YouTube University. 

“You can learn everything there for free,” she said. “There’s no shortage of information out there. I use it all the time, whether it’s to learn something brand-new or just check up on and make sure I’m doing something correctly.”

Learning new stuff also helps keep the job fun, she added.

“There’s always going to be a first time for everything,” she said. “Then, eventually, it won’t be the first time anymore, and you’ll feel super comfortable. Working toward that goal is pretty fun and challenging at the same time.”

A Leap Of Faith

The path that led McGrew to Wyoming was typical. 

It started with a huge leap of faith. She quit a steady teaching job to start popping up newly renovated Airbnbs in the Phoenix area, not knowing how or whether it would all pan out.

Her successful renovations led to more and more ambitious rehabilitation projects. Family and friends also reached out, seeking help. 

Along the way, McGrew made friends with a Montana investor and contractor on Facebook named Kyle Black, who eventually partnered with her to buy the K-Bar Motel.

“He and I hit it off as friends and talked about all the projects we would do, and the hope to get into more real estate,” McGrew told Cowboy State Daily in a 2023 interview. “Eventually it turned into, ‘Oh, we should try to do some projects together. That would be so fun.’”

McGrew and Black met for the first time in Greybull to tour the K-Bar. When they saw it, they both started laughing. It was just so rundown, and it was right across the street from a newer, nicer, bigger motel.

“I was like, ‘Well this is gonna be a lot,’” McGrew recalled saying. 

That’s when Black gave her the motto that still drives her today, and she’s been saying it ever since: Bite off more than you can chew, and then just chew like hell.

That’s worked out so far. The K-Bar is 100% full today, with a mixture of medium- to long-term tenants, she said.

“We’ve got a pretty solid mixture of long-term tenants who live in town full-time and travel professionals, whether it be travel healthcare workers or travel railroad workers,” she said. “There seems to be no shortage of travel professionals who are coming here for work.”

Treasure Hunting For Final Details

Most of the time, McGrew works completely by herself. In a recent, sped-up video of work on the Basin home, her only helper is a trusty, blue-handled sledgehammer, lying on the floor at her feet — the better to take a swing at things whenever she wants.

Despite working alone, though, progress is happening quickly on the Basin house. 

“We’ve got all the framing up on this one,” McGrew said. “I took out some old, rotten boards and anything that was no good in the framing.”

She has added a second bathroom and reframed the existing bathroom to make it bigger, as well as adding closets to each bedroom. 

HVAC is coming in next, following behind the plumber, and then electricians, who are rewiring the entire place. 

“I would say in a couple of weeks I can start thinking about putting some insulation and some sheetrock on the walls,” she said. “Once the walls go up, that’s always a very exciting time, because it really starts to look like different rooms.”

Once the walls are painted, it’s time to go shopping for the final designer touches that help elevate her remodels and make them feel personal. She’ll skip an actual store, though.

“I’m a seasoned veteran on Facebook Marketplace,” she said. “That’s one of my favorite places to acquire things.”

McGrew never knows what she’ll find, and the “thrill of the hunt” has made Facebook Marketplace her second-favorite remodeling task — right behind smashing stuff. 

“It could be interior finishes, but it could also honestly be building material,” she said. “It could be people selling a bundle of sheetrock or a bundle of wood. It could be anything.”

Finding bargains in rural Wyoming has been trickier than in the big cities where she once lived, where a “plethora” of options might be within a 15- to 20-minute drive.

“Here you kind of have to travel a bit more,” she said. “But for the deals you can find, it is worth it.”

The Risks Have Been Worth It

McGrew landed in Wyoming because she was looking for small-town life and for small-town rodeos. She started in Greybull, but has since moved to Shell.

“I assumed Greybull was small town enough for me,” she said. “Then I got to Shell and realized, ‘Oh, this is it. This is where it’s at. It’s like population, I don’t know, 50 or 80? But it’s very nice. It’s quiet. I love the animals. It’s the best out here.”

When she first landed in Wyoming, McGrew could tell people had put a big question mark over her head because she came from California.

“But I think people really believed me when I said I was looking to get out of there for a reason,” she said. “And the people here have proven to be the reason why people would move here and stay, because they’re just so wonderful. I couldn’t think of a better place to settle down.”

Taking the risk on herself — quitting her job, moving to a new state, taking on ambitious and scary projects — has totally been worth it, she added.

“If anybody’s questioning whether they should take a risk on themselves, let me be the example that you should absolutely do it,” she said. “Because it could turn out better than you imagined.”

It was all “completely terrifying” in the beginning, she added. But betting on her own work has let her see just how far she can go. 

“If you’ve got the work ethic and the kind of intrinsic motor behind you, you can make some really cool stuff happen,” she said. “And coming to a place like this and having it turn out so well … just confirmed everything I knew could be true and then some.”

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.