It’s Taken 2 Years, But Revival Of Vintage Greybull K-Bar Motel Nearly Finished

Amanda McGrew’s progress on a dilapidated motel in the tiny Wyoming town of Greybull went viral recently, thanks to a random post by Financial Dystopia that gained more than 1.2 million views. 

“This woman bought a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming,” the post says. “And somehow turned it into a vibe. The renovations are actually solid.”

The post caught McGrew a little by surprise.

She’s been steadily working on the K-Bar Motel since landing in Wyoming in 2023 after stints in California and Arizona. She moved to Wyoming in part on a personal quest to find a new forever home, a quest that involved finding all of the coolest small-town rodeos. 

And that was part of the initial attraction for Greybull. It has a great small-town rodeo called Days of ’49.

Which is appropriate, because the motel was originally built in 1949.

Greybull, McGrew added, has been one of the most welcoming places she’s ever been. So, she’s just been quietly doing her thing with that big can-do smile of hers, working through minus 30-degree weather, and regularly posting to social media platforms about her progress on the K-Bar renovation, without expecting the world to take notice in any sort of viral way. 

In fact, the video Dystopian Financial posted was just one of her “normal” Instagram or TikTok videos.

“Someone found that somewhere else and thought it was interesting enough to put up,” she said. “That’s great, though.”

McGrew will take all the help she can get with what she calls her bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew project in Greybull.

“Bite off more than you can chew, and then just chew like hell,” McGrew told Cowboy State Daily. 

That’s become her new motto in life after buying and surviving the remodel of the K-Bar Motel.

McGrew didn’t purchase the K-Bar unaware that it was going to be “a lot.” She’d already renovated a couple of homes prior to buying it. But the key thing is, none of those projects were half as big as the K-Bar. 

“This was certainly an example of biting off more than I could chew and then just kind of one bite at a time every day,” she said. “I just showed up and got a little bit closer to that finish line every day.”

The very first room she did was one of the hardest and is still one of her favorites.

“Getting that one finished kind of got the ball rolling for me,” she said. “And it really kept my confidence up to make me realize, ‘Hey, you can do this. You can get these rooms down.'"

Water Where It Shouldn’t Be Almost Every Day

In the viral X video, McGrew talks a little bit about just how bad the K-Bar Motel was when she first bought it. 

“She was in pretty rough shape, and the plan was for me to move to the motel and renovate each room one at a time, by myself,” McGrew says in the video. 

But that’s underplaying just a little bit how bad things really were. There were all kinds of hidden, unexpected problems she had not foreseen. The biggest of which was repeatedly hearing or finding water running where it shouldn’t be. 

“I feel like that story is like ‘Groundhog Day’ in my head,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “I heard water running where it shouldn’t be so many times.”

She’d seen the visual signs, too, now and then. Darker spots on concrete where no water should have ever been. Water damage on walls where, again, no water should have been. 

But she thought she was on top of it. She thought she’d found all of the biggest problem areas already.

And then, one day, she took a phone call from city hall, asking her nonchalantly if she knew that she was using a couple thousand gallons of water per day. 

That was crazy. Especially given that there was no one even staying at the motel yet.

“That was like a big heads up to say, ‘Hey, it’s not just a small, like trickle leak, like you actually have a massive leak somewhere,” McGrew said. “So I kind of hit the ground running to find that.”

She was pulling back portions of the wall, looking under floors, until she finally found where the water was gushing out. McGrew then had the city turn the water completely off, so she could cut the broken pipe and cap it. 

But even then, she seemed to find a new leak every other week or so. Ultimately, the silver lining to that is that all the plumbing for the building has been completely updated. 

There’s nowhere left for any leaks due to old pipes.

K-Bar Rooms Are All Done Now

In the recently viral X video, McGrew mentions four rooms left to finish, but that video is a little out of date. McGrew is actually completely finished remodeling all the rooms. That includes a new shared kitchen space that she’s added to the motel.

“We knocked down a wall and combined two older units and an old, shared kitchen to create a really awesome new space,” McGrew said. “The appliances there are all full-sized. Refrigerator, stove, oven, air fryers and those kind of things, so people can cook and be in a fully updated, renovated space while they do it.”

Eventually, there will be washers and dryers there, too.

The only thing left to do at the motel now is a bit of landscaping and a fresh coat of paint for the exterior, which will likely happen sometime this summer.

McGrew has not needed much in the way of advertising to fill up her newly renovated motel in Greybull, either, regardless of its “nowhere” Wyoming feel. She’s already attracted 14 long-term leases at the originally 20-unit motel that she’s turned into 18 livable units. 

That leaves a few rooms for Airbnb during the summer, for tourists passing through on their way to Yellowstone or staying to take advantage of other outdoor activities in the area. 

Greybull makes a great base for adventures, McGrew believes. There’s Thermopolis to the south, Bighorn Mountains to the northeast. Cody to the West with its east entrance to Yellowstone, Billings to the North. Not to mention, the Red Gulch dinosaur track site, and the Devil’s Kitchen. 

McGrew, meanwhile, has already found a new project in Greybull, renovating an older home for a newly arrived resident. After that, she wants to find more houses to fix up and present for sale in a town she’s decided is her forever home in Wyoming.

More Than Just Another Flip

McGrew doesn’t refer to what she does as “flipping” a house, however. It’s so much more in her mind, because she strives to make each new project unique and personal, outfitting them with things she finds at vintage thrift and antique shops, as well as pulling in brand-new items from sponsors. She also isn’t afraid to grab a paint brush and create a scene on a wall for a space that needs it. 

“I really just want to give somebody a quality home that’s made from quality materials, and something they can walk into and be proud of,” McGrew said. 

That said, the K-Bar remains one of her favorite projects. 

Every room in the motel is channeling a piece of the Wyoming town she’s come to love. All the rooms are her favorites, though she’ll admit she has some she likes more than others.

Like the room guests have affectionately nicknamed The Cowboy Room. For that one, McGrew painted freehand three bars of colors all the way around the room. In the bathroom, she added a shower curtain with a life-size cowboy riding on horseback. 

When McGrew arrived in Greybull, she wasn’t sure she would stay once her project was finished. But Wyoming and its cowboys captured her heart. She not only fell in love with the small town as she was renovating the motel, she also met someone, too. 

All that’s part of the journey she’s channeled into every remodeled room, and looking at the Cowboy Room especially, McGrew knows she has no regrets about her newly chosen place in the world, in the tiny town of Greybull, which has her heart in more fabulous ways than one, making her a rambling rose no more.

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