May You Live in Hectic Times

Just a few days into House Flipping Experiment 1.0 and already I’m making tweaks to the initial plan of attack. I imagine I should likely get used to this, as you never really know what’s going to develop once you start ripping carpets up and knocking out sheetrock, not to mention the various other curveballs life throws at you.

I’d planned on getting started on Friday after closing but that all went out the window when our pet rat Sherman got mightily sick. We basically spent the whole weekend with him, trying to nurse him back from the brink, but we had to have him put down on Monday, when things took a turn for the worst. He was my best little rat buddy but he had a good, long life, and got himself a prime bit of real estate in the rose bed in front of our house where he can still keep an eye on us and take care of his big people.

I did sneak over to the 1002 S. Main St. house for a bit on Sunday, as I needed to get out and do something active, after much sitting and worrying and anxiety. I got all of the old ceiling tiles ripped down in the kitchen, and discovered that what I thought was the original wood ceiling was in fact just a section of the original wood around the hood vent for the stove. That happened to be the area that I pulled a tile down from earlier, to see what was underneath, but most of the ceiling is the old sheetrock, with 1×4s attached through it to the studs above to provide the backing that the ceiling tiles were previously attached to. So I won’t be able to restore what I thought was the old, original ceiling, but it should be a pretty easy job to put up some beadboard.

I also started ripping up the old carpet in the two back bedrooms, expecting to find the original hardwood floors underneath but discovering plywood instead. I wasn’t up for ripping into it, to see what was underneath, but I may simply take it as a sign and just replace the carpet in those two rooms, instead of refinishing the floors as I’d planned. They’re pretty small bedrooms so the cost won’t be that much more in the end, and it’ll definitely speed the project as a whole along if I’m not doing that work myself.

Another thing I was slightly worried about was the drainage on the lot, as the water table is pretty high where we live and a lot of houses in the area are prone to the yards becoming lake-like when we get a lot of rain. I was hoping to get a feel for that on the new place before doing a lot of the landscaping and patio planning, and, lo and behold, we got over 9 inches of rain on Sunday (seriously) . No issues at all with water pooling at the 1002 S. Main St. house, so that’s definitely a relief.

I was doing yardwork at our Austin rental house (which we rent to my brother-in-law) and we were discussing things in general and I mentioned that if he still felt like the rent was too high for just him to live there and he wanted to look for other places, we’re pretty eager to sell the place. He didn’t seem excited about the prospect of moving at the time, but went and looked at apartments the next day and signed a contract, and is moving out at the end of the month.

Normally I’d be a little frustrated and overwhelmed, just due to the timing of closing on the flip property, but it’s actually a relief in a lot of ways.  I don’t think the Austin market is going to implode anytime soon, but now’s a pretty good time to sell, as supply is really tight in our neighborhood, and we hopefully should show a nice profit on the sale. I don’t mind the landlord gig so much but I’d like for the rental property to be closer to our current house, just to make upkeep and maintenance easier. And, honestly, I think there’s more upside for property appreciation if I snap up something like the REO duplex I’ve been eyeing.

It throws a bit of a monkey wrench into my schedule for the 1002 Main St. house, as I’ll be focusing the next 2-3 weeks on getting the Austin house ready to sell, but I’ve got some time to play with on the Main St. house, as the first mortgage payment isn’t due until May 1, and I can still knock out a lot of projects here and there, as well as get the ball rolling on the roof and furnace replacment.