Aug
1
Why, That Appears to be a Finish Line
August 1, 2007 |
Knock on wood, but the Main St. house should be finished and done after this weekend. There are some small things that’ll be unfinished like painting a few closets and replacing some window screens on the back side of the house, but the plan is to meet with our realtor on Monday and sign all the papers to get that sucker listed and on the market.
I’m currently working on taking lots and lots of pictures and doing a room by room breakdown of before and after pics, work that went into each room, along with the final tally for expenses and all that fun stuff. Again, I suck for not including photos along the way, as that was my plan all along and much more engaging (and helpful) than me babbling about things in plain text, but extreme busyness and life got in the way, and I just didn’t have time for such things.
We finally got a break in the monsoons so I was able to knock out the vast majority of the exterior landscaping in the last few days. I still need to plunk some plants down here and there and mulch the crap out of the raised beds, but all the patio and stone work is done, tile on front porch grouted, etc.
I probably went a bit overboard with the landscaping, as we’re still talking about a 3-1 starter house here, but raw materials for such things are dirt cheap (literally) and it’s more an investment of sweat equity than anything else. I think projects like that help to make the house stand out a bit, too, as compared to other boring generic houses in the same general range.
The new furnace and coil go in on Friday, which is the last of the major expenses. As far as a general ballpark number, I’ll have put about $7,000 into renovations, with the bulk of that going towards the new roof, furnace, and flooring. Which is coming in well under my initial $10,000 budget so, you know, yay. On the non-yay side, assorted delays are going to result in me making 2-3 more mortgage payments than I planned on, so, you know, boo.
As far as the general market, there are a few more similar houses currently on the market than I’d like, but most are listed in the $87,500-$92,500 range, which is pretty encouraging. The Main St. house is a notch above most of the other 3-1s as far as features and general condition, but it does have foundation issues (nothing dramatic, just basically what you’d expect from a 70+ year old house with a pier and beam foundation), which’ll likely ding it back down a bit. I’d be more than happy to get anything within spitting distance of $90,000, though, which I think is pretty realistic.
That’d give me a profit of around $10,000-$15,000, when you factor in commissions and taxes and all that unpleasant stuff. Which isn’t quit my day job money, but also not that bad considering I probably have invested only about 100 hours of labor total in the house. That’s not a bad hourly wage for puttering around, painting stuff, installing tile, landscaping, etc.
As far as next steps when this one is done, I’m scouting out potential rental properties, as I want to take a bit of a break from anything that immediately needs major renovations. I’ll probably stay busy, though, as there are tons of projects I want to knock out in the house we live in. That’ll tide me over until late fall/early winter, when it’s likely back into the hunt for another property to flip.
