April 2

Well, I think this is it.  The final blog post.  

The house is finished, the renters are in (one moved in today, the other moves in tomorrow). 

All in all I have to say I'm pretty proud of what we accomplished.  We set out to rehab a house with the money we had and get it rented, and that's we did.   We set out with a budget of $26,000 for the rehab, and we ended up spending about $28,000 by my not-yet-finished estimates.  Its pretty close.  That's not to say we're not broke- we are.  What we didn't plan on was the 2 months we had to wait for our zoning hearing board.  I'm still upset about that.  It was such a useless formality which has ruined so many of our plans.  I estimate we spent about $2000 just living through those 2 months of waiting.  But our time frames were pretty accurate as well.  We thought we'd get everything done in 6 weeks, and it ended up being more like 10 once we had our zoning, however 2 of those weeks were because we were delayed by a contractor, so figure 8 weeks.

We learned so much doing this house.  We hired someone to do the PEX plumbing, but after I fixed all his mistakes, I'd be confident doing a whole house of PEX myself.  Ryan did most of the drywall, but through helping him and watching him I was able to do complete walls by myself by the end.  Same goes for electrics.  The more I looked at things and studied them, the more I understood them, or at least knew what I needed to read more about.  I estimate we could have saved close to $1000 by knowing then what I've learned by now, or about $6000 if I did the work we paid some contractors to do.   I think the biggest thing we learned is that we can do this.  Normal people can do this.  The TV shows don't show you all the crap you have to deal with, but if you deal with it, then it's do-able. 

Fanette and I couldn't have done this alone.  We need to thank a few people.  A big thanks to Mom and Dad who put us up in a room which was only supposed to be for a couple weeks and turned out to be a few months, including letting us store so much crap in the basement while waiting for our zoning.  A huge thanks to Ryan who came over nearly every day at the beginning of the project.  Not just for the work he did, but for the momentum he gave to the project at that critical time.  Same for Dad who came over many days near the start, and near the end when I was getting lonely in the big empty house.  A big thanks to the Habitat ReStore people who provided us with so much of the discounted supplies we needed, and the Freecyclers who responded to our 'wanted' posts with everything we needed to be comfortable in the house. 

And last but not least, I need to thank my wonderful wife.  We watch HouseHunters on HGTV and see these women who walk in to a brand new huge kitchen just remodeled and say, "I CANT live here, it doesn't have granite countertops", and equally disturbing things.  I married a woman who walked in to a house full of graffiti and holes kicked in the wall, with broken windows, crumbling walls and ceilings, no pipes for water or heat and fell in love with it.  She believed we could do this and was willing to get dirty doing it.  We spent 6 months not buying anything other than groceries, gas and building materials.   That's really not easy to do.  We'd evaluate $10 non-essential items to see if we REALLY needed them, and most times didn't buy them.  Most of the clothes I wear were bought in the 90's and packed away for 10 years.  In fact, buying a new pair of pants was such a big deal, it made it on to this blog.  But I digress. 

In the end I'm really proud of what we've done and hope to have more success doing it again in the future. 

-Rick