Day 96- More Progress

We passed the three month mark on this project, and should be totally finished within the next three weeks. The house is painted, the trim is installed and the interior doors are in place. Today the crew is putting up the crown molding on the first floor, and then construction will halt until Thursday. We special-ordered our front door from Home Depot, which proved to be a total fiasco. Apparently the door came once and was damaged, so it was sent back to the manufacturer. Then, the door came again, but wasn't correctly marked so it was refused and sent back. The door is supposed to arrive again sometime before tomorrow morning. In the meantime, we had to push back installing the alarm, so the house isn't secure and we couldn't start with the floors or the cabinets.

One positive result of the delays is that the house will hit the market towards the beginning of September, which experts are predicting should show a lot more buying activity than this summer. The buyers in Patterson Park are predominantly single, working professionals or young couples, so buying a house before the school year starts isn't really an issue. In addition, buyers usually go on vacation at this time of the year, and should be ready to look for houses again in the fall.

In this picture, you can see how the walls were painted (this is the closet in the rear bedroom). We chose a sand-colored Behr paint for the walls and a pure white for the ceilings. We used rollers for the walls, even though we probably could have done the job much faster with a spray gun. The problem was that we already had all of the windows installed, stairs in place and a ton of exposed brick, so it would have been a serious production to cover everything properly with plastic. The rollers allowed us to be more accurate with the paint.



Here's the finished window in the kitchen. You can see the finished trim around the windows. We did this on all of the windows in the house. It's not particularily expensive and it looks far better than standard window trim.



This is the current state of the main floor. You can just barely make out the baseboard trim. We went with thicker trim on this floor, and thinner trim on the second floor and basement. Our thinking was that the bigger stuff looks better, but it also can make the room look smaller. Therefore, we put it in the big rooms but not in the smaller spaces.



This is the basement after finished drywall and paint. It's not exactly massive, but it's definitely infinitely better than an unfinished space. There are three other rehabs on this block where the investors didn't spend the money to dig this out. Which would you rather have?



We're already scouting out new properties for our next project. We own 216 N. Luzerne Ave., which is a huge house two blocks east from this house. However, the house has two great tenants, brings in positive cashflow and already appraised for $35,000 over the purchase price (at the time of purchase). It seems there's no reason to change a good thing, so we're thinking about keeping this house as a rental. We'll keep you updated on our search.

Thanks for checking in.

Dave