Is my title confusing to you? Probably about as confusing as our lives have been the last month or so.
I haven’t mentioned much on the blog because I wanted to wait until it was all official before saying anything.
And then all of a sudden it wasn’t official and I hadn’t said anything.
But you all know I can’t be me without saying anything.
ANYWAYS. Still confused?
Here is the story…
For several years now, Theo has been very interested in the world of rental property investing. He has always wanted to own several properties, be a landlord and kind of run our own business that way. Yes, we know this has a lot of risks and a steep learning curve, but believe me when I say it’s something he (and me!) is very, very interested in.
A year ago when we started running our AirBnb, we realized how much we really did love being landlords and owning property that we got to rent out! Sure, there are stressful moments and huge downsides, but for the most part it’s pretty great having your own hours, being able to make an income while working from home, and getting to interact with all kinds of people from all kinds of places.
We are the type of couple who likes to look at Realtor.com together for fun, and we always enjoy dreaming of different ways we could live.
We also have realized that our current home is rather large, and we don’t love all the space it takes to clean and fill with things that we don’t use/need. After Heavenly left our home and we had fewer regulations, our family kind of relaxed and started feeling a bit more family-ish. We have four bedrooms (not counting the basement) and we really only use one or two of them. We realized that we just want more time as a family and less stuff taking up our time and space. These were big changes but as we went through grieving the loss of Heavenly all those things rose to the surface.
So one day at the end of July Theo stumbled unto a fantastic deal on a fourplex unit (four apartments in one building). We requested a showing, did a walk through and we loved it. We got really excited and started brainstorming. We would move into one apartment (900 sq feet), we would rent out one or two and we would put the remaining one on AirBnb. It was all brilliant and foolproof!
Did I mention the place was a bit of a dump? I mean….a total fixer-upper? I mean…completely unlivable? I mean…not a single toilet, shower, tub or kitchen sink in the entire four units?
NO PROBLEM FOR US.
We soon realized that if we sold our current home, we would be pocketing a significant chunk of cash. We bought our current home for rather cheap and have worked really hard to fix it up the past four years (plus adding an entire kitchen/bathroom/apartment in the basement). We didn’t realize how much we had actually raised the value of our home until we started to think about listing it. Then it all made sense.
Get a loan to the buy the new place. Move into the new place. Sell our house. Use the cash to fix up the new place.
FOOLPROOF.
So that’s exactly we did.
We started the process to get a loan- about a three week process. I went through every single bedroom, bathroom, office, toy, attic, and garage item in our home and PURGED everything. I told myself we were going to be living in 900 sq ft and I wanted nothing to do with anything we didn’t need. We had a garage sale and got rid of a lot of our stuff, including furniture. We then put last minute painting and cleaning touches on our house and left for vacation.
The next day our home was for sale.
Our house was on the market for three weeks- showings almost every day. No offers. People messaged me and told me that our house was listed for far too cheap. Still no offers. More showings. No offers.
Then, a phone call from the loan company, the day before closing.
“Sir, you need to fix the windows in the new unit before we will go through with the loan.”
“The windows? That’s random. Ok, we will call a contractor out. Wait…you do know this place has a lot more going on than just the windows needing fixed, right?”
“What kinds of things?”
“Well, um…plumbing. Drywall. Flooring. Windows. Electric. Paint. Gutters. Stuff like that.”
“Is this house livable?”
“Um, well…not yet.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we won’t be able to give you a loan.”
Click.
Well, that was that on the craziest three weeks of my life. Listen, we had not been hush-hush about the state of this place. We are all fairly positive that we had mentioned the fixing needs. The loan company just didn’t seem to hear what we were saying and then suddenly finally realized that it was a fixer and they couldn’t loan us the money.
We learned the almost-hard way to not use that lending company!
So now here we are in a little predicament.
We want to move to something smaller.
We want to own rental properties.
Our house is already for sale (with no offers).
We are having a baby in November.
Basically, we have a lot of options. If someone puts in an offer on our house, we will move out…not yet sure where, but we sure have spend our fair share of evenings on Realtor.com!!
However, we have both agreed that if there are no offers on our home by the end of September, we will take it off the market and focus on having a baby. Then, maybe in the Spring we will come back to revisit all these ideas.
So….are we moving?
Your guess is as good as mine.