It seems crazy to me that 6 months ago we didn’t own any houses…and now here we are having practically flipped two houses and we are officially in the rental property business!
If you want to see our first rental property, you can see that post here.
This second rental property is right down the street from the first one so as soon as we had finished and listed house #1, we began working on house #2. Similar to the first house, this one mostly just needed cosmetic fixes and few medium level home projects like installing a dishwasher and regrouting tile in the shower. Most of it was just time intensive work…like painting. So much painting. SO MUCH PAINTING. Did I mention the amount of painting? Ha. I painted every.single.wall in this house…most of them at least four times. Now that is a lot of painting! While I worked on painting, Theo stained the deck, cleared out the garage, fixed up some of the landscaping, installed a dishwasher, painted the kitchen cabinets, fixed a bunch of piping issues under the kitchen sink, changed out fans and light fixtures, and fixed up the grout in the shower.
Overall, we spend ______ hours working on this house.
Since Theo is still working a full time job and we still have three children, we were working very slowly on the house when days off and time permitted. But towards the end of July, I got a phone call asking us if it would be possible for a missionary family to move into the house while they await borders opening up due to COVID restrictions. They need somewhere to live, it needs to be furnished and they need it on a month to month basis so that they can pack up and leave for their mission field as soon as they are able. We weren’t sure we could meet all of those criteria since our house wasn’t supposed to be furnished and we had a set idea of a year long lease. But we prayed about and decided that THIS is exactly the type of thing we want to be able to provide with our rental properties. However, this meant we were on a major time crunch AND needed to find furnishings for the house. So bear with these before and after pictures as the furnishings that we were able to find are eclectic and not Joanna Gaines worthy. We still have a few more tasks on the house we would like to complete like painting the ceilings and painting the front and back doors. These will get done when we can get to them!
This might explain why I had to do so many coats of paint! Orange, Brown, Blue and Yellow!
A lot of work (Theo and Suzanne) and a lot of play (Tera, Kiah and Ezra)!
Progress being made!
Let me tell you the story about these fridges. Fridge tall was in this house and didn’t fit in the fridge spot. Fridge short was in the first house and was very small for the very large kitchen. So we decided we could easily switch the fridges- it would make more sense all around. Ha. Walking two fridges up and down the street was NOT the hard part. The hard part was taking apart the fridges so that they could fit through the door, figuring out how to get the computerized fridge door off of fridge tall and then getting everything hooked back up. It took not one, not two, not three, but FIVE hours just to switch these two fridges out. We never want to look at another fancy fridge again.
Ezra was not the most helpful child during the renovations. Goodness gracious this child keeps us on our toes! We had a screwdriver in the socket, he fell off the countertop, and he managed to get the paint bucket open and paint the wall, himself, and the paper on the floor. THANKFULLY, he at least used the right color!
It was finally move-in day and were scrambling to finish painting and move in furniture.
And finally….we were done!
Shall we see some before & after photos? The before photos are the listing photos! We actually bought this house sight unseen just off those listing photos. Ha!
For some reason I did not get any final “after” pictures of the living room, but I think it’s transformation is impressive! Here is a before and a progress shot.
And that’s a wrap on our second rental property!
And now for a fun announcement…. we are now under contract for property #3!!! More details to come soon, when it is officially official and we have closed.
Looks great! I think it’s so exciting that you got the opportunity to rent it out to the missionary family, even if it wasn’t the original goal. We have flipped a few for resale, but always while living it. My husband is finally ready to seriously look for our next flip (for rental or sale) and finally we won’t live in it at the same time! But the market in our area is crazy right now with houses selling for 20% over asking or more!