A to Z Blogging: F is for Fixer-Upper

Well, look at that!  I made it through the first week of the Blogging A to Z challenge!  Here we are at the letter "F" and I had so many choices, but since 507 is ruling my activity during the day and my dreams at night, I figured I may as well blog about it!

A Little History:

Somewhere back in the late 1990's, Ornery was employed by WorldCom.  He had all his meager retirement savings invested in this company's 401K program (mostly in WorldCom stock) and we thought we were actually going to have some retirement funds.  Whoops!  So, after all those hard earned dollars disappeared into Bernie Ebbers' yacht and what have you, we decided that wasn't the best way to gain funds to keep us off welfare when Ornery could no longer work.   We transferred what little was left after the fraud into a roll-over IRA when he changed jobs about 8 years ago.

If you have invested in mutual funds, you are probably aware that they have been sluggish to show any rise in income, and here we are closing in on an AARP membership with just a pittance (not even six months worth) of his annual salary set aside.  So, we went on a hunt for PLAN B.

Plan B:

Enter Robert Kyosaki and a dream.  In June we cashed out the IRA (to lose a hefty portion for taxes and penalties for early withdrawal) with the idea that we would begin purchasing investment properties for rentals.  We searched for  almost 8 months before we finally found one that was A) in our price range, B) nearby, and C) whose offer was accepted.  We offered on at least 10 houses before we landed this one.

The house address is 507, which is why I refer to it that way on this blog.  In private, however, we affectionately call it "the crack house" because of all the cracks--or because whoever did previous repairs must have been on crack...or something.  The foundation was severely compromised (a very common occurrence in homes built on the clay soil in this area) which led to at least two different pier companies making repairs.  Unfortunately the first one over-lifted some of the piers leaving one end of the house considerably higher than the other, but the former owner refused to pay the second company to have them let back down, even though it would have made a huge difference for a relatively small cost.  Needless to say almost every wall, doorway and window suffered some cracking--and we won't even talk about the floor, which gives one a sense of being at sea in certain rooms.

The second piering stopped all movement, so at least we hope that the cracks we patch won't reappear for a while, but it sure would have been nice if she had forked over the extra dough while they were in there adding the new piers to have them level it all out a bit!

We closed on the property on March 6th, and have been assiduously working away ever since to bring it up to some sort of livable standard.  It had been rented in its previous state, but the poor house needed lots of love.  We don't want to be "slum-lords" but we do want to make a little money, so we figured that we might attract a better quality of renter (one that won't destroy the place) and get a higher rental income if we fixed it up.  We shall see how realistic our ideals are, but meanwhile we are busting tail to get it done by our totally unrealistic target date of May 1.

If you are interested in our progress, you can search this blog for the tag 507 or just read the posts in March, which pretty much all pertain to our work there.  The before photos (which don't show nearly all the snafu's we have uncovered!) are here.