Garage Door Drama

It's been quiet this past week. The US Thanksgiving holiday hit so we didn't get a whole lot of house stuff done.

One thing we did address was the jacked up garage door on the rental.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to it. It's warped in several areas, dinged up, marked up, and completely jammed. The rails inside the garage are warped to hell.

One of our neighbors, Ty, told us that when the previous owner moved out* that they left the house completely open. Like literally left the front door wide open and the garage door up as they drove away. What a bunch of  dicks.

Anyways, after it was apparent they weren't coming back, Ty and her husband went over and locked up the house and tried to close the garage door. Ty said her husband rigged the garage door enough to get it down but that it was tough. I thanked them for doing that. They probably prevented more damage from kids/squatters.

Well, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving we had an estimator out to look at the door. We knew it would need heavy repair or possibly be replaced entirely. Sure enough the estimator said it would cost almost as much as a new door to fix the existing one. We decided it would not only look nicer but be better in the long run to replace the door, rails, etc entirely.

Jess and I had guessed the garage door ordeal would cost us about $1500. So when the estimator said we could get a good door completely installed for $750 our eyes grew as big as saucers. We asked how much it would be to also get an opener installed. $280. So after taxes and all our total would be about $1100 for a new door AND an opener. Score!

We were sooo excited to not only come in under our budget for the door but to also get an opener that we didn't think would make the budget. So excited!

We scheduled the install for the Saturday after T-day and happily went off to stuff ourselves with turkey.

Soooo here's where some drama starts. Maybe drama is too strong of a word but there were some issues getting this damn door installed.

Saturday arrives. The GDP (garage door people) told me they'd call about an hour before they headed to the rental so I could meet them out there. So I'm waiting and finally get a call around noon.

"Ma'am, we're here to install your garage door. Is anyone here?"

/facepalm

I specifically told them no one was living there and that's why they needed to call before they got to the house so I could meet them. Whatever. I tell the guy I'm on my way but it'll be about 20 minutes. He says no problem and will start setting up.

Well, about 10 minutes into my drive over there he calls again. This time he informs me that he noticed the new door is actually damaged. Since it's Saturday his distributor closed at noon so he can't get another door that day. We have to reschedule for Monday.

Ugh. Well, shit happens so no big deal. Jesse is going to be at the rental Monday morning anyways so it works out. The gas company was coming out to hook all that up so they could come do the garage door too.

I get to the rental and they're already gone which is fine. I do get some painting done.

So Monday comes. I'm at work and Jess is out at the rental. The gas guy shows up, hooks everything up, and we're rocking the furnace, hot water heater, and stove/oven now. Woo!

Garage door guys also show up. This is a good Monday so far! Jess is sending me texts updating me on everything and it seems things are going well.

Around noon he texts me that the door is all installed, he paid, and the guys are gone. Good deal. Glad that's over with. Or is it?

Jess texts me, "The door is a little darker than the old one was."

Weird, but no big deal. A couple shades darker isn't going to make that much of a difference. Then he sends me a picture.

What. The. Fuck?

That is A LOT darker! That is dark brown! Our old one was beige. What? I don't even...

So at first I'm thinking "well, ok. It's not that bad." But, it's not right. And it doesn't really look good.

Jess heads home to get some sleep and I'm sitting at my desk at work. All I can think about is that door. And I start to get pissed.

When the estimator was out there I made a point to ask about the color. Would it be the same or close to the same color? He assured me it would be. This was obviously not. Why did we just pay $1100 for a door that's not correct?

I finally decide that no, this is not acceptable. So I call the GDP and ask about it. The guy I speak with (at their office so not one of the installers) explains that the doors come in a few standard colors and might not match exactly to what the builder painted the door originally. I'm like, "yeah dude, I get that. But we had tan and now it's dark brown."

He's goes, "Oh. Let me check into this." lol

The guy drives by the house and calls me back. "Yeahhhhhh they shouldn't have put a dark brown one on. Not sure why they did that. We will send a new door out to be installed in the right color."

PHEW! Let me tell you I was getting to that super pissed off woman stage and that's never fun. I'm generally laid back and chill so I'm glad I didn't have to fight about this with them.

They said they'd be out to install on Wednesday, so I was pleasantly surprised when they called Tuesday afternoon and said they could head out there already! I meet them there and they had the new door on in about 30 minutes.

Almost done.

This dude was super nice and awesome. Kinda an eccentric old guy. XD

Mucho better!

It's not an exact match to the old color but it's WAY better than that dark brown and looks fine on the house. =D

I must say that every single person I spoke with at the garage door place was very friendly, nice, and helpful. Yes there were two big bumps in the road, but they were always great to talk to and they made things right in a quick manner.

Shit happens. It's just unfortunate we had two shitty happenings in the process of getting this door replaced. lol

But now we have a beautiful new door AND an awesome opener on it. This opener is way better than the one we have on our own house. Very quiet and with a lock switch and a light switch. Fancy.

Soooo success!

So now we basically need to paint the trim, replace the carpet, get an A/C guy out there to figure out the A/C issue and then it's just cleaning and small fixer upper things.

It's taking a bit longer to get this house in shape than we thought, but that's ok. Since we both work fulltime (and Jess gets drafted to OT a lot) we aren't stressing it. We hope to have it ready to go by the new year.


* i.e. kicked out due to foreclosure

From super gross to not as super gross

I bought this stuff called "Super Kick-ass Fuck-That-Grimy-Shit" cleaner. I used it on the gross bathtub in the second bathroom.

It worked pretty well. Not sparkling new, but doesn't look like you could catch ebola from it anymore.

Disgusting:

Less disgusting:

We have a lot of cleaning still to do but this is a start at least! I'm hoping to tackle this tub again and get it even cleaner.

Awesome news from the weekend

Two AMAZING bits of news (well, for us anyways haha):

1. Jesse found a valve on the hot water heater that was turned off. After turning it on the water in the master bathroom is working! HALLELUJAH!

Man, we were really concerned about the costs we'd have if we had to call a plumber out.

2. We pulled down the fan/light in the living room that wasn't working. Turns out one of the wires had just come loose. Jesse reconnected it and LET THERE BE LIGHT (and uh.. air flow). HALLELUJAH PART TWO!

Again, we thought there could be a wiring problem we'd have to call an electrician out for. Nope! More expenses avoided.

Funny how you always think the worst of a situation. Glad these two turned out to be no big deal. =D

In other news, we completed painting the two blue rooms. They both required two coats (plus a primer coat in the dark blue room). They are looking mucho better now.

Also, Jesse replaced the broken thermostat. The AC is still not up and running, but at least this will be ready when it is.

Finally, I added the rock garden in the front. Pretty happy with how this turned out. I'll be putting a nice potted plant on that front part once we're ready to lease it out.

Week One - Hooooo mah gawd

So we've had the rental for a week now and renovations/discoveries are underway. Yep discoveries.

When a house hasn't had power or water for a year and a half, you get some fun surprises when you turn those things on. Luckily there still hasn't been anything major but there were quite a few light fixtures that didn't work, the doorbell didn't work, the A/C thermostat doesn't work (or the A/C - the fuses are completely gone).

So far most of the water fixtures work. In the master bath the tub and shower are only getting a drizzle of water, though. Not sure what's up with that. It's likely we'll have to call a plumber out to investigate. =/

Other than that we've starting on fixing broken shit and started painting some. Here's a photo roundup of the first week:

The carpet in every. single. room. is fucked up. I have no idea the how or why of its current state. I mean seriously, wtf happened? We'll be having the carpet in the whole house replaced but that'll happen closer to when renovations are done.

A large tear in the linoleum flooring in the kitchen:

The front and back yard aren't in too bad of shape. Sure there are weeds, but those can be handled. I already spread out some weed and feed in the front and back to hopefully help. With winter around the corner I doubt we'll get to the "lush" yard state, but hopefully we can hold off additional weeds.

The front gardens are overgrown with weeds as well. I worked on this tiny garden leading to the front door. These pictures are when I was about halfway through pulling all the weeds. We're going to fill this tiny spot with a rock garden and a potted plant.

The main front garden. The line/ditch you see around it is where they lined the garden with leftover house bricks. They were uneven and overgrown as well. Pulled them all out. I'm planning to make the garden bed area smaller, pull the weeds, and add some red mulch. The bushes are actually in decent condition and just need trimmed.

Bricks I pulled from the front garden:

Here's the kitchen where we've dumped a bunch of supplies. We had the colors of the house matched and bought paint to get started repainting inside. Like the carpet, nearly every wall is marked up and/or dirty. There were also a few dents in the sheetrock that Jesse patched up.

This wall corner is filthy. Looks like a lot of hands grabbed it as people rounded the corner. Gross.

You can see the ring of dirt around this light switch.

I'm guessing this is some kid's "art". hehe

Unfortunately even the trim is banged up/dirty/marked throughout the house. We'll be repainting it and all the doors too.

Jesse repainted the kitchen while I started on one of the secondary bedrooms. You can't tell in this picture, but the room is a light baby blue color. I'm repainting it the off white that covers the master bedroom.

The previous owner obviously didn't give a shit about the carpet. This is baby blue paint stains in the secondary bedroom. It looks like a paint tray spilled over its edges. 

This is the back porch. Yeah it needs a pressure washing. =P The back porch light was not working but thankfully it just needed a new bulb. I also cleaned the light fixture because it was caked with dead bugs.

Another fun discovery. The inner workings of this toilet are completely broken. I'm guessing it took just as long to rig up this wire hanger to be a new flush handle as it would have to just fix it properly. Lots of rust inside now.

Look at that dirt ring. XD

The front of this bathroom drawer is completely broken off and missing. One of the kitchen drawers was also broken off but left behind so Jesse was able to fix it. Unfortunately we'll have to find a new drawer front for this one or replace the whole thing completely.

This is the front door. We'll be replacing the hardware and repainting it.

That's it for now! As you can see there's a lot of work to be done, but again it's mostly cosmetic. So we continue on!

Ugh mortgages

Lesson learned: Find a mortgage company that works well for you.

Once our bid was accepted on the Mercury home we had to set up a mortgage. Within 24 hours we went from casually looking for a rental to buy to having a bid accepted on one.

So the next 48 hours were spent gathering paper work, signing forms, and faxing/emailing documents to the mortgage company our realtor suggested to us. He'd worked with Citibank before and got us in contact with someone there.

This was our mistake. We should have gotten pre-approved for a loan beforehand and been prepared to move forward on a mortgage application with the bank of our choice. Since we'd heard of Citibank (who hasn't?) we felt fine working with them.

Ultimately, everything went through fine. However, the process was a royal pain in the ass.

I couldn't believe how many documents they wanted from us for a small mortgage loan. We were putting down $21.5k so our loan was only for $63.5k. Plenty of cars cost more than that.

But god forbid I didn't get them an official document that said our $400.00 a year HOA fees were paid. And exactly WHAT is that suspicious $3000 deposit we made a couple weeks ago??? Written and signed proof please!

Ask Jesse or my friends what I thought of the loan application process. I'm sure they'll tell you of the many f-bombs I threw around. At one point I was near ready to tell Citibank to kiss my ass if they wanted any more documents from us. I faxed hundreds of pages to them over the course of 3 weeks. Oh, they also had to call my boss to get a verbal confirmation that I work where I work. Twice.

The people I directly spoke and worked with at Citibank were very nice, thankfully. It's not their fault their company requires such dumb shit. Their whole process can eat a dick, though. Can you tell we won't be using them again? =P

It was finally all approved, though, and we had our closing date! We'd be closing on October 31st! November 2nd! November 6th!

Goddamnit, Citibank.

So we bought a house...

...that's not for us.

Yep, we finally did it. We took the plunge and bought our first rental house!

J and I have been talking for a while about getting into rental properties. We both think having an additional income source in the future is a good idea. Sure we both have retirement accounts, but additional security never hurts.

The driving factor was that we had some extra money just sitting in savings. Neither J or I are big on playing the stock market or dealing with those decisions directly, so we wanted a different approach to investing.

Helloooooooooo real estate investing.

We decided on single family rental properties. The market in Houston is currently awesome for investors. Home prices are low and renting is up. Thankfully neither of us are very impulsive, so we discussed our course of action a good bit. J also read Building Wealth One House at a Time: Making it Big on Little Deals. 

We both got excited.

The hunt for a house began. We drove a lot of neighborhoods and scoured HAR.com. Most potential houses were either more money than we wanted to spend or great price but horrific condition. J and I both work 40 hours a week so while we were willing to do work and repairs on our investment, there was a limit to how much. Full renovations were definitely out.


Then one day J sent me an email linking to this house on HAR:

It was a foreclosure listed at 90k. Right in our price range. Plus, it looked great! Yep, could definitely tell it needed some work but nothing insane.

I called the listing realtor and booked a showing for that afternoon. When we got the house it looked to be everything we wanted. Great price and good condition. There were a lot (and I mean A LOT) of cosmetic issues, but those are easily fixable and just require some elbow grease.

This property was currently held by HUD. The realtor explained that the purchasing process was done by placing a bid on the home. Every night at midnight an automated process ran in which HUD would determine if your bid won the home.

We were very lucky in that previous accepted bids on this home had fallen through (I'm guessing the bidders finances didn't go through). On HUD homes investors can not make bids until after an initial period where the home is available to owner occupants only. Thankfully, that period had passed.

We put in a bid of 85k that same night and the next morning we found out we had won the house!

Next step: lining up financing. Oi!