The Foreclosure: A Diamond in the Rough

When my husband, S, and I bought our first house together, we decided not to sell his first, and instead try our hand at being landlords and rent it out – how hard could it be?

As it turns out, not too hard at all when you have one of your best friends in the market for a rental. <<I can see where this would not work with just any friendship, so I would advise a lot of consideration beforehand>> <<We also highly advise our friends to purchase when they can, NOT rent!!, but if they insist on renting, then yes, come our way!>> We had been renting it out successfully for about 9 months when S came across a foreclosure on the market, and we decided to take a look. And man, oh man was it rough, and gaudy, and scary.. but we saw strong foundation.. level floors.. space.. potential!(?) A diamond in the rough (I hope you read that in my Aladdin sand-tiger voice). Hours and hours of work later – and still hours and hours of work to go – I look back at pictures, and I can only laugh and cringe at what we bought.

Now, S and I are not pros by any means, but when I say whoever was in here didn’t know what they were doing.. understatement of the year. Lots of aspects were downright comical: trim inside out, each room a different color (literally no repeats), receptacles horizontal (and not just not vertical, not even squared), glitter glue/stickers/craft paint on the walls, huge staples plaguing all the window trim (for makeshift curtains..??), and there was caulking and spray foam EV-ER-Y-WHERE.

We also closed on this house at the worst time of the year. January, the middle of winter, when we had no intentions of turning on/paying for utilities. So, the house ended up sitting pretty (or sitting ugly, I suppose) until the weather started coming around. Our plan was to put off turning them on until the heat of the summer when “we’d be spending more time over there”. We had some uncharacteristically warm days in February and March that we did some cleaning up, but May came – enter AD, our firstborn son – and things inevitably slowed down.

In the month since, you can no longer see many of the above colors, and we’ve managed a lot of demo (the fun part in my opinion), but we’ve still got a ways to go to make a home out of our little gem.

💎

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Next time on The Foreclosure: Our goal has been to have someone in before the winter.. check out some Before and Afters along with my To-Do list!