After asking my tenants to leave a couple weeks ago, I went in to rental property #2 to start working on it.
This is my overall analysis:
- Budget: $2700
- Mortgage cost for vacancy in November: $1500
- On market date: November 11th, 2024
- Key notes: walls were heavily dirty and colored with crayons, both sliding glass doors need work, fence needs to be fixed, wholes and cracks on exterior of house need to be sealed and painted, termite treatment might be needed just in case.
I had my parents, brother, and coworker come give me a hand this past Saturday.
We went in with the goal of changing the kitchen sliding door and putting up the fence that had fallen.
Turns out the fence is too rotted to stand up again. The options were to get rid of it or swap everything out and make it brand new. This won’t fit into our budget, so instead we decided to get rid of one half of the fence and leave the other half that covers the main road.
Although it looks tacky, it will have to do for now. The tenants that I asked to leave still owe me more than $4500. They ended up falling a couple of months behind, and I had to cover the mortgages during those months. This is why the budget is so low for this turnover and I have to get so many people involved. Hopefully once we clean up the yard and mow the lawn, it will look more presentable.
While my stepfather and I were working on the door, we found that there was a lot of rotten pieces of wood. As the good ol’ saying goes, “you never know what you’re going to find until you start tearing things up”.
We spent a majority of the day making Home Depot runs and going back and forth between the house and our personal residence looking for tools and supplies. We kept running into different problems that required some creativity to solve.
While my stepfather and I worked on the kitchen sliding door, my mom and brother were cleaning the bathrooms and the rooms. They were in need of some deep cleaning.
Overall
Saturday we ran into a few problems while changing the door. Also, we have no experiencing changing doors or dealing with this type of work. The learning curve and additional issues caused the day to be extended without much progress being made.
- Jobs completed:
- Kitchen sliding door ripped out
- Rotted wood ripped out by kitchen
- Master bedroom cleaned
- Both bathrooms cleaned for exception of inside of cabinets
- 3 walls were painted, they still need one more coat
- Total hours worked: 12