DEJA VU

It feels like we’ve been here before…we had just finished this same property and same units a few months ago. We renovated both sides and had tenants placed. We were FINALLY onto our own house and working on our OWN bathroom! All that came to a grinding halt when the flooding occurred!

This time around, we had to add in the replaced drywall on 2ft sections, around the entire parameter of both units. We also had to add 4 yards of stone to both driveways. With those items finished, we’ve moved to our painting, caulking, and flooring.

For small business real estate owners, who manage and repair their properties yourselves, you have to have GRIT!! This “part time gig” will wear you out and push you to your limits. Once you’re at your limits, you’ll be pushed some more. Properties are not forgiving and things will break. Since this major disaster has occurred we’ve been contacted 2 more times over water issues at other properties. Luckily, they were both minor, but you never know. It could have been a busted pipe or main. You just don’t know what you’re up against and have to expect the worst.

Our original plan was to put down vinyl wood plank floors. Once the drywall was installed and we had a chance to clean up the floors we decided to do a very thorough cleaning and seal with four coats of polyurethane. Just like before it was an arduous process. We would drive up to the unit after work and put a coat of poly on then drive home (120 miles round trip). These floors aren’t in pristine condition but they serve their purpose and still look pretty good once the poly is on!

After the floors were dry, we painted and installed all of the baseboards. We were careful to number every board as we pulled them all up, so putting everything back was fairly easy! The only real issue we had was that we originally marked the baseboards and the walls, but the problem here is that we painted the walls so the coinciding number was gone!! A few of the baseboards cracked when we pulled them up and most of the quarter round broke when we tried to free them from the walls. Danny just cut new baseboards where they were needed and replaced any missing quarter round. With expensive as wood has become, we grateful that we were able to salvage whatever we could from the units and reuse it! The replacement baseboards cost us $16 each!! Amazingly we only needed two of them.

This has been a difficult renovation to tackle. Not only dealing with the damage from the flood but also because we finished these units back in April and May. We’ve been able to keep good spirits and positive attitudes but it has been mentally, physically and emotionally draining. At this point we are about 95% of the way done with one unit and we still have a LOT of work to do in the other one! We are trying to move as quick as we can because we have another unit that needs a kitchen and bathroom renovation at the end of July!!

We try to make sure to enjoy our time together, even if we are sitting in a vacant rental on the floor taking pictures of caulk!!

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