And take a look at this progress photo of our finished basement!

Even the darkest, dingiest spaces have potential if you know how to look at things!

After our personal experiences dealing with elderly family members, we decided to go the extra mile to make the whole suite handicapped accessible. We created a shower that has no step-over threshold. In the event a buyer or family member is in a wheelchair or requires a walker, they won’t have to worry about rolling or stepping over the threshold to get into the shower. For future needs, there is wood blocking installed in the framing of the walls for hand rails and a shower seat.

Having wheeled many a stretcher into homes during my long career in the fire department, we decided to install 36-inch wide doors to the master bedroom and bath in the event the suite will be used for an elderly or infirm resident. You’ve got to start thinking about these things as you get older, or reach the age when you find yourself caring for aging parents.

This foresight adds a bit more time and effort up front of course, but we know how much of a difference it can make to someone’s quality of life in the future, which makes it a no-brainer!

Recently we’ve invested in three properties that need various amounts of renovation. The one I want to speak  about now is our Fredericksburg single family home on one acre. This place was owned by a man who had many difficulties keeping the place up. After he passed away, his son inherited the property and realized that he had neither the time, the resources, nor the energy to tackle the renovation needed to either live in the property or to sell it conventionally. And this guy is even in the building trades, so you can imagine the amount of work we were up against when we got the call to consider purchasing the property!

A careful assessment was completed and a renovation budget was prepared. The potential of this property is awesome, but we knew we would have to roll up our sleeves to tackle this baby! Even with our many years of experience, this one posed a couple of challenges:

#1) There was a full unfinished basement with a drive-in garage under the house, lending itself to a terrific amount of additional living space, and we had to re-design the finished basement with today’s active family in mind. A powder room was decided upon to complement the huge family recreation room, the newly separated garage, and the large laundry/storage/utility room entering from the outside. The advice we got from our team was to make the floorplan open, but with some separation for multiple activities. With some work, we created a media room that opens to a recreation area. They are separate enough for dual activities, but the new owner can easily encompass both areas if needed.

#2) We were caught off guard by the number of floor cuts we had to make in order to meet today’s new codes for the laundry room drain and the utility floor drain. These were in addition to the new powder room piping we installed. For our guys, it was no problem that a major concrete saw and a jack hammer couldn’t deal with. Of course, don’t forget the good old fashioned shovel needed to dig down to the under-slab piping. The inspections process wasn’t so bad, after we got help from the inspections and code officials.

Even if you know the business as well as we do, seek out any and all help. You won’t regret the time you spent to get it done right the first time. We know from experience that it is a heck of a lot cheaper to do it right and pay for it once than to tear it out and do it a second time.

This house will be in beautiful, clean, modern, move-in condition when we’re done. But how’d you like to live there now, during the renovation? Yeah, me neither.

Like a lot of homes that went to foreclosure, it was in really rough shape when we first took on the project. But the repairs and renovations are going well, and I’m very excited about how it will turn out. It is a pretty well-constructed single family home, and homes in the area were selling in the peak a couple years ago in a range of $250,000 to over $300,000.

I have got to post some of our project photos, so you can see just how much work goes into renovating one of these foreclosure properties! I keep talking about how taking on these repair and renovation issues yourself is a huge and inconvenient endeavor, but a picture speaks a thousand words. Our construction crew is very skilled and professional, but I still wouldn’t want to live in the house with all of this work going on!

Check back next week for photos…

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While out looking for homes one day, they stumbled across my street sign and website. When the parents came by the house and it was still under construction, they immediately called Jan and told her “We found your house.” They called me and asked what seemed like a million questions about all the renovation work we planned to do. They were good questions, particularly from people not in the construction business. They told me their story of seeing so many properties, and the poor condition the banks were trying to sell them in.

Once Jan and I talked, we struck a deal for a little less than what the neighborhood homes were currently selling for by owner-occupants. She even paid me more than the negotiated price in order to get the appliances upgraded to exactly what she wanted. With all the work we did, it was still an older home. But, the place was in true move-in condition and fixed up just as she wanted.

Jan, as a single owner with no renovation experience, did not have to worry about plumbing issues, appliances, windows, bathrooms, flooring, the hot water heater or heat pump…the list goes on. The house was a true deal for her, unlike all of those other nasty foreclosures she saw. Since it was already well-renovated, she was able to get over the first year of so of being “house poor” before deciding whether or not to change other things in the house — which would then be optional and not major repairs.

Check back on Monday for Part 3 of Jan’s buying a foreclosure experience: The Closing