In my defense, lol, I was (at that point) a Mama Bear who felt "homeless" essentially and my goal was to refocus my life, find some stable ground and rebuild a life for myself and Riley after the break up from my ex-fiance which I was not expecting. So when I was back home for Thanksgiving, I saw this house for sale. Dirt cheap (less than $10k) and it needed a lot of work...a lot! The floor had fallen in about half of the house. But it was so cheap and it was in the small town next to where my bff lives so I did some thinking, talked to my family, talked to Riley, ran some numbers. Then I decided I could afford it. And the plan was to buy it, remodel it to make it livable and Riley and I move back to Arkansas to be near family. And I would run my Arizona real estate team from Arkansas, via the wonderful internet. So I bought the house and we closed on it around Christmas during that second visit out to Arkansas.
It was in BAD shape. But...as a lover of homes all I saw was the original wood doors, original doors knobs, the brick fireplace, etc. I knew it needed a ton of work but I did have an inspection and the foundation was solid, roof was good, frame was good but it just needed all new flooring, some new floor joists and likely updated electrical and plumbing plus all the finishing items.
This is what it looked like the day we closed on it; a soggy December winter day.
I knew we'd be leaving the house soon to go back to Arizona so I wanted the house to look "cared for" and not abandoned as it had previously so I knew I had to do something with the outside first so that strangers or neighbors wouldn't think it was just a sad, empty house. So I spray painted that front porch area that looked so horrible. Truly it needed to be replaced but this was a temporary, visual fix. I put up a flag (which I do everywhere I live) and put up a nice wreath on the door my Mom made me. We changed all the door knobs and locks on the 3 exterior doors. Three of the windows that had been missing or broken got replaced so that the house was now "sealed up" and secure.
Front porch got cleaned up to reveal a painted red concrete porch which was a fun surprise because you couldn't even tell it was red before.
New mail box up, house numbers up!
Just a little bit of muscle and it already looked 10x better, in my opinion.
Then we took to the yard. The grass wasn't bad because it had been being mowed but there were little baby trees growing up by the side of the house and those hadn't been taken care of. They were all over so we got most of those chopped down and in a pile so that the house, again, looked cared for.
Riley man loving his demo work!
One of the walls we were removing.
Riley man standing in the door way of the old living room to the old kitchen. In that living room is one of the rooms were the floor fell in, you can see clearly in this picture.
Part of the reason my family and friends told me I was crazy. This is the dirt in the "living room", haha!
Kitchen post demo. You can barely see that old original door and window frame!!! <3
Me working to remove walls to reveal the brick chimney I had found!
Part of the old chimney! Love these!
After taking a day break from the house work we had gotten a ton of rain so Riley and I returned one day to find the house mostly flooded underneath. Which was a sobering reminder to me why this house was so cheap, the slope around the house was directing water towards the house, water was getting in somewhere and standing there. Then the humidity from the evaporation is what eroded those floor joists and caused them to eventually cave in. I knew the pillars and support were good, you can see how solid they are here. But I had to find a way to stop the water from coming in. So I did a bunch of online research and found I'd need to close in all the crawl space vents and add a sump pump down there to drain out any new water that might get in there again.
So on our last day there working on the house we went to town and got the materials I needed to close up all the crawl space vents, except the bigger one for access. These vents were originally put on these old homes because back then builders thought it was good to have air flow but over time we have all learned that if not properly taken care of and when in a very humid environment, these vents do more harm than good. So I closed them all up with the hope that would be fix #1 to prevent more water from getting in.
How we left the house in early January 2015. You can barely see but I had put solar walk way lights around the big tree in the front (that I loved) and the walk way up to the front door. There is also a solar flag light on the flag pole.
We left there in January with this "plan", which I'll use loosely, which was to return to Arizona, work my tail off in real estate, save up a stash of money, sell most of our belongings in Arizona, trade my car in for a pick up, drive out to Arkansas and purchase a small pop up camper, stick it in the backyard and THEN live in that camper while we finished the work on the house.
Reality set in about a month later as I had made arrangements with the seller to do a seller financing deal and pay LARGE monthly sums to have the note paid off within a year. Since the property was so damaged and also so cheap, no lender would even think about doing a loan on it. I couldn't even get contractors insurance on the place...it was that bad, lol! So we're back in Arizona and those next few months turned out to be seriously the worst in my entire real estate career. It was a little slow but then on top of that I had the team member working with me and sharing commissions and THEN we had a deal cancel. And then another one cancelled...and then another. I went from December to April with no paycheck. I'm not even sure now, looking back, how I managed to stay afloat. My Mom was a tremendous help financially, doing all she could to help from afar and thankfully with us still rooming with Chad our costs were super low. So we didn't have or get anything we didn't need, we just survived, barely.
During this time I had a real hard time meeting that commitment I'd made on the Arkansas house but they were flexible with me and we changed the terms and I kept the house. All the while wishing it was even barely livable and I'd move out there in a heart beat. That one large payment on that house we couldn't live in got to be rather daunting and down right frustrating. To pay for something you can't use, live in or even sell!
So around May I started reaching out to fellow investors because with some long thought I had concluded my best way to get out of the mess of that house in Arkansas I couldn't live in would have to be to cut my losses and change the plan to MOVE there and to finish flipping it and sell it for profit. So the plan was rather modified from my dream home to scaling back and completing all the work that needed to be done. And rather than changing it from a 3 bedroom to a 2 bedroom with an office, I changed the plan back to a 3 bedroom to make it something more appealing for the buyer's market. I put together a big presentation with plans, diagrams, photos, interactive floor plans, budgets and spreadsheets, etc. I reached out to a few investors I knew and nobody did flip properties in Arkansas so that wasn't helpful.
Right around this time, in Arizona, a good friend of mine who lived in Maricopa (where I had lived for 6 years previous to moving with my ex-fiance the fall before) had a huge house and nobody to live in it with him and he worked away from home out of state for at least a week or two out of the month. He knew my situation and knew that I'd love to get back to Maricopa, out of Chad's house, move on with my life but that I needed another roommate situation while I was getting things in order. So when we talked about this idea of me and Riley being his roommates, he thought about it for a bit and then agreed. So within about a week or so we moved back to Maricopa. We moved in early May, Riley just had a few weeks to finish out school there in one of his old schools to wrap up 5th grade.
So as of May/June 2015, that's where we were in life. Back in Maricopa, near good friends, 90% of our stuff in storage still and real estate business on an upswing (which was great, finally)! So that meant, no plans or time for a new plan!
XoXo,
Elizabeth
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