05-23-15 Deck lattice removal & yard clean up

I knew we had some things to clean up around the property before we moved in because it had been on the market for about 6 months and the last time I had been there to clean up the weeds had been about 2 months before. On the day we actually were to move in I wanted my only concern to be moving in and unpacking. So Riley and I spent some time at the property before moving day working on some things.

From the first day I set foot on this property a couple of  years ago I hated this lattice on the deck on the front of the house. If you want privacy then I guess it's a good idea but I like looking out to the yard or the mountains and enjoying the view. So it had to come down! And Riley man is always up for demo work!

We brought our puppies out to the farm to see what they'd think about it. And on this first day that Riley and I spent about 4 hours there, our yellow lab Bella would not sit still. She ran her heart out around that whole property, all over the place and back and forth. Now Max, our pitbull mix, is much lazier! He would follow her and check things out but he'd end up on the porch with us before long.

The lattice is down! Yay!!!

A before and after of the same area! I can't imagine why anybody would ever put that up.

Riley helping blow the huge tumbleweeds after I raked them up.

Working away!

Side yard clean up done!

Here is a nice before and after of the small yard side! It was BAD before!

XoXo,

Elizabeth

Jan-May 2015

A little side story, I had bought a house while in Arkansas. And I'm sure if I was blogging back then there would have been 100 posts about it! I'll share some pictures of that little...adventure...

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

Late 2014, Season of Changes

I pick up in our story, in our journey of getting TO the farm, in October 2014. The financial turmoil I mentioned in the last post that my fiance and I had post-summer was still happening and nearing a breaking point. Chad mentioned that his family had a house in another town an hour away that had been his grandparents and his mother and brother lived there now, there was still a small mortgage on it. They could always use some help with the payment and apparently there were 1-2 rooms that we could use for our rooms if we chose to move there. We talked about it for a while as it meant another move for me and Riley, him having to change schools, moving to a town we had never lived in, moving in with people we barely know and moving away from my real estate market in Maricopa that I specialized in. There were plenty of cons to the idea BUT the pros were that after talking to the family we’d have the option to buy the house from the family and own it one day, of course, allowing Chad’s mom and brother to stay. The house was run down and needed some work, things that they just weren’t able to take care of. So we planned a dinner with his Mom and brother to drive up there and talk to them about this idea, as they didn’t offer it to us in the first place. Chad did a lot of assuming but after talking to a few family members everybody was on board and so we prepared to move. It was the financial break we needed, to save us. We did, unfortunately, have to break our lease on our beautiful home in Maricopa but it came down to the fact that it was the only option we really had. We put 80% of our stuff in storage except for what we needed for our 2 bedrooms and moved in.

This is a part of mine and Riley’s life that because it involves so many other people, I will leave out a lot of the (unpleasant) details.

By November 2014 house remodel #2 on the farm was DONE!!! Myself and the Seller were very pleased with this. He decided he didn’t want the risk of putting a tenant in there again and the cost of the 2 remodels were more than he could recoup continuing to rent out the investment property so he had to sell it. He had an appraisal done on the property and I listed it for sale accordingly! 

Here are the photos of when the second renovation was completed as the house went on the market up for sale just shy of a year ago!

She's no looker and still has no curb appeal but at least she was all cleaned up and ALMOST everything in working order!

The deck is 515 square feet, I measured!

Done again. Dining room.

Living Room 

Living Room

Kitchen

Kitchen

Backyard

Backyard

I have always loved these 2 mature mesquite trees and how they just seem to beautifully frame the shop!

A view of the entrance to the carport, the gate to the back part of the property (about 6 of the 8 acres is rural and fenced in, separate from the "front yard" part of the house/property)

This is a tack shed on the property.

3 car carport/shop

The chicken coop is right there to the right, inside that covered awning area.

A shot of the back 6 acres. =D

Changes abound!!!

The house went on the market and I was excited! I was happy to see it looking so good again and I hosted a few open houses to drive people to the house since it’s in a very rural area. Things didn’t go as planned. There was hardly any interest in the home and when I would have someone come out to see it they either were just curious to see what it looked like after the remodel (nosy neighbors) or they were wanting a rent to own option which the Seller wasn’t too keen on!

In my life, the second week of November was a giant turning point. The stress my relationship was under with my fiance got to be too much and after arguing daily for about a month and finally sitting down to talk, we ended our relationship. Problem was, I had no intention on ending the relationship and I had vested my entire life and my business on this move to a new town. Riley had only been in his new school for maybe 2 months, if that. Add to that that I was heartbroken because nobody likes the end of a relationship but I knew that if we did proceed to hack away at it that if a marriage did happen, it would eventually end as our views on parenting were so far apart…that any compromise seemed impossible. So, since I wasn’t planning on having to move AGAIN we hadn’t been saving money. Both of us had put all of our extra money into fixing up his Mom’s house that we had planned to buy. I think we sunk about $3000 into that house in two months, repairs that were greatly needed. But then at that point in my life seeing the end of my relationship it felt as though all that money had been wasted, on a home I’d never own, belonging to a family I’d never be part of. The magnitude of the situation I was in got to be too much for me to bear. When venting to my Mother on the phone (who lives in Louisiana) she told me that Riley and I needed to come out to see her for Thanksgiving and just give myself a chance to get away. So we did just that. We loaded up in the car and hit the road a few days before Thanksgiving when Riley got out of school. The week following the break up, while still living together, Chad and I didn’t do much talking. We had talked about how it was obvious I couldn’t move out right away so he’d have to be flexible with me. And we needed to at least be friendly with one another or it’d be unbearable for both of us. Since we both agreed on those things, that’s what we did. So our trip to Louisiana and Arkansas (where I’m from, where most of my family is, where my youngest son lives) was great!!! I’ll share some photos below because it was such a wonderful time!

Thanksgiving in Louisiana and Arkansas!

When I go back home several times a year to northern Arkansas it is a 23-34 hour drive. This was my first trip heading to West Monroe, Louisiana and so when we left home and my GPS said 19 hours I was like "Woo hoo, I can do that!". A little known fact about me, I love road trips. Particularly, I love driving, as these trips going back and forth to places we've been so many times there is less "road tripping" and sight seeing and more driving through the night to not have to deal with traffic and fellow travelers! So I almost always set out midday or in the evening with the intent to drive straight through and every trip I've made by myself or just me and my boys, we always made it straight through. #motivation #loveit

But honestly I don't do it alone. I always have a monster (or 5) on board and generally a jug of my homemade sweet tea to make the drive a little easier! And it works! =D

Coming into West Monroe! It was my first time there and I swear you drive through Texas for 12-13 hours (no lie) and about an hour before you hit the Louisiana western border you go from wide open plains to TREES!!! Being from Arkansas with tons of big, huge, beautiful green trees but living in Arizona the last 15 years...I LOVE TREES!!! So that is always one of my favorite parts about going back home!

My boys and I at the Duck Dynasty Headquarters in West Monroe, Louisiana!

Boys being adorable in the hotel

Me and my Riley man

Some time in Arkansas with those we adore!

Part of the middle of southern Arkansas on our way from my Mom's in West Monroe, La (north central Louisiana) to where my bff and family live in north central Arkansas. Almost a straight line north through the center of the state. Trees and wildlife (deer primarily) abound!!! And fog, I do not miss driving in fog!

While there, I kid you not, I never once saw the sun. That to me, being so used to the bright, blissful, endless Arizona sun was pretty dreadful! This was a very soggy, long dirt road to my good friend Alaina's house. She also lives in the middle of nowhere, common factor with my friends and family! But on a sunny day in spring or summer, this road and this area is immensely gorgeous with bright green fields, tall towering trees and wild flowers!!!

One of the days going to my best friend Jeannie's house, this is the dirt road to her house. She lives in flat lands and the area is primarily all farm land. So all the area around her house in a good 8-9 mile radius is ALL farmland. The main highway is raised, due to damaging floods in the last 30 years. But once you turn off that main road you drop down to the rural dirt roads and they're all low, pretty level with the farmland. So when there is a ton of rain and the nearby rivers rise (and they do, at least a few times a year) then the farmland gets flooded. If it is bad enough, then the roads get flooded. A few times, most recently just a couple of years ago, the floods got so bad homes were lost and major damage was done on the nearby towns. These roads make me nervous as I seem to always find myself on them in a car!!!

While in Arkansas to see Konnor we got to go by my best friend's house and she's PURE COUNTRY! Her and her husband (and their kids) live on an acre outside of town and have chickens, lots of dogs they breed and pigs!!! I hadn't had much experience with pigs although...I do love pork! haha! So it was a wonderful experience to get to meet her pigs, talk to her and her husband about what it's like to raise them and I was smitten! I knew right away when I had a farm someday I would have to have pigs! They are such smart and social creatures! I loved how they wagged their little tails when you walk up to them!

One of Jeannie's pigs! So cute!!!!

I am still not a fan of chickens and I'm not sure why, they just kind of freak me out! haha!

Jeannie's dogs looking out to the farmland surrounding their house.

When we went back home to Arizona after Thanksgiving it wasn't too bad because we were only home for a couple of weeks before we left again for the Christmas holidays in the south. Chad and I got along fine, we had a few heart to hearts about how we could be friendly roommates and still split the bills like we were before and make it through until I could put a new plan in place. So everything was shockingly amicable on that front.

Christmas in Arkansas and Louisiana!!!

This was the first Christmas in too many years that all my siblings got together at my Mom's house. The previous 10 or so years my Mother and I both lived in Arizona so we'd celebrate together with my boys but my sister lived in Arkansas and my brother lived in Oklahoma. This year with me coming out, my brother and sister came out as well since they were all less than 8-9 hours away. So my Mom was very happy to have all her babies and all her grandbabies together in one place! We took that opportunity to have some family portraits done by my sister in law who is a professional photographer!

The swampy yet beautiful park where we did our family photos! The grounds were GORGEOUS! And I'm not sure what kind of trees these tall, lanky, mossy trees were but any tree is a splendid sight to me so naturally, I snapped up several photos while there!

One of the docks we did photos on!

My two happy boys, playing video games at Nana's!

My baby boo! He is already 8 but still loves his blanky that he got when he was just 6 mths old. Sleeps with it always!

Riley man on Christmas morning.

So those are just a few photos from Thanksgiving and Christmas! This was a long post with lots of pictures so I'll pick up on the next post in early 2015! Almost got you guys caught up to date, almost!

XoXo,

Elizabeth