The House

The house is a 4-bedroom, 2-bath home. It's all brick around the outside with no siding. It's tan in color, and is in great shape with no physical damage. The front yard is small, but the backyard is huge! There are a couple of bushes in the front of the house, but the backyard is nothing but grass. No trees, no plants, no shrubs. A perfect “clean slate” for Lawrence and his green thumb to fix up the way he wants it. I have the black thumb of death with anything resembling foliage, so I'll have very little to do with it. I'll help prepare and plant, but he will be doing the upkeep. Oh, and he's mowing the grass. Me and manual labor don't get along, so it's all his.

There is a wrought iron fence across the front door entrance and on the side of the house heading into the backyard. We will paint all that black eventually. The rest of the backyard is surrounded by wood fencing, and a couple of planks need replacing. The roof looks good, but some of the trim around the edges needs replacing and repair. Eventually we will need to replace the roof as it seems a number of the shingles are loose, thereby allowing water to seep in. More on that later. We will have a two-car garage. My Honda has never known a garage, so this will be a nice change to help protect the car from the elements and most bad people that want to break into it, which I found out from talking with one of our new neighbors, has happened before. Everyone knows who is doing it, but no one has any evidence. It's one of our neighbor's kids who is in and out of jail a lot. I wonder why. That will change when we move in. Again, more on that later.

Now, to the inside of the house. I'll start off by saying this was a rental house before, and the renting family had three kids. Need I say more? Stains on the carpet. Stains on the walls. A mutilated air duct vent way up high, which we still can't figure out how that happened. The place is filthy, and it's obvious that when this house was foreclosed on, they moved out and didn't bother to clean anything. The kitchen cabinets are damaged or missing, and they used bad contact paper on the walls in the kitchen that was supposed to look like wood. Nice try. The garbage disposal has a hole in it. The water heater won't light, so there's no hot water. Luckily, the central air conditioner and heating unit do work, but it's 25 years old and will need replacing eventually. A quick pass with the Shop Vac will collect assorted dead cockroaches and other matter which has collected everywhere. The rest of the interior looks like an apartment, and what I mean by that is it has white walls, tan carpet, and the cheapest ceiling fans, light fixtures, faucets, toilets and appliances they could buy. Absolute crap.

You may be wondering at this point why we would want a house like this. The answer: It's a foreclosure, and we got it for $74,000 with a 3.875% interest rate. We jumped on it just in time since the economy is slowly getting better and cheap houses are disappearing fast. According to real estate records, this house was worth $140,000 at one point, and that's with the description I gave above! Just wait until we get in and redo everything. Egg-shell walls with beautiful tow-tone paint. Crown moldings on top and chair rails at the right level. New tile on the floors as well as new carpet. New cabinets and appliances. We plan on making this a showplace, but it will take a lot of elbow grease, time and money, and we are both prepared for that. Maybe in a few years when the economy is great again and we want to sell it, I see no reason why we couldn't easily double our money, if not more.

The nice thing about all of this is that we will continue to live in the apartment rent-free for a few months while we work on the house, and the apartment is only one mile away. Another nice thing? The closest Home Depot is only half a mile away. Buy your Home Depot stock now. We also frequent Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Ikea and Williams-Sonoma. They’re not close, but trust me, we know where they are.