House #1 - Day 2

I only spent about three hours total at the property today. I had to run a few errands, and do some stuff at my 'real' house. My father-in-law finished cleaning the outside entry way, and it looks 100x better. After seeing his work, I decided against painting the outside completely. Instead, I'll just do some patchwork around a couple of the windows. Those windows look like the previous owner had a flower bed installed underneath them at one point. What's bad about that is it looks like moisture from the dirt came in contact with the window frame and caused a little bit of rot. It isn't too bad, but needs to be patched a little and painted over.

I also talked more about the property with my wife and decided to go ahead and paint the entire inside. I didn't want to do it really, but there are just too many imperfections in every room that ignoring it would probably drive away potential buyers. Also, the previous owner had an affection with hanging things. He put nails, screws, tacks, and even straight pins on just about every wall in the house. In a couple places, he even put those big drywall screws. So, I spent some time sunday taking the objects out of the wall and covering the holes with spackle. It looks a lot better to the eye, but still looks bad. That's another reason for wanting to paint the house inside.

We all discussed what to do with those teal-green shelves. We all wanted to just remove them, but were afraid it may damage to the drywall. The shelf right under the window was also custom built, and required destroying the brace under the window sill itself. So, we decided to leave the shelves alone, but to paint over them with a bone white color. I started this project yesterday, but only managed two coats. It will need at least one more coat, and possibly two.

I also installed the rear coach light and painted the pantry door. For some odd reason the pantry door looked like someone just put a light first coat on, so I painted it with another coat to make it look more appealing.

I still need to order the microwave/vent hood. I found a Hotpoint model at Lowes for $160 that I think I'll get. I'm not sure how long it will take to come in, though. My most time-consuming task now will be to paint the inside of the house. It'll be easier since the place is empty and not currently being lived in. When we painted our house last spring, it took about two months total. But we had to do a lot of covering up and moving of furniture, and shielding rooms so that the fumes would not go in our daughter's bedroom. Plus our house was about 300sf bigger. I'll stop by Lowes sometime this week and pick up the supplies and the first 5 gallons of paint. It will be a cheap light beige paint and not that really cheap Monarch white paint, so it will look a little bit better. I figure with supplies (which I still have a lot from last year) and paint, I'll be spending $300-$500. After that's done, I'm considering hiring a company to steam clean the carpet, so that we can take a break. Then it will be put on the market.

My work was cut short at the property because things at home are starting to break (go figure). Our microwave turns on, but no longer heats, so I need to call GE to have them fix it. We also noticed little specks in our water. I filled one bathtub about 2" with water, and you can little specks - like pepper - floating in the water. When I drained the water, there were streaks of dirt in the bottom, so it appears the specks are actually dirt. I told my wife to call the water department first thing in the morning.