Renovating Our $253K House! 🏠 (It’s getting close)

Sharon Tseung 0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design their best lives.

Unknown Speaker 0:13
Hey, guys, it’s Sharon Tseung.

Unknown Speaker 0:14
And I’m Sean pan.

Sharon Tseung 0:15
And today we’re gonna talk about our renovations on a $253,000 property and all the progress with it. So you might have seen it on our previous video. But we basically purchased our latest project at the end of January. And in that previous episode, I talked all about how we were able to purchase it. But now it’s been months of renovations, we’re almost at the endpoint, I would say probably about one month out until we have the final product. And we can start furnishing the house and making it into a midterm rental. So in the last episode, I kind of talked about how we were interviewing contractors, we ended up talking to about five different contractors, some of them actually knew who you were. So they were really fighting for our business, we ended up narrowing down to two different choices. The first was a bid around Labor for about $41,000. This bid was without material, and this company looked really good, great reviews, but they dealt with a lot of luxury builds. And you know, with what we’re doing, we’re not usually flipping super luxury, were usually buying them as rentals. And we want people who we can work with all the time that can fix little things here and there. So the other company that we were talking to, they were bidding around 30k For our project, just labor as well not material. And they basically had the benefit of you know, if we ever had future projects, and we needed little things to be fixed, he could probably help and do that you look like he would always be on the site working with a team, like his clothes were all painted up and stuff like that. So we knew that he had experience with renovating. So that’s why we actually ended up going with that team. And again, both teams had really good reviews as well. So we felt like both would do a good job. And honestly, it probably would have went well with either group. But we ended up going with this one.

Speaker 3 1:58
Originally, we were trying to do this renovation with as little work as possible because when we went in the property, we saw that it was actually in decent condition. And we felt that with just a few minor upgrades, it could look good enough to rent out but we try to do everything at the minimum we try to leave out the countertops, we try to leave out the bathrooms the kitchen as is keep the kitchen tiling, keep the ceiling and fix the fireplace light over time we decided to you know, redo the recessed lighting, redo some of the walls, fix up the ceiling, fix up the fireplace, so in the bid and going up to $30,000 from labor costs as you

Sharon Tseung 2:25
can see here, it’s kind of looking moving ready, right like someone could rent this out as a long term tenant. But we did want to make it a lot nicer. So our budget did go up and the flooring was a bit old, the kitchen was a bit old, there were certain things about the bathroom where the entryway was kind of smaller, we were going to leave that there initially, but then we ended up widening the doorway for the bathroom, which cost more as well. There were some cracks on the wall, some of the windows were broken, so we wanted to repair those as well.

Speaker 3 2:54
And also, as you can see with the master bathroom, initially they were two separate areas. So we wanted to break down the wall between the sink and the toilet and also just cover up the whole thing. So we added a whole nother wall on top of that. So we thought

Sharon Tseung 3:05
we would initially just like repaint and texture. But because the panels were a little bit weird they ended up bringing the living room down to the studs on

Speaker 3 3:15
the cracks are just so big that it wasn’t worth the time to try to patch it model just cut it open and put a whole new drywall on

Sharon Tseung 3:20
as we ripped everything out. We found that the electrical had issues Yeah,

Speaker 3 3:25
the electrical wiring in their house was outdated. Some of them were cloth wiring, which has a greater potential to fail and possibly cause a house fire. So we just decided to upgrade everything to code. So

Sharon Tseung 3:34
we ended up rewiring everything for an additional $7,500, which is quite frustrating. This was definitely not in the budget. But this is what ends up happening. You should allot at least 20% or more in the budget when you get a quote so that you can kind of account for these different things. Because a lot of times you can’t see the issues until you actually open things up. And

Speaker 3 3:54
the cool thing is when we were doing this renovation, one of our friends from the air just happened to be visiting here in Dallas. And we took them to look at the property. And he actually gave us many great ideas. One of them was that the bathrooms had these first downs. So there’s just big empty spaces that were just covered up because that was a style back in the 70s. He said, Why don’t you open this up because they’re opening it up. Now our showers in our kitchen suddenly look bigger than they were before.

Sharon Tseung 4:15
Yeah, the ceilings went up a lot. And it just looked a lot bigger. So very happy with the suggestion. And then as we kept going, we decided to just rip out the carpet. Initially, I was like, hey, maybe we can salvage it. We can just patch up these little different things, do a deep clean and make it look alright, but we ended up ripping it out. And we’re going to put in new flooring. We’re just going to put vinyl plank flooring throughout. And as we kept going, we ended up going let’s add new baseboards. Let’s put in new doors. And I want to say the interesting thing about this property is yeah, we keep fixing it up but it’s also because we could potentially end up moving into this property in the future. This property is in a better neighborhood than our current property. we’re unsure right now but we’ll see we might as well do some of these changes in case we do move in. We actually went there today and we saw it. It looks really nice. We love the recessed lighting in the living room. I think that lighting is extremely important for your property. So make sure you have like bright lights for the property, we’re going with lighter flooring. As you can see here, we haven’t done the flooring yet. But in a couple of weeks that should be completed, we went with pretty I would say basic finishings and stuff like that we didn’t go super fancy with color, we just essentially did white, we’re gonna do white for the kitchen, I think that the kitchen is a bit smaller. So maybe making it white will make it look larger. The bathroom is essentially gray ish. But it looks pretty nice. I would say I’m happy with how the grout went with the tiles, I would also say that we’re probably going to add shelving, we’re going to do wall art. So it’s going to look a lot more exciting. When we do deck that out, a lot of that color will probably come in when we do the furnishing for the midterm rental.

Speaker 3 5:55
We’re hoping that this whole thing finishes up in about a month. And then we’re going to start furnishing the property and building out the air b&b system.

Sharon Tseung 6:01
So again, like I mentioned in the previous video, we are planning to leave to Taiwan at the end of the year if we want to rent out this property as well as the other one. And a huge reason why I got it was if we create that Airbnb system, we can apply that to this primary home when we leave. Another thing to note is that we want to check if a long term rental would make even more sense or monthly rental or short term. So I think when we get to that point, we’re probably going to call different property management companies that have handled near term rentals in that area to see how they perform. And we’ll just gauge which strategy works. I think the beauty of this is that we can apply any of these different strategies like we’re not limited to cash flowing only if we do short term rentals or whatever right we can actually cashflow really well with this property, especially because we bought it all cash we can do a cash out refinance in the future. But right now we’re pretty open to figuring out what makes sense for us with this property. And I would say we’re also kind of like gradually going, so we only bought one I think this year so far, which makes it so we’re not like super impatient with things we’re not stressed about having to like flip a property or something like that we have some time with this property is also

Speaker 3 7:13
nice leaving only 30 minutes away from it. Because before we were trying to renovate properties all the way in California so it made getting updates pretty difficult. And being able to just pop by see your contractor at work makes us pretty happy. And by the

Sharon Tseung 7:25
way, if you guys are looking to purchase your first rental property, whether it’s out of state or local, because we invested out of state most of the time because we were living in a high cost of living area we have a course called Remote rental riches, which applies to anyone who’s trying to buy the first rental property so if you want check it out through the link below. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai