Month: August 2015

Renovation, Rental

Oh dear, a week went by!

ashleylfrancis

Is this your first time stopping by? Check here for the scoop.

So apparently a week has gone by. We have done nothing. That’s not true…I’ve been packing a few boxes a day and Dee made an appointment to have our home photographed next week. We also threw a few posts on Facebook about a rental coming soon.

So TOMORROW I’m calling to make a lead inspection appointment. I’m taking the babes to a birthday party and a ballet performance at the mall this weekend (good luck, Miss Anna as you try to get Elle on stage in front of an audience). Dee will be touching up the deck, installing the railing between our first and second floors and hopefully grouting the kitchen floor. Hey–a girl can dream!

We’re also finalizing our lease. Leases are hard.

Lastly, the seller has agreed to fix every single thing we asked him to. He’s a dream!

He is:

-replacing the roof on the addition

-putting a clean out in the basement

-re crowning (and other weird words) with the chimney and fireplace.

-taking out the sky lights

-confirmed that the addition is on footers instead of on a concrete slab. Apparently it’s important that it is sitting on something below the frost line so it doesn’t settle away from the house.

-something else I can’t remember

Wish us luck!

None of the Above, Renovation, Rental

Three items down, a billion to go

ashleylfrancis

Is this your first glimpse of Rentals and Beans? Start here.

This week has been chaotic. We have several “major players” in our lives that are struggling with health issues. So it’s been a bit emotionally exhausting and we obviously changed focus. However, we (Dee) did check off a few items. He sanded and painted a small area of the kitchen, power washed and stained the deck, and bought grout to touch up our kitchen floor tile.

Some lessons learned:

  • don’t let the power washer hose touch the motor. ($56)
  • staining a deck does take 12 hours so don’t offer to watch your niece and nephew at 5:30 pm, lest you (ashley) be in charge of FOUR KIDS UNDER 3.5.

So hopefully in five years Dee will have forgotten how terrible it was to refinish it and he won’t still want to hire someone. Luckily the new house has a stone patio.

I also got a lead registry number. In Maryland your property needs to be inspected for lead before you can rent it out. Before you do that you must receive a lead registry number. A friend went through this process about a month before us and had quite the story of getting his number and there was weeks of stalking involved. For whatever reason I sent the email and left a voicemail (because it’s impossible to have an actual human conversation!) and received the number in my email the next day! Hallelujah!

This coming week I’d like to set up our lead inspection and rental inspection as well as get pictures taken of the rental to list it. Dwe would like to install the smoke detectors (which must be hard wired and “talk to each other”) and/or install a railing that spans the entire flight of steps from our first to second floor.

We are still negotiating some things  that we would like to be fixed before we purchase the new home. Hopefully that will get finished up this week as well.

As I am typing this one of our sweet neighbors is cutting my lawn. He’s not even a neighbor. He bought the house next-door to ours at an auction and is fixing it up and selling it. He’s the sweetest man ever. They started work  on the house a week before Jay was born and they finished it about a month ago. I think they felt so bad to be renovating a house next-door to a new born that they started cutting our grass. Now every couple weeks they completely cut our lawn and it is outrageous. Side note, he is friends with the seller of our new house. Small world!

Renovation, Rental

Hello world!

ashleylfrancis

Well I already typed this page out once and I somehow lost it. I’m not off to a great start. Now, both of my babies are awake and so it will not be anywhere near as fun or clever.

The gist was, I’m typing this before I can even push “publish “. We haven’t told our neighbors that we are moving yet. I loathe goodbyes!* If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here for our story.  We have the best neighbors. This was number one on our con list of the move/rental/renovation. We don’t want to leave our neighbors. Granted we are just moving about a mile down the road but it won’t be the same. Elle plays outside with her little buddies every evening before dinner and it’s the best. She’s having that picture of childhood that I experienced as a child and always wanted for my kids…playing with neighborhood friends.  So we have to tell them first.

At this point in the game we are under contract with the renovation house and starting to prepare for our rental inspection on the rental. To keep this somewhat organized, I have a page for the rental to do list and one for the renovation. Ill link each corresponding blog post to that page so it all makes sense. Lord help me with the links!

Ok-I’m excited to get started!

* I was reading something by Jen Hatmaker the other day and I cannot for the life of me find it. Basically she was explaining that a symptom of introversion is hating goodbyes. I’m pretty much a textbook introvert but I had no idea this was a symptom and it’s totally me!   Whether it’s saying goodbye to neighbors or saying goodbye as I’m leaving something fun like family dinner or a party… I hate it!  Even weirder is Elle is starting to be the same way. I haven’t seen much else in her when it comes to introversion so her hating goodbyes could be more tied to leaving something fun. I’ll try to find a link.