Three items down, a billion to go

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!