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Category Archives: Purchases

Mattress 8 Closed!

At least this much stuff has been removed from the house.

Lee got all the issues with the closing documents fixed, so we were able to close on the Mattress 8 project in Temple yesterday. Hooray for officially having another project to work on.

He went by the place after the closing and found that much of the intriguing junk we were looking forward to scavenging had already been removed. Darn for the potential treasures, but yay for not having to pay so much to have the place cleaned out! There turned out to be another entire bedroom that Lee had not been able to get to before, so it’s a 3 bedroom one, just like it was supposed to be.

On the right of this lovely bedroom photo is a lot of flooring. Hmm.

The mattresses and extra refrigerators, and all the interesting glassware are gone, but as you can see, there’s still plenty to remove. There are also some intriguing building supplies still in the house, like drywall and flooring. Maybe they are not all ruined!

Lee is currently negotiating with a contractor to get working on the many, many repairs needed. I’d share more photos, but, really, you see one pile of junk, you’ve seen them all.

Carol has been working on acquiring a house in San Marcos, so maybe we will have more to report on that soon. We think it’s on the borderline of what we want to pay and also that there may be a bidding war, but you have to try!

Other than that, Carol and Sierra are mailing things out to market for us, so we are hoping for good results.

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New Project! Need a Mattress?

There’s a tree that’s got to go in front of the house. You can see it was once cute.

Our patience has paid off at last,  and we’ve found something new to work on that fits our model. We are all happy campers, to say the least! Thanks to Lee carefully evaluating all the wholesale deals that come our way, we now have a little house near downtown Temple to fix up. We’re calling it the Mattress 8 house, since it is quite full of mattresses, even in the living room. We’re grateful to the wholesaler we worked with, and hope to work with him more in the future.

We are pleased with the deal we got on this one (let’s say the price begins with a 2). It obviously needs a lot of work. Nothing is salvagable in the kitchen or bathroom, it will need windows and doors, and you know, everything else in a house.

This porch is not being held up by this porch support.

Lee has handed over the earnest money and will close on the property on Monday. Since it’s a wholesale deal, we don’t have to worry about problems with inspections or other such issues, so we are confident this one will go through.

It’s definitely a sad house, with boarded windows, a porch post that doesn’t actually reach the surface of the porch, and a tree trying to grow into the front. But the neighborhood has quite a few homes that are well kept or have been renovated, and it’s in a convenient neighborhood for anyone who works downtown.

Mandi is excited about these free cement blocks.

Mandi’s all excited, though, because among the junk surrounding the place is a big pile of cement blocks, which we have ideas for at the Rattlesnake house. There is some interesting stuff left inside the place (other than mattresses), so we’re all looking forward to picking through things before we hire someone to haul everything else off.

The plan for this place is to renovate it to be a rental property. Once we fix it up to be livable, it should cash flow very well. We’re now figuring out who will be the project manager, lining up contractors, and figuring out what other folks we need to get moving on this one quickly.

If you want to see more photos of the property, visit the Mattress 8 page. There are lots and lots of “before” pictures to marvel at.

And if you need a used mattress, look no further than the Hermits (eww).

 

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Thoughts on Gentrification

Regular readers will know that we have been working on the Saint John house in San Antonio for a long time. It has had a pretty rough history, and things keep happening that make our job hard (contractor issues, a person living in it and messing up the floor, people stealing copper, drug deals in the yard, etc.). I just searched for St. John in our blog archives, and got depressed just reading about it.

The Saint John house, stripped and with repairs in progress.

Now, we put it back on the market a couple of weeks ago, and I did a big Facebook marketing campaign for the house that got lots of hits and reactions. It brought us a good real estate contact in the area, but didn’t get us many showings.

What DID happen was that people who live around the area where the house is located began to complain about what we had done to the house and the selling price. You see, it’s in a neighborhood that was historically occupied by working class black people, but the homes in the area are rapidly being bought by redevelopers and being fixed up with an intended purchaser that is in a different demographic. It’s a lot like the East Austin area, only a few years back. There are a lot of people who are not happy that the trendy folks have bought so much of that area, as well.

Well, Yeah

And you know what, here at Hermit Haus, we don’t blame them. Our goal in renovating a house is to make it safe, clean, and affordable by residents of the neighborhood. Affordable housing should be available to everyone, no matter what their income or situation.

Continue reading →

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Projects? We Got ‘Em

Beautiful morning in Las Vegas. Invisible balloons make it look prettier in person.

It’s a beautiful morning in the middle of a giant desert. You can’t see them, but hot air balloons are flying over the mountains. A good start to the Ignite conference. But there’s more going on for us!

Taylor

With Anita back on the job, more of the last-minute details on that project are being taken care of. The back door now works properly, for one thing. We can’t wait to share with you photos of the staircase. It went from the ugliest part of the house to the most beautiful highlight. Anita reports that she’s putting together a post with lots of final images.

Lots of televisions, but nice rock walls in the Oakridge house.

Oakridge

Carol reports that the house is full of furniture, clothing and other things, which you can see in this living room photo. She’s in too much of a hurry to get to work to have a garage sale, but there are a couple of items we’ll get to keep. On the renovation schedule, she’s working with a contractor to do an interesting arrangement for the renovation, and we will share that as soon as it’s finalized. I think our fellow rehabbing folks will like her creative idea.

St. John

Now that it’s spruced up, we are getting showings. We plan to lower the price a tiny bit to get more interest. It’s well priced for the area, just needs to get in the minds of agents.

Bonus photo: The back yard of Oakridge is really pretty. Lots to work with there!

Meadow Arbor 2

We keep getting offers, and they keep disappearing. We think perhaps today’s will go through. More to come!

 

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Welcome to Oakridge

There’s a nice tree and lots of decorative trim.

Today we officially signed the papers for a new acquisition, Oakridge! It’s a very nice-looking 3/2 house in one of the most comfortable and desirable areas of Round Rock, Texas (if you don’t live here, that’s just north of Austin). This is a wholesale deal found by Carol, who immediately fell in love with the place and put in an offer before other investors could get it.

Getting the house paid for was a bit of a challenge. Since we are waiting on a couple of closings, we didn’t have a lot of money just hanging around not working for us. So, while Carol worked out logistics, Lee went to work finding money we could use until the other sales are complete. This was made much harder by the fact that he came down with some kind of horrible throat infection and was barely functioning for the past week or so. But, he did it, and all that was left was to jump through an incredible number of hoops to allow Carol to do the signing for us. Carol finally got my signature (no copies allowed!) on the last form minutes before the closing.

Really pretty windows.

That’s why we find this work so exciting, I guess.

Why All the Hoop Jumping?

We were willing to fill out an incredible number of forms asking for repeated information, so that we could get this one. The reason is that it is just what we want. It’s the right size, configuration, and location. Plus, the house only needs one wall removed and cosmetic touches to sell for quite a bit more than we paid for it. That’s the model we are trying to emulate. Houses like that have been few and far between in our area lately. (One reason is that people are buying fixer-uppers at retail prices, which is NOT our model.)

As you can see from the pictures, the house looks sort of Tudor, which will look really sharp painted in good colors, and there’s landscaping that can easily be beautified. We will have photos of the interior in the next few days.

Carol has the rehab all planned out, so she’ll be the project manager on this one. And she is really ready to jump in and go!

Additional Before Pictures

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