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Category Archives: Purchases

The Hermit Haus, Day 1

“Come to our house, be one of the comfortable people!”

October 5 marks the official beginning of The Hermit Haus Journey. Once we really get going on the project, we’ll have a website and blog just for whatever the site ends up being, but for now, we just want to say YAY, we now own a church building!

We even have keys! That is significant!

Saturday, we went over to take some pictures and see what was left at the church after the previous owners left. We even stuck a HermitsBuyHouses.com bumper sticker on the basement doors. Just because we CAN. I forgot to get a picture, darn it.

We already have the lights turned on in our name, and Mandi has chatted with the Post Office on how we can get mail delivered to the location! There isn’t a mailbox of any kind there now, but we decided on a slot in a non-obvious location. Continue reading →

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I’m Making Them Birds

Lee wearing a Bob Ross T-shirt

While you can’t just paint over all your mistakes or confusion, you can choose how you let them affect your mindset.

Starting with Why: Every day in business, you encounter things that annoy, frustrate, or confuse you. I wanted to talk about how I’ve chosen to accept some of the things I cannot change.

One of the more frustrating points about running a business is that you can either know what it’s really worth or keep accurate books for taxes. And never the twain shall meet.

Businesses are punished on their balance sheets for being good negotiators. At the same time, they are required to take totally fallacious “expenses” while being forbidden from taking real ones. Here’s a few examples:

  • Cost basis
  • Depreciation
  • Capitalized expenses

Continue reading →

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Checking Out the Hermit Haus

This room will probably be a Mandi office. It’s a blank slate.

We were able to take our friends Mike and Martha through the church property yesterday to get some more ideas on how to prioritize our renovations. Lee and Mike measured all the rooms and thought about the heating and air conditioning, while Martha and I thought about ideas for making the upstairs more appealing for different types of events while remaining neutral (we figure people’s events may have “color schemes” and we won’t want to clash, ya know.

Of course the upstairs has very red carpet and rather blue windows. We can’t change the windows, but perhaps the flooring can change at some point, I guess!

Our conference room table and other furnishings will improve this room.

While we were downstairs, we looked at the four (or five) rooms that could be offices. Well, they definitely will need some work, as you can see in the pictures of the three rooms Mandi and I have to work out. We are pretty sure the big one will be a conference room, and will look nice with our “good” conference room furniture in it.

Continue reading →

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Excitement Builds

Looking forward to making this an inviting meeting space.

As our closing day of October 1 approaches, we are getting more and more excited about what we plan to do with the former church property in Cameron. It’s ideal that we can dream big and start small on the project, and still make some money, we hope.

As soon as we take possession, the building will be usable. We will be able to move our office into the downstairs rooms immediately, and then get moving on improvements.

What Comes First?

Well, in these days of social media, it will behoove us to set up a website, Facebook page, Instagram page, and Twitter feed. Oh my. We will also want business cards to share with local caterers, the Chamber of Commerce, etc.

Hmm, it does seem like something ought to come before that…oh yeah! We need a name for the darned thing! After going through lots and lots of ideas, it came to us that we already had a name; we just needed a tag line:

The Hermit Haus: A gathering place

Continue reading →

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Parkwood Progress

Honest, there’s less of this now! Parkwood will return to being a good family home, and soon!

One of the things you have to do to get a bank loan on a house you plan to renovate is to get an inspection, so that the house can be appraised and the loan amount determined. That’s a big reason why many rehabbers rely on other types of funding: we often work on houses that have so many defects it’s hard to list them all. Also, you don’t get to pick the inspector; the bank does. That means you can come up with some unhelpful appraisals, like we did with the big house in Lago Vista.

We have a good relationship with our small-town banker near Cameron, though, so we decided to go ahead with a bank loan for the Parkwood property in Round Rock, since the interest is way better than with a “hard money” loan. So, last week we had an appraisal scheduled.

Carol went over there, arriving a little before the scheduled time, only to find the appraiser had already left. The wholesaler we are getting the house from and the heir to the house were standing around looking shocked. Apparently, the appraiser had hoarder family members and the look of this house was too much for him, perhaps too close for comfort. He was inclined to suggest the house be torn down, and made that decision as soon as he took a look at it. Hmm. That was not our plan. Now what?

Continue reading →

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