Stupid Property Repairs #8
Johnny Northsides just dropped me a message saying that he posted his own Stupid Property Repairs entry. You can’t help but get a laugh here. Love it.
It got me thinking that is has been some time since I posted a Stupid Property Repair. Maybe it has been because I am becoming numb to the stupidness. Maybe it is because I am so engaged with my customers that I don’t notice the repairs. Or maybe it is because I am talking so much that I am light headed and can’t see straight (this one is my best guess).
Well I came across a nice one the other day. Here we go.
Cute 1.5 story, 1950s house in a quiet North Minneapolis neighborhood. I have seen this exact floor plan probably 500 times. Walk in to the long family room, kitchen is on the back of the house straight ahead, dining room/bedroom/office off the kitchen, plus 2 other bedrooms on that floor and then a steep staircase to a big room upstairs.
This house was on the market for $79,900. Decent price for this neighborhood as it was a foreclosed property. It gets interesting as the moment you open the front door, where you are expecting hardwood floors, you are hit with an entire living room of white-ish tile.
Ok. Well, not my preference, but I understand people in Florida put tile everywhere. What I started to realize is that this must be one of the worst tile jobs I have ever seen! Clearly done by a weekend warrior. They simply put the tile down and never even attempted to close the gaps around the trim.
Even I can do a better job than that! Plus, then the tile in the kitchen was completely different than the tile in rest of the 1st floor. Again, OK, maybe they did the kitchen first and then they got a great deal on this other tile. But look at the seem in between the two tiles. You must have a 1″ gap there.
Now I am just lauging and hacking on the poor guy that put this tile in. I go into the kitchen and check out both the counter top and what is mounted above the sink.
A hand soap dispenser like you would find in a restraurant bathroom. Huh. Odd. By the way, nice counter pattern. See what the rest of the kitchen looks like.
And then just for the cherry on top, I go upstairs and see this odd install. I must have spent 5 minutes trying to understand why they would put 6 registers on the wall into the attic space like that.
It turns out (the picture did not turn out) that there was a bath fan mounted in the attic space behind these registers to suck the hot air out of that 2nd floor room. For the amount of money and time they spent on engineering this one, they could have gone to Home Depot and bought a $89 air conditioning unit and put in the window there!
And this house can be yours if the price is right!
Are you searching for investment properties on your own and running into similar properties?
Scott Ficek is a Minnesota Real Estate Agent with RE/MAX Advantage Plus in Minneapolis and helps new and seasoned investors buy and own Minnesota Investment Property. He owns and manages almost 30 investment property units from single family to multi-family. Find his website at www.minnesotainvestmentrealestate.com or use it to search the MLS for Investment Properties.
It is crazy to see some of these repairs done by various sellers or rehabbers!?!
The picture with the registers is my favorite. I always get a kick out walking through these homes with a good and capable contractor to see their reaction to stuff like this.
It’s not rehab it’s reSHAB!
We looked at soo many “interesting”houses in the past year. What we’re working on right now has only got walls built over carpeting in a few places…..
Given that it was a foreclosed property maybe he just hadn’t finished the repairs. It looks like punch list stuff that wasn’t finished.
I see this kind of work all the time in Baltimore rehabs. Don’t people have any pride in their work?