Deanna

I looked at your pictures the other night. I really liked how you gave a description of the pictures.

You had an address of the property and a narrative of what was going on.

Would you mind giving a little detail on how you did this? Thanks

Deanna, I enjoyed looking at your pictures of this $500.00 gem. Between seeing these & hearing about how inexpensive properties can be had in other parts of the country, I'd be tempted to relocate.

In my area permits for a cost in the $1,800.00 - $3,000.00 range & at least 8 different inspections done would be required for the scope of work done. About what were you permit fees if any costs. Also how many actually inspection would they require?

In the rooms where you used tarpaper for an inside vapor barrier is there much off gassing of the asphalt?

In some of the rooms I noticed that the ceilings were rocked & taped before the walls were even rocked. Is this a common practice?

In another picture I noticed that the wall / ceiling joint wasn't taped, why? If you are putting some moulding up how are you air sealing this joint?

That one got finished last July/Aug, and it was so hectic, I didn't get the chance to put the last set of photos up. People were trying to move in weeks before it was ready...

Because it's a small 3-br, and you can't get to the bathroom without going through a bedroom, plus the low ceilings, plus the w/d in the kitchen, I put the price at $525. It probably should have been a little higher, but I wasn't confident--- and I was being pressured while it was still a construction zone. I'll raise it when it turns over.

The people also had two dogs, so I should have charged extra for that.

Steve, we don't generally put molding up around the corners at this price point. That's more upscale a finish, and if people bring in bugs, it's one more place for them to hide. Instead, we caulk the joint.

Re: the order of operations, this was my first experiment in hiring it out. DH does much of my work, and he was really crispy, so I made an effort to have him do almost nothing on this. I was limited by my own lack of ability to work in three dimensions, plus the limitations of trying to turn $10/hr handyguys into house renovators. Like, one question was, DH said to put the doors and doorframes in before you put the drywall in. But my guys were like, "We don't know where the surface of the wall will be, so we can't put the doors in and have them end up flush." So we did it the handyguys' way-- but DH is like, "That's what math is for. You know where the wall will be because you know the thickness of the drywall." But my guys weren't experienced enough to visualize the abstract, and I didn't have the budget for a $30/hr guy who could.

In other cases, we kept some ceilings and replaced others. So the kitchen and the living room are a good example. It was abnormally low, so I spent the money to get the kitchen ceiling raised to a standard height. I tried doing the same in the living room, but the ceiling was solid shiplap. But we didn't find that out until we'd torn down the drywall that had been there. So we just put fresh drywall up. The bathroom got a new ceiling; we kept the bedrooms as-is, just with paint and some replacement tiles.

At the end, I was all-in $40k. Purchase price, roof, rewiring, plumbing, yard care, tree trimming, materials, labor. $10k was labor. I learned a lot. I'll've grossed back about $4200 next week. It'll take about 6.5 years to gross back everything, which is longer than I like, but it was what I was given to work with. Taxes are about $235/year.

The houses are good, but the tenant pool is the squicky bit. Prices reflect economic stability. So with a bad economy, and a stagnant tenant pool--- people in better areas have a good selection of people who rent because they're only in the area for 2, 3, 5 years. They could afford a house, but don't want to be trapped by it. So they rent in exchange for flexibility. I don't have that strata of tenant. Everyone who's stable and responsible with their money is a homeowner, and I get to sift through everyone who's less so. :)

I'm happy to grow where I'm planted, because we won't be leaving the area anytime in the next 20+ years. But I definitely wouldn't advise anyone to come invest in a market like mine.

I thought the question primarily was regarding the editing/narration of your photos.

Ah! Sorry, was getting kids out the door to school and didn't read closely enough. :)

I have an ancient copy of Photoshop. (Photoshop 6.0.) Nowadays, they've gone to a subscription-based service (all the Photoshop CC [Creative Cloud] versions) but if you want your own permanent copy, the last version available for retail was Photoshop CS6 [Creative Suite]). Adobe doesn't sell it anymore, but you can probably find some for sale online.

Other image editors would also work; whatever you're comfortable with.

Anyhow, from there, it's super-simple. You download your photos from your camera or your phone to your hard drive. You open them in your image editor. You resize them to whatever dimensions and DPI you want. Viewing online, 72 dpi is fine; if you're printing them for your photo album, you want more like 300 dpi. You save it to a fresh .jpg file, so that whatever you do, you still have your original files intact, in case you ever want to use them for some other purpose.

You have a text tool. You choose your color. Yellow is a good color for text because it contrasts against most of the sorts of pictures we take. You choose your font (sans serif fonts are good for narration/subtitles) and your font size. You want your font size big enough to be legible, but not so big that it covers up the key parts of the photo.

You type your text. You drag it around the photo a bit to arrange where it sits. You change whether it's justified or centered, etc, until it's in a form that you like.

Then you flatten your layers. Everything in a flattened image is stuck where it is; you can't shift things around at this point. But now that it's flat, it will again save as a .jpg file, so it's nice and small, because you don't have multiple layers all taking up the same space.

You save your file again, and then you can upload it wherever you want.

Thank you Deanna.

You went well above and beyond in your explination.

Deanna,

Adobe PhotoShop 7.0 is my all time favorite photo software. I use it on an old XP box. Thanks for that re-fresher info on doing 'type layering'. Like you, I take a lot of photos of my rehabs too for the same reasons you do.

Oh-- if you ever need to do a thing of text, and the yellow doesn't give sufficient contrast, you can always use the rectangle tool to mark out an area of sufficient size and shape on a new layer to serve as a background. Fill it with a color like black, and then toggle the transparency-- like to 50% or below. That will allow people to see through a bit, but will be able to focus on what the text says without straining their eyes.

Armadillos aren't particularly friendly, but it's always nice to see a live one. :) Usually, you see them squashed when they try to cross a road. Their way of escaping predators is to jump about three feet straight in the air-- which doesn't help them in a battle against a vehicle.

You wouldn't want to pet one, because they are capable of carrying leprosy bacteria. I don't know if anyone outside of South America has ever caught it from an armadillo, though, so there are probably other hygienic factors at play. This particular one decided there was too much activity going on, and relocated itself to a quieter place. That was really the only day we actually saw it. But usually, if something is living under the house, it's more like feral cats or skunks-- so I was pleased that it was something a bit less odiferous. :)

Deanna, thanks for the follow up pictures. It came out nice. I hope you've started ROTH IRAs for your 2 younger professional handi helpers / models. We did it for each of our kids when they were young.

Deanna,

In addition to PhotoShop, I also have an ancient copy of Adobe PageMaker 6.5 which I use to make 8.5 x 11 photo flyers with. PageMaker gives you more options with photos and Text boxes. Like any Adobe software, there is a steep learning curve with it and it takes some time to get comfortable with it.

Steve, indeed. My handyguy was so proud of the closet, using all the tag ends of the drywall... but when my husband saw it, he was like, "Really? Really?" And I'm like, "I was trying to save you the tedium and aggravation and mess, and this is what happens..."

I had taken my kids to DC for about two weeks to visit my elderly grandparents, and I'd left my main guy a verbal checklist of stuff to get to. I should have left a written one posted, but I thought he would enjoy the authority. But it was all pretty much wasted, anyways, because they spent all that two weeks dinking around with drywall... putting it up, sanding it, doing the bathroom ceiling, that sort of thing. I expected to come back and be about two weeks ahead... and instead, I came back and found that not only was I almost where I was when I left, but my second handyguy had ended up offending my first handyguy, and my first handyguy shortly thereafter refused to be on the premises at the same time my second guy was. (They had worked together in the past, and I had gotten #1's approval before bringing on #2 to speed up the job. #2 had called #1 a Mexican, or something... both of them were Hispanic Americans... but it was a slur against how long one had been in the country, compared to the other.)

Anyhow, it was a good lesson about the Master's Eye and all that. After this project, I dropped #2, and tried to book #1 for about 2-4 weeks of solid work at the next renovation. He turned me down, because he had a job lined up in NM that paid better. I had someone else-- the turned-over leaf from the bad family-- come ask me for work, so I gave the first stage of #1's project to him instead. Then New Mexico fell through, and I gave #1 two or three tasks at other houses, to give New Leaf & Co a chance to finish that stage, and not have #1 be on the same jobsite as the Bad Family. #1 never even started the other tasks-- he drove past while I was talking to New Leaf & Co about the current job, and broke up with me. "Sorry, I can't work for anyone who employs the Bad Family." And I'm thinking to myself, "I gave you first shot at that job! I would rather have hired you instead-- but you said no."

I was sorry to lose #1 for good, because even if he wasn't a good reno guy, he had been a former apartment maintenance guy. He had a good reputation, knew everybody in town, was a great source of information, and I could give him fifteen different small, weird things to go take care of, and not have to bother DH with them.

Sigh. Small-town drama. :)

Deanna,

On my rehabs, I have had the same problems with handy people you experienced. I have left my hired hands alone with a well written 1-day "To Do List" tacked up on the living room wall. When I returned the next day, hardly anything got done to completion because I was not there to over-see them. These people need to have a baby-sitter and this is why I spend a lot of time on my rehabs,..baby-sitting.

We deal in cash. Normally, the house purchase price comes out of DH's pocket, and the renovation comes out of the rentals' money bucket. So DH might spend $5k on a house, and I'll spend $15k on the renovation, or he might spend $10k on a house, and I'll spend $10k on the renovation. Here, he spent $500 on the house (approximately-- because it was a batch deal) and I spent $40k on the renovation. He was very proud of the initial deal, but I'm like-- you're killing me! :P Let's spend a little more on the front end so that the back end of my budget isn't quite so stressed! :P

The tarpaper is a good start, but it's also important to put in the wall insulation over it to help out. Technically, I think tarpaper is more of a vapor retarder than it is a vapor barrier. It's common to use it in my area in walls and under flooring. Based on what I'm told, I think that the fact that it does allow some degree of pass-through is a healthy thing. It "blocks water but allows water to dry".