You see a mess, we see an opportunity

When we said overgrown and abandoned, we really meant it. Here's the before shots of our next challenging property make-over.

There's rubbish and piles of secondhand building material under all this weed.

Ok now for the inside:

Are we mad or what? You bet!

Four properties in 2 years

Property number 4 is in the bag. Our friends are joking that they'll have to name the street after us as like a domino effect we just keep buying the next house over the fence.

No.4 is going to be our biggest challenge so far. There are several 'problems' with it:

1. Residual title. A friendly valuer I sought advice from said he'd never recommend buying a property that's still sitting on a residual title (i.e. clear title for the section hasn't been completed).
2. Abandoned unfinished 2 bedroom cottage. Twenty years ago the previous owner attempted to build his last home - a 2 bedroom Skyline cottage. He got as far as insulating the walls and doing some pretty shoddy lining; failed the consent and became ill never to recover enough to continue.
3. The rubbish. Bless his heart the old guy collected a sh...load of second hand building materials and concrete blocks, reinforcing steel, fittings... the house is as full of crap as the yard. Plus, over the last ten years since his death the neighbours on 2 sides have pitched whatever they could over the fence.
4. Nature. There are numerous letters of complaint on file complaining about the overgrown unsightly section and the rats.
5. No drive. We've got heaps of drive but there isn't one to drive down to get to the section. The people in front have turned it into lawn.
6. It's a crosslease. Anything we want to do will have to be approved by the owners of the front half of the section.

So, why'd we buy it? We think it was a reasonable price, for a section that already had services (drainage and power) laid to the house site - it's a right-of-way section so that represents a considerable saving. There's an existing building consent, so the development contribution (which cost us about $25,000 for House No.1) has been paid. It's adjacent to House No.3 and overlooked by House No.2 so any improvement we make will lift the value or at least standard of living of 2 of our other rentals. We need to replace the fence between House No.3 and this new one anyway, so at least 2 of our properties will benefit from that. Our tenant over the fence will keep an eye on it while it's under 'construction.'

We don't know what we're going to do with it yet and we don't know how badly it'll hurt us financially. It'll take a while to find out, because after 2 years of working almost every weekend and nearly every day of any annual leave we get, we realise we can't maintain such a gruelling schedule. Property No.4 is going to stay looking abandoned for a few more weeks at least.

House 2 nearly finished

It's been nearly a year since we took possession and begun renovating this house. We're nearly nearly there. Didn't quite get it done before the holiday we soooo badly need. We're both exhausted to the point that it's hard to drive without falling asleep. Day jobs Monday to Friday and then renovating all weekend, every weekend... tired tired and worn out. But, the house is looking fabulous. The bedrooms are done: Main, 2nd front and 3rd

The bathroom is complete. It's adorned with an orangy-red glass sliding door - absolutely dazzling touch.

And the lounge dining is dressed and ready.

The kitchen is just getting some kickboards and a clean and it's finished also. The laundry is pretty much done. The toilet room has been relined, but one wall is a bit rough, so thinking of wallpaper in there and we're still to level the floor and tile (one more weekend needed for that).  We've had to build a new back door entrance, but that's done. Then we've got to build some stairs to the new french doors (x2) and voila.

But we're off to the warmer weather on the Gold Coast for a week and we don't care. We can't care that we didn't get the house finished and rented in time. It's just too bad. The ad on Trademe can wait a week. Hopefully we'll come back renewed and be able to smash the last few jobs off the list.

We better be quick because we take possession of no.4 a week after we get back. Oooh nooo what have we done??

House No.2 almost finished