Starting the Week off Right

This week started off just like last week….. with a closing on Monday and another on Tuesday.  We sold the Ware House on Monday and sold 39 Brooks St  on Tuesday.

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The Ware House – If you remember this beauty I was up in the air about rehabbing it or just wholesaling it. We closed on it, but because it’s located about 45 minutes outside our normal territory, we couldn’t get any of our contractors to travel out and do the work…. so I ended up putting it on the MLS and got a cash buyer who is going to fix it up and live in it. We only paid $15,000 for this gem so it was pretty easy to flip it out for a quick profit.

 

We are still waiting on the clear to close for Hartford Terrace, we should sell that at the end of this week. We also have two more purchases lined up for next week. These last few weeks have been really crazy as we have worked through all these closings….. by the end of next week we will have closed on seven properties in total, selling four of our properties and buying three new ones! I guess when it rains it pours!!!!!

39 Brooks St, Springfield MA

We have the home on Brooks St on the market. We repaired some water damage spots, put gutters on the house, did some landscaping and a few other odds and ends. Once the work was done we cleaned it and staged it. This home was rehabbed by the previous owner so it is a nice change from the full gut rehabs we have been doing lately.  Here are some photos:

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The new furnace is a high effeciency direct vent unit that runs at 95%.

Heres what the property looked look before we bought it.

Brooks St EXT 1

Brooks Kitchen

Brooks Living Room

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Not as drastic a change as Bessemer or Hartford Terrace , but the improvements will help it show alot better.

Playing in the Dirt

We spent the afternoon doing landscaping over at Brooks St. I generally don’t do too much work at our properties myself, I leave that for the real contractors, however I do enjoy doing the landscaping from time to time. I don’t go to overboard, I usually will just plant some shrubs, evergreens and an ornamental grass or two. My favorites are boxwoods, azaleas, spirea, rhododendron, and Alberta spruces. I like to throw in some ornamental grasses for color and dimension. Because I use mainly evergreens I use the red mulch to add some more color as well. The main goal is to make it look fresh, clean and not too cluttered. If I can, I will try to save the mature landscaping already located around the property, but most of the time everything is so overgrown and unkempt it is best to take it all out and start fresh.

Heres what we did at Brooks St today:

Landscape Before

Landscape Before

 

Landscape After

Landscape After

 

Landscape Before

Landscape Before

Landscape After

Landscape After

House Before Landscape

House Before Landscape

House After Landscape

House After Landscape

 

We didn’t do too much, but it definitely helps the overall curb appeal of the house. We landscaped that whole front bed for less than $200, and most of that cost went to the three tall Arborvitaes, which cost $30 apiece.  The arborvitaes are a great foundation plant, especially in this situation as they block that ugly front wall pretty good.

Stop Work Order

We’ve hit a few snags at the fire damaged three family. The next door neighbor isn’t happy about the dust from the demo so she called the cops on our contractor for working on a holiday (memorial day) and then she called the building inspector the next day… apparently she thought we were working without permits. No big deal, the inspector stopped by and everything looks good. Then on Thursday we got an unexpected visit from the Environmental Protection Agency…. seems someone called in an anonymous tip alleging that we were removing the asbestos boilers from the property on our own, instead of hiring the overpriced asbestos abatment companies. We’ve had four abatement guys over to look at the job in the last two weeks…. I’m not sure which one took the liberty of  dropping a dime on us.  I guess it’s their way of insuring they get work, call in the EPA so we don’t even consider removing it ourselves (which we never did).  So the EPA guy says that there is a slight chance that their may be asbestos in the sheetrock we are removing and he gives us a Stop Work order until we get some samples tested. $450 bucks later the samples come back clean and we should be able to start work again on Tuesday. Here’s a look at the progress so far:

102_5375    Not too much action on the exterior

102_5374   Nice Banner

102_4988   This porch is ready to come down on its own!!

102_5009  Heres how the third floor looked a week ago

102_5377  And the third floor now

102_5380   Here’s where the fire burnt through the roof

 

We’ll probably lose four days because of this little hiccup. It wasn’t too bad because it gave our contractor a chance to get back over to Bessemer and do some painting.

 

We bought another house on Wednesday. It’s on Brooks St in Springfield. The good thing is that this one has already been rehabbed by the previous owner, not to our standard… but it’ll do. Heres a look at the house;

102_4569    We bought this from a hard money lender out of CT who is also a pretty well known TV star on A&E’s Flip This House .  Theres a few repairs we need to make to this house, nothing major though.  Once thats done we’ll stage it and get it on the market.