We’ve officially closed on the historic home and our renovation plans have been approved by the historical society. Our first job is to smash up the concrete pool deck, fill the pool in, clear and level the overgrown yard, and tear off the illegal addition built on the rear of the house. 

I was a bit surprised to find that the interior of the house is no where near as bad as the exterior. Don’t get me wrong….. it definitely needs lots of work, and it smells terrible, but overall it isn’t as bad as we first thought.

We are doing a full renovation on over 3,000 sq. ft., so this job is going to take several months to complete. The budget is around $75k-$80k, but hopefully our contractor can find a way to save a few bucks here and there. 🙂

 Heres a bunch of before pictures for you to look at:

The REO broker told us that they took 8 dumpsters worth of trash out of this house just from the inside, and then they hired a professional cleaning crew to come in and scrub everything down…. and it still looks real nasty, and smells even worse. If you add up the cash-for-keys the bank had to give to the owners to get them out ($2,000), the cost of the trash out and the cost of the cleaning crew, the bank probably spent more getting the house ready for sale than what we paid for it!!!! Not to mention the $176,000 they lost on the mortgage they gave in 2006.  Hmmmm I wonder why all these banks are going out of business??

I’ll post some more updates of this project as things progress, as well as a few videos that we’ve put together.