I’m finally making progress!

I just got back from the house in Clendenin last night. This trip I looked over the work my contractor did and also planned my next step.

Just under a month ago I signed 3 contracts for 3 jobs. The contractor has completed two of them, and will shortly be starting on the third (replacing half the driveway).

Bushes

The first job was to cut down and remove the overgrown bushes. This was not critically important, but the bushes did make the property look bad. Now the hill looks kinda scraggly, but that’s okay. All I was really aiming for was a visible sign that someone was taking care of the property.

This cost me almost a thousand dollars (it’s a steep hill), and was worth it.

One thing that is hard to see in the before photo from last July is that the bushes were 4 to 6 feet tall everywhere. Actually, now that I look back at the older photos (some were taken before the auction, and date to early 2022), I am realizing just how fast these bushes grew. They _really_ had to go.

Clean Out

The second job my contractor finished was cleaning all the trash out of the second unit, and the crawlspace. I had the contractor go ahead and gut the entire unit, tearing out everything but the studs and floor. He also cleaned up all the trash around the building.

It cost me almost 6 grand, but was worth it.

Here are a few photos to give you an idea of the change. The before photos are from last August, and the after are from yesterday.

I can’t tell you how it feels to finally be able to look at the framing and get a sense of the current state of the building. All in all, it needs work (the floor desperately so) but in general the structure is sound. It really doesn’t look like much from the road, but there is potential here.

So my next step is planning what I want to do with the property. I had planned to  turn it into a single family home, but yesterday I learned that the second unit was in fact rentable (the only problem with it was that the last tenant was a hoarder). This means that I could conceivably keep this as a duplex.

I’ll have to think it over.