or, "Pardon Me, Have You Seen My Ever-Lovin' Mind?"
Guest blogged by Roy.
Any fool will tell you, if you're having trouble getting a remodel off the ground, that the thing to do is to take on two remodels. That's how you know they're fools. They say foolish things like that.
Or maybe it's not so foolish. Maybe it's brilliant, in a non-obvious, John Nash kind of way. At least that's what we're hoping, because that's the direction we're going, now. See if you can follow the meandering path of reasoning we've been on:
To have our house remodeled, we are going to have to move out of it for a not-well-defined period of time, between six months and a year. We could either pay rent, or we could buy a place so that we'd at least have some amount of equity to get back on what we pay. Now, if we're going to buy another place, we could just fix up our current house and sell it, and move into the other place. But we don't want to leave the neighborhood we're in. We like it here.
However, there is a house a few doors down from us that has been on the market for some months. It is on a substantially larger lot (though the house itself is smaller). We could buy it, do the big remodel on it, and then move in there, remodel our own house, and rent or sell it.
We walked around the outside of the neighbor house, and determined that its layout isn't suitable to the design we want. The master bedroom is in the front of the house, which precludes expanding the master suite, much less the ability to tack the Endless Pool enclosure onto it. Sigh.
But since Shelly was already in real estate researching mode, she continued to look for properties to buy, on the idea that we could move there, remodel our house, and move back in. She located a short sale home that has been empty for four years. It's in a really nice little neighborhood, on a nice-sized lot. The house is a comparatively spacious two-story. We liked it, fundamentally, but it needs a lot of work, including a new air conditioner, and all siding (the first story is brick, the 2nd story and the garage are siding). And there's a tree leaning on the roof, but it doesn't seem to have penetrated. The plumbing inside has leaked at some point, damaging floors. The utilities have been off so long that the meters were removed.
We ran the numbers on that, and found that we could actually afford to buy it, fix it up, do our remodel, move home, and then keep the other house as a rent house. As a bonus, we know the people who live across the street. It would be really tight, though. And it leaves us on our original lot, whose size is very constraining.
So then we did some more thinking about what we wanted to achieve, and realized that it would make more sense, if we're just going to live in another house while we fix ours up, to buy the one down the street that doesn't need all kinds of repairs, and is just down the street. Duh. Then we went one step further and closed the circle: we can expand that house in much the same way as we'd planned to expand our own. We'd just add a new master suite on the back, with the pool attached. The front bedroom stays a suite, a nice feature for guests. An added advantage is that the house becomes a 3-3-2.
So that's the plan now. We're running numbers to see how many phases we have to go through to get it all done. Keep your fingers crossed and keep watching this space.
