Can expenses be carried over to next tax year?

[Ansari A.]

Hello All, I purchased my first rental property in Houston on August 2017. I listed it for rent right after closing.

House required painting and many small repairs (not improvements/capex from what I read from IRS rules) I was going to rent it out and do the repairs/painting later, but since I could not find a tenant immediately, I went ahead and hired contractors and got the painting and other repairs done while my property was still advertised for rent.

I was able to rent it out only on November 2017 and have an income of around $2500 for the year.

My painting and other repairs costed me around $4000

Questions:

1. Can I use part of my expenses ($2500 out of $4000) this year avoid taxes and use the rent of my expenses ($1500) in next years filing? In other words, can you carryover expenses to next year.
2. If answer to my first question is no, can I show (income minus expense) $1500 as loss this year and deduct it from my income in 2018?
3. If I had another property, can I combine income from both properties and deduct expenses from both properties? In other words, is there a need to separate income/expense for each property or can it all be combined?

Some additional details if that matters: Property is located in Houston, purchase price is around 100K, rent is around $1250 and its not transferred to LLC yet.

Thank you for your time.