I screwed up

[Rose Stuart]

Hi everyone. I screwed up. And it is really hurting my pride and bank account. We bought a solid property. A second duplex in our neighborhood. It's a solid B neighborhood near different kinds of employers. It's centrally located and backs up to a town park. We can walk there from our house which comes in really handy since we only have one car. We screen carefully and have solid renters. But I majority messed up the math. Specifically the initial repair investment. A couple of major things happened. One: turns out that no matter how carefully I observed and took notes, there was a world of difference between the initial, "this is a solid house! This could work" walk through and the "crap! I am NOT the kind of landlord that would show this place as grungy as it is. We will paint EVERYTHING, refinish the floors, revamp the kitchen, there goes a month and a half of our lives." The second, really major thing that happened it's that we were expecting to keep the tenants we inherited while we did the remaining home repairs and updates on our own time as we had income. Guess what comes next? They were not up to date on the rent when we closed and could not get up to date in the allotted time. We do not play games. They were gone. Which meant all of a sudden we were replacing another floor of windows. Rennovating another bathroom. Remodeling a horrendous kitchen. Major thing three: we were going to put off doing the roof and driveway for a couple more years. Nope. The universe had other plans. So here we are, nine months out. We are fully rented. Everyone has paid their rent. Zillow (I know) says the house is worth $21k more than we paid. $140. If you go with that and our (TBC below)