When a house needs a "hero"

I really enjoyed Brandon Turner's blog post titled "How NOT to Flip a House: An Embarrassing Story of Wasted Time, Money, and Opportunity".  The one thing that caught my attention in the story was about how Brandon wanted to be a house's "hero".

Excerpt:

She was a 3500 square foot beast of a house that was just begging for a hero to come and rescue her from her despair and make a ton of money in the process.

I was that hero.

I know the feeling!

On December 19th, I purchased a 1,424 square feet house that was owned by an older woman on dialysis who needed to sell her house in order to move into assisted living.  Not only that, but she was a bit of a hoarder.  So the house had two main issues:

a) There was deferred maintenance due to her being sick and not being able to take care of the house.  And by deferred maintenance, it was more like almost to the point of being un-livable.

b) There was so much STUFF!  Not to the point of the show "Hoarders" but it was pretty bad.

This house needed a hero to save it!  No one else wanted it, literally.  No one else could see the potential but me.

Luckily, the bank paid for someone to clean out the house, but they didn't get done until a week after I closed.

I slaved over that house.  I had both bathrooms renovated, I painted the whole house (ceilings and walls) myself, put in a new window, had the garage torn down, had trees and brush cut down and cleared, fixed the plumbing, upgraded the electrical, put in new carpeting, had the hardwood floors refinished ... and then breathed a sigh of relief when it was all done.

The house was livable again!  And to give this story a happy ending, the tenant that lives there now not only loves living in the house, she's planted flowers and bushes, done weeding, and pays her rent on time or early each month.