All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

"Suicide is the only act that is able to succeed." -- Jacques Lacan

There was enormous intellectual liberation in that quote from the chronic fear of failure I felt during my first renovation. I told myself firmly at least a dozen times a day that I didn't want to be successful, thank you very much. I was just fixing up a little apartment. One task after the other.

@Bettina F.

I'm writing up a long post on the many benefits and drawbacks of active landlording for the local smallholder. You have six units (according to your profile). You obviously would be working differently if you had 200. I've always felt there's not enough focus in most information about real estate investing that seriously looks at doing what you're doing, and far too much emphasis on putting more faith in your PM than a priest has in Christ.

@Margie Pierce From my perspective as a Pittsburgh-area home improvement contractor in good standing with the PA Attorney General's office, with one million bucks worth of insurance on every job I do:

The bathroom and kitchen you're planning are what you should be really worried about.

The city of Minneapolis issues plumbing permits and licenses plumbers -- it says so on their website. The city of Pittsburgh proper and the boroughs of greater Pittsburgh do not -- plumbing permits and licensing plumbers is handled by the Health Department of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located. We do 3rd party paid electrical inspections, and everything else is handled by local code enforcement and the quality of that varies sharply across the boroughs. It's a mess, except for those plumbing permits. We all mind our P's and Q's when it comes to those.

As Napoleon once put it, "In this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others." The health department has a ferocious reputation for going after small offenders and issuing draconian penalties when they find them. I'd bet a significant sum that the city of Minneapolis has much the same reputation when it comes to plumbing permits. Illegal sanitary water work destroys property, hurts people (typically children and the elderly), leads the news, and makes top local politicos look like they can't get their thumbs out.

So the problem with not pulling building permits (with special attention given to plumbing permits) if you're in this business for keepsies is that sooner or later, the odds catch up to you, and once they do, your name is mud and your career as a landlord is over. I maintain the absolute best possible professional relationships with the building inspectors who typically check my work, but I am ready to drop and shine an Allegheny County plumbing inspector's shoes if he wants me to. Over time, several have come to trust I will always do the right thing because I know the score. This makes my life easier in turn.

The simple construction reality is that if you sister your 2x8s, as indicated elsewhere in this thread, you can do whatever you want up there and the floor will hold. The plumbing work to cut into the stack and put in the fixtures you talked about isn't impossible hard even for a DIYer. But my recommendation is that before you do anything at all, call the plumbing department and indicate your intentions, call the office responsible for issuing building permits in your area, AND DO WHATEVER THEY TELL YOU TO DO. Or hire a contractor who knows the score. Pulling permits is more than a bit stressful but is an absolutely integral part of being in this business -- you've got to learn the process sometime. As an starting investor who owns a single duplex (as indicated on your profile), with the desire to get a few more, this is the best time to learn even though, perversely, it's the time when you can least afford the expense of it.

Politicos LOVE shafting and shaming us, Margie. If they could shaft one of us every day and give a speech about how "the good people of our fine city need not worry about predatory slumlords doing their tenants wrong on this administration's watch," they'd stay in office forever. Perp-walking one landlord in handcuffs on camera is worth kissing a hundred full-diaper babies for a politico. There's no downside for them, whatever party they belong to.

Good luck to you, whatever you choose to do.

I found a plumber in Munhall who sent me on to a good agent in Munhall who let me in on a pocket listing that I bought, so it worked out for me.

Of course I have to admit that this can certainly be hit or miss. But it is a reliable way to find smaller yet competent plumbing outfits in those ageing, tightly-knit Mon Valley steeltown communities like Clairton (and Munhall) that can have valuable under-utilized contacts.

@Anthony Angotti @Kevin White

You're welcome, guys.
 

@Kevin White

Here's a sort of an inside tip for Allegheny County -- you probably already know you can always search for PA home improvement contractors through the PA Attorney General's Office. But you can also find Allegheny County certified master plumbers who live within a zip code using this Health Department page.

http://webapps.achd.net/Plumbing/

Let me show you how this can work:

In the 15025 zip code (Clairton), there are 12 guys on the registry. Within that, there are only six who live in Clairton proper, not Jefferson Hills. These are the highly experienced guys you actually want on your jobs if you can get them, not the apprentices or perennial journeymen that work off their licenses. This becomes enormously useful when you're building local contacts in the boroughs, because master plumbers know EVERYONE.

Let me show you how this can work: so if you go halfway down the 15025 list you'll find Gary Horvath. Do a search on "Gary Horvath Clairton Plumbing." You'll find his cookie-cutter-template seven-page Web 1.0 beta website for his obviously smallish company, GH Plumbing. You go to his social media and you find almost nothing. He doesn't even list his PA contractor number on his marketing material (indicating that no one had ever seriously gone after him for breach of service, so he's never had a lawyer yell at him for not having that info up on his marketing materials, as he's required to by HICPA). This guy went through at least six years of training, his photo tells us he's no spring chicken, and obviously has zero ambition to build a plumbing empire. His bread and butter is very likely a small client list that he takes good care of and has no use for the interwebs.

Now I don't know this guy, but I do know that he runs a small shop and he's a master plumber, so he's probably answering his own phone during normal business hours. If you talk to him, explain that you found him through the master plumber registry search and make sure to call him "Mr. Horvath" until he insists you call him "Gary." Ask him to take a look at your problem.

I agree with @Roger Lee. Wet basements are a huge concern here in western Pennsylvania, and people are generally terrified when they find water leaking into their basement. There is no form of basement construction that is waterproof by design. The problem is never waterproofing one's basement, it's turning a wet basement into a dry basement. With great frequency, a pattern like the one on your wall tends to be water flowing toward the wall instead of away the wall at the surface. With slightly less frequency, it's an outright crack or series of cracks in the wall allowing seepage. Only rarely is it enormous water pressure outside the basement wall forcing water through the walls and into the basement, and this is almost always a product of long-term erosion or poor building.

The first thing you can do will be to set your heart at ease. Stand in the corner and sight along the problem wall to the next corner. Does the wall bow in at or near the center? If it does not, the chances that you have a significant problem are minimal.

Your first remediation is to go outside to look for a slope leading toward a basement, or roof downspouts emptying very near a wall. Change the slope using gravel/crushed stone if necessary, extend the downspout out from the wall where you find problems.

If you do that well and the basement continues to look like that, please tell us. A basement like that was built to outlast the structure above it by centuries.

@Ryan Tuleja You're very welcome, Ryan!

@Ryan Tuleja

It's pretty simple. A message flashes on the screen of the digital thermostat that reads "FILTER CHANGE."

Several people on this website so far have tried to goad me into responding to them, and I've been nice. But an HVAC tech selling the industry line on filters? No, this cannot be borne.

The first time I had to deal with one of the bloodsucking leeches was in my own home ten years ago, well before I got the bug to start renovating again in the USA. It was January, and my blower motor went out. The tech showed up with a pornstache, an elaborate deal that made it impossible for him to wear a small particulate mask. I should probably be grateful to the pornstache because it made me immediately suspect the SOB.

So the tech confirms that my blower motor is not spinning, goes out to his truck to make a call on his cell phone, and comes back quoting me $600 to replace the motor. According to Pornstache, the part cost $450 and he was going to charge me $150 for the service call and for labor. I told him I couldn't afford that, and he looked all offended before he remembered it was January in Pennsylvania. Pornstache actually ended up snickering at me as he climbed into his truck.

I took apart that furnace and removed the blower motor.I read the part off the case and found the same blower motor selling online for $250 retail price. The SOB tech probably got that sucker for less than $180. I bought the part mail order, and it showed up days later as I shivered in the cold.

I installed the motor, cleaned the blower, and the furnace works great to this day. Pornstache wanted to get paid some FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS for an hour's work and a drive to a routine repair. He had no bones about using my tender nether hole as his personal playground and trying to take total advantage of the cold to maximize his profits. Pornstache has a deep little pocket of the abyss of the lake of fire waiting for him.

For the last ten years, I have yet to meet a single HVAC trainee, tech, or business owner who could control his sick and twisted greed, who didn't think a cold snap was a personal gift from the divine straight to him, a license to charge the earth for his services. I can certainly never trust the word of one of the diseased breed.

So Ryan, on how many of the service calls did you put the screws to some poor little guy like me on the other end? Or do you consider the kind of markup I've described perfectly fair and just in January?

@Steven Mitchell

There's usually a basic course on property management you can do at your local community college. If you can get it for free or almost free it's a good deal for a small landlord.