All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Stephanie D.

Very good eye. It wasn't RedGard, just thick water-based paint. You're absolutely right, though, it was practically the same shade as dried RedGard where it had been exposed to minimum UV exposure from the four windows in this bedroom, as it has here in the photo posted.

I also met the tenant who did this -- and she would not know RedGard from Easter egg dye powder.

In other places throughout the room, the paint had darkened a bit and taken on more of a purplish tone. The worst example of this was on the crown molding of the room, which itself was an obvious, poorly-done late addition to this duplex, originally finished in very good stain-grade oak trim. The original trim on this place was done by a very good trim carpenter. It's been a complete shame, a leprosy of the soul, to paint over it. But the place is old and was maintained for seventy years by a father and son team of living avatars of Bozo the Clown Handyman. The trim was in really bad shape when we came in.

In other words, Jamal, you're gonna get screwed pornographically, magnificently, magisterially until you find the right people to help you in your target area. Start looking for those people as much as you look for properties where you want to buy.

@Kelly Kormos

Kelly, I went to my local judicial auction for more than a year before I bought anything. Your state has different laws, but still, I would avoid buying anything right out the gate, however good the deal looks from the outside. I am not advocating investor paralysis, and no business forces you to make hard, fast, and expensive decisions like this one, but still, I'd wait until I had attended a few auctions and followed up on a few sales by other third-party investors before I started making moves.

@Danika Lowry

 Can you show us pictures?

Everything @Karen S. said is essentially correct. The stripping route is long and punishingly difficult. I would recommends CitriStrip for critical pieces instead of strippers labeled "premium" strippers, which indicates that they contain methyl chloride. Methyl chloride strippers work faster but you need a full-on gas mask or SCBA gear to safely work around them -- a half-face respirator fitted with organic vapor cartridges, the painter's standard, won't fully do the job for long exposures, and you'd need long exposures to get all that trim stripped. Never mind what the label promises -- that's the sure and certain road to a diagnosis down the line.

Two coats of Kilz Complete is the way we go when painting over chipped interior and exterior trim. I thin the first coat 10% with Penetrol, a paint additive that improve this primer's already-exceptional penetration and adhesion characteristics. Kilz Complete is a high VOC oil-based primer, Penetrol comes in at a much higher the VOC content, and paint thinner is almost pure VOCs, so if you plan on doing a significantly amount of oil-based painting indoors, you need the aforementioned half-face respirator fitted with organic vapor cartridges.

If you want to replace pieces of trim, as Karen S. suggested, you may need to invest in a 1/2 in. router and a router table to make new boards match old boards. That requires carpentry knowledge and experience and investment, and of course you'll want to avoid it., but depending on the state of the trim, it may be the wisest way to go for quite a bit of your trim over the long haul, and of course if you plan on doing this multiple times.

Granted, you already have a painter over there, so you'll want to be hands-off, but still -- I think anyone who's done this a bit has seen quite a bit of nasty trim that needs to be replaced.

@Jenelle H.

Very seriously, you should not bother talking to anyone outside real estate investing about it. They don't need to know. There is a LOT of cultural baggage around owning multiple properties and landlording, if you decide to go down that road. Bags and bags of it. Talk to fellow investors in person and online. That's why I'm here. I haven't even told my brother what I've been doing with my life for the last few years.

The deeper you go into this the more aware of all the cultural baggage you'll become. The assets that you're talking about buying and selling and improving and reworking are HOMES for non real-estate people. They build their lives around them. If they rent, they compulsively worry about "being thrown out on the street." If they own the house they live in, they compulsively worry about "the bank foreclosing if I miss another payment."

When they move in, they pay for renovations they don't need to "make the house truly mine."

They celebrate paying off their outsized mortgage because for them it's a great life-changing accomplishment.

They mourn when they have to leave the house that they spent so much of their lives in, like their cheap ticky-tacky tract-built place is an ancestral estate handed down from time immemorial and their lives are bound up with the soil it rests on.

They fill their houses with just ungodly amounts of their crap, trying to own it more fully.

They hire people to do the simplest jobs in their house because they're worried to death about structurally compromising the joint: "Oh no, if I replace this faucet and the faucet leaks there will be massive damage and a contractor will have to give me a quote and I'll have to file a claim with my insurance, and, and, and..."

You know those guys who save up to buy a cheap  American sports car, get someone to take a picture of themselves standing in front of it, and then use it as their profile pic? You stay away from those guys, right? When it comes to houses, everyone who doesn't invest in real estate is just as emotionally mature about the subject as a bozo on a dating site in a leather jacket and sunglasses sporting three days' stubble as he sits in a beater convertible and gives the camera his best Magnum.

UPDATE: Kilz2 effectively put away Melisandre in two coats, ready to roll on Glidden Premium.

@John Thedford

Alls I know is I'm pretty sure it was on special somewhere@!

@Ian Olmsted

I've never let a tenant paint a rental. Part of hardening old low-cost rental properties in Pittsburgh like this (with intact plaster throughout and lead paint safety issues properly put to bed) is getting the paint right at first so that we can clean and repaint reliably and quickly between tenants. Paint is a protective coating with decorative properties. You get people painting who can't understand why it's there, and you have one crappy job after the other that takes a lot of time and cost to correct and get the value of the paint job to match the value of the property, especially on trim.

@Justen Ashcraft I think it's gonna have to be the drill. Haven't found a reliable cheaper way.

@Rob Beardsley

I don't read tea leaves and make simplistic giant-picture predictions. We're looking at a long and complex process here in unmapped territory. Some aspects of the process of the shift to an autonomous driving culture are obviously predictable. Some will happen before others. The only thing that is absolutely certain is that what most people and self-proclaimed experts think about the process is guaranteed to be completely wrong. The technology is inherently disruptive.

We are also not going to move the day or year after tomorrow to a system where traffic is all computer-controlled by a massive expert system constantly improving its performance and in which people are not allowed to drive their own cars, which are all purpose-built to maximize space and comfort for passengers and minimize space and comfort for autonomous drivers. If it even happens, that kind of massive shift would take a lot of time.

So what can we reasonably expect and predict?

Here's one idea that gets tossed around frequently: very quickly, well-paid big rig truckers will be put out of business except in specialized cases where there jobs cannot be taken by minimum wage workers with no special driving credentials driving smaller trucks. I think that's reasonably accurate.

The median pay for a commercial truck driver is $66,000, according to Google. Someone who makes minimum wage 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year with a regular driver's license to supervise an autonomously-driven truck would make $15,080.

Again according to what Google just taught me, the max weight of a tractor-trailer is 80,000 lbs. 90% or more of tractor-trailers on the road max out at 75,000 lbs or less. According to PennDOT, a guy with a regular license can legally operate a vehicle of up to 26,000 lbs.

Assuming the law and its limits stay exactly the same and don't change to benefit the changing interests of very wealthy people and industries historically flush with cash while sticking it further to the weak, poor, and helpless (which of course never happens in America the Beautiful), that means that Pennsylvania cargo carriers will in the near future be able to pay an unskilled worker less than 1/4 of the going rate to take on reliably more than 1/3 of the typical truck load handled by a well-paid and experienced trucker.

So I am rather certain that one of the first things that is going to happen is that we're going to see more smaller trucks controlled by autonomous technology with minimally paid people behind the wheel just watching the technology do the work (perhaps while they do a second unskilled job on their tablets) on all roads moving more and more cargo, while there will be a decrease of larger load carriers with expensive drivers on roads that allow trucking traffic.

So if there's a road that goes over a bridge that typically has a lot of commercial tractor-trailers going over it in and out of a big shopping development primarily accessible by the bridge, I'd expect to see fewer large trucks on it and faster pickup on the smaller trucks going over it, which would increases the rate of traffic and would likely improve congestion along that artery, thus making rental properties on the less desirable side of this bridge more easily accessible by people who who don't want to pay out the nose for rental properties on the more desirable side of this bridge.

@Bettina F.

Classy with the permanent marker.

@Shannon Slade

I'm still trying to see how anything can be done right with that color, I really am.