All Forum Posts by: Matt R.

I just have one rental so far, so I use spreadsheets.  :)  One thing I have found helpful is to categorize receipts into the various expense categories (your bookkeeper has probably already told you about these) as they come in, or very shortly after - it makes tax time easier.

The Home Depot Pro Xtra account mentioned above was handy when I was rehabbing the house.  It does cost money, but sometimes you can get it for free if you're a member of a local real estate investment group.  They tie it to your business credit card, so you don't have to have a separate card for it; anything you buy with that credit card at HD shows up on your Pro Xtra account.  If you do lots of business with them (I think it's a few thousand dollars a year), you also get a rebate check at the end of the year.

I do use Cozy to collect rent.  (I also used it for a credit report and background check when I first rented the house.)  It's worked well for me for over a year now.  Mostly I can figure it out on my own, but when I've had questions, their support has responded quickly and helpfully via email. 

The one quirk of Cozy is that they sit on the money for about five days.  I get an email from Cozy when my tenant pushes the "pay rent" button, which is when it comes out of their account, and then I get another email from Cozy about five days later when it hits my account.  I suspect, but don't know, that they are doing some kind of short-term investment with the money in order to finance their service.  They do have an option to reduce this time for $1 per door per month, but I haven't used that.  I told the tenant that as long as I get that first email (that says they've paid), by the day the rent is due, then I consider the rent paid on time.

If I was going to use Quicken or Quickbooks or similar software, I would buy the software, run it locally on my PC, and make backups often - including a backup of the installer file or CD.  I personally prefer that to a "cloud" service with unknown security, future pricing, and future availability.  If my PC catches on fire or is blown away in a tornado or something, a couple of hundred bucks at the used computer store, plus my external hard drive, and I'm back in business.

If you do use a cloud/online service, see if it has an option to export your books to a file on your PC - if it does, use that once a month or so, and keep local copies of those files.

I don't get money from any companies mentioned.

Now I understand.  Yeah, for dressing it up for an afternoon, the 5000 K lamps probably do help.

(There's a local BBQ place that bought LED lamps the day they came out, and they are all much higher color temperature than 3000 K.  It looks weird in their dining room.  The food is good, though.)

I do most of my digital photography with clothes on, but you do you. :D Also, since I have to pay for the software myself, I use Gimp. :) Yeah, I know Creative Cloud is a lot cheaper than full-boat Photoshop used to be...

@Troy Welch

The electrician replaced the old 100 amp breaker with a 125 amp breaker. I wanted them to just provide an allowance so I could go with a 200 amp breaker but couldn't come to terms on it. So I am satisfied with the 125 amp breaker.

The reason why they wouldn't "just" install a bigger main breaker / panel is that the transformer in the back yard (on a pole or on the ground), the wires from the transformer to the meter, and the wires from the meter to the panel all have to be sized for the size of the service. This gets into what the electric utility will let you do. I can see them saying that installing a 125 A main breaker on a service that was originally sized and wired for 100 A is OK, especially if the utility knows they've upgraded their transformers since 1968. Going to a 200 A (or more) main breaker probably means they want you to replace the wires from the pole to the meter, the meter socket, and the wires from the meter to the breaker panel, which drives up the cost. It might also mean that they'd have to install a bigger transformer, and they want to subtract part of the cost of the new transformer from you. (Electricity is a little weird... usually you own the wires all the way out to the pole, so fixing or upgrading them is your baby. You don't own the electricity itself until it goes through the meter, though.)

My only concern is the renter tripping GFCI's and calling every time - I guess it is easy enough to just tell them to reset.

I don't yet know for sure if it helps or not, but I gave my tenants a 3-ring binder with copies of all the appliance manuals in it. There are also a couple of pages at the beginning about the GFCI outlets, how to reset them, and which sockets each one controls. For something like the bathroom, it's simple - the GFCI will be the only socket on that circuit, so if you pop it, you will be standing right in front of it. However, it might not be obvious to the tenant that if they plug in something in the bedroom and that outlet stops working, then they need to go reset the GFCI in the living room. (A lot of GFCIs now have a small LED on them that's only on when the GFCI is not tripped, so telling them "look for the one with the light out" may also help.)

I am handy enough to do the GFCI replacements

Do you know the difference between the "line" and "load" terminals on a GFCI?

I am assuming that each room gets a run from the breaker box that splits to switch/light and receptacles that are in series, right?

That's one way to do it. On normal-ish sized rental houses (less than maybe 2,000 square feet), it's fairly common for the receptacles and lights in a couple of rooms to all be on the same circuit. There is also a suggestion, not always followed, that in any given room, the receptacles should be on one circuit and the lights on another - that way, if somebody plugs something in and pops a breaker, they aren't also plunged into darkness.

Bathrooms are special and different. Kitchens are special and different. The laundry is special and different. If your locality requires AFCIs, the bedrooms will be special and different.  Reading the book (see below) will tell you how, and what to do.

I should be able to talk with guy at the big box store for cable size and the like.

Some big-box employees will help and some won't.

I would strongly suggest that you go buy a book (don't Google) on how to do wiring in a house. The big-box store sells one with lots of pictures for $20 or less; you probably already understand the "how to wire up a receptacle" chapter, but pay lots of attention to the "how to wire the whole house" chapter. They probably also sell a small paperback called "Wiring Simplified", by Hartwell, Richter, and Schwan. It has a green cover with a picture of wires on it and costs about $10. It's a little light on illustrations, but it tells you how to wire up an entire house, correctly. Even if you end up hiring an electrician, that $10 will allow you to have more intelligent discussions with them.  (I have a few different versions of this book... including the 1954 edition that my dad bought back in the day to help him install a 240 volt room air conditioner at home.)

Also, since they had an attic fan at one time, I would assume none of the exterior walls are insulated.

Not necessarily. The house I grew up was built in the mid-1960s with insulated exterior walls, blown-in insulation in the attic, and insulation under the floor (it has a full basement), and Dad put in an attic fan in the early 1980s. My current residence is a few years newer, but has a similar situation. In the Midwest, the attic fan basically gives you 2 to 4 weeks in the spring and 2 to 4 weeks in the fall where you can run the attic fan alone, before you give up and turn on the A/C or furnace respectively. Not sure how it goes on the Gulf... if you're used to the humidity, just having moving air might be enough to help you feel cooler.

(From your later post)
I didn't realize that grounding to the box is acceptable.

Grounding the receptacle to the box is acceptable IF THE BOX IS GROUNDED. If the house was wired with two-wire Romex (nonmetallic cable), the boxes will NOT be grounded. For 1968, you might find that the kitchen and bathroom boxes *are* grounded, but nothing else in the house is.  (For a while, the metal boxes were grounded by using cable with a ground wire, and attaching the ground wire to the outside of the box, so it might be grounded even if you can't see a ground wire inside the box.  The (probably original) kitchen outlets in my mid-1950s rental were done this way.)

You can tell for sure with the 3-light tester and the 3 prong - 2 prong adapter I talked about before. Take out the screw in the cover plate, plug in the adapter, and then put the screw back in through the tab in the adapter. (This connects the adapter tab to the metal mounting strap of the outlet, which is hopefully in good contact with the outlet box.) If both of the "good" lights on the tester come on, then the box is grounded.

Another way to tell is with the tester that has a small neon bulb in a plastic "cage", with two short test prods sticking out of the bottom. First, find an outlet at home that you trust and plug one prod into the narrow slot and the other prod into the wide slot. See how bright the neon is? Remember that.

At the rent house, take off the cover plate and touch one prod solidly to the metal box. Then try the other prod in each slot on the outlet. If one of the slots makes the neon light up nice and bright, then the box is grounded. If the neon glows dimly or not at all on both slots, then the box is not grounded.

Don't use a voltmeter for this test. (Once you understand why not, you don't need my advice anymore. :D )

This is a good point.  Zinsco is another brand of panel to watch out for.  Besides the price clue Don mentioned, the other way to tell is whether or not you can still get breakers from the original manufacturer.  Walk into any big-box store and you can buy GE, Square D, and Cutler-Hammer breakers that are actually made by GE, Square D, and Cutler-Hammer.  The breakers to fit FPE and Zinsco panels will be sold by "Acme Breakers" or something like that.

I agree with this too, but note that you don't have to upgrade the service from the electric utility to do this.  (You can upgrade it if you want to, but it's uncheap, and in town the utility will often insist on you hiring an electrician to make the cutover.)  You can buy the bigger panel, change out the main breaker to match what your service is, and then enjoy all the extra spaces in the panel.

Part of the basement in my rental was already finished when I bought it. Somebody put a light coat of plaster over the poured concrete, and then painted that a light pink color. Then, somebody else nailed 2x2s to the poured concrete, and put wood paneling up. Later on, the wood paneling was painted white. I ended up having to tear out all the paneling (and install a sump pump... whee!), leaving me with the pink walls again... painting them white helped brighten the space back up. I washed it with TSP and water and let it dry, and then I used the "bright white" Sherwin-Williams base paint, with no tint in it whatsoever. If it's poured concrete, and you DIY it with a roller, get a roller with a really long nap - this helps you get into the little holes and bubbles in the concrete. You'll never get them all, but you can get most of them. If it's block, a shorter nap roller may work.

I don't know if I would go for the curtain idea... the fire marshal may have something to say about that.  In theory, wall coverings are supposed to meet some flammability specs, and curtains from the general store probably won't meet that spec if they're used to cover an entire wall.  You can get curtains that will meet the spec, but they're enough money that it would be cheaper to do drywall or paneling at that point.

The company that did my sump pump had an add-on offer (which I didn't take up) to install fiberglass reinforced plastic (FRP) panels on the inside of the walls.  You've seen these in a gas station bathroom - 4x8 plastic sheets, usually with a shiny finish and pebbly texture.  I don't remember if they proposed gluing them up, or using nails or screws.  I've seen the sheets for sale at the big-box store, as well.  The advantage of these is that water doesn't bother them.  However, if you have an active leak behind one of these panels, you may have to pull out the panel to fix it... or funky stuff could start growing behind the panel.

The finished part in the basement of mine is kind of an L shape, with a 10'x20' area and about a 10'x10' area adjoining, drywall ceilings throughout.  When I bought it, there was one can light in the center of the 10'x20' area, and one old shower-type fixture (square frosted glass) in the center of the 10'x10' area. I took out those fixtures and put in some LED "disk" lights - three down the middle of the big area, and two down the middle of the small area.  This also helped bring up the light level.  The disk lights only need a deep regular (4") junction box, so they might be good if you have low ceilings.

The LEDs I used were Cooper Halo 6", 1200 lumen, 2700 K.  I picked them because Cooper has a photometry program on their Web site that lets you pick out your room size and desired level of light, and tells you how many fixtures to use.  You can also tell it if you want one row down the middle, or a grid, etc, and it will compute the light level for the arrangement you want.  The only thing I don't like about these lights is that they have patents licensed from Rambus, which is a patent troll.  You can get equivalent lights in other brands from the big-box stores.  If you're not sure how many to get, buy one or two, wire it/them to an extension cord, and temporarily hang it/them from the ceiling some evening.  Play around with the spacing until you like the light level, and then order more if you need to.

If you're trying to do the real low dough show, at least put in a few more regular round junction boxes, put the classic ceramic lampholder on them, and wire them to the existing light circuit... pull chains or wall switches to taste.  Most basements need about double the amount of ceiling lamps that the builder installed.  Also, for some reason, the LED industry has decided that the 60 W equivalent is the size they really want to sell... if you have the headroom to spare, you can often get cheaper lumens by installing a Y adapter and two 60 W equivalent lamps, rather than one 75 W, 100 W, or higher equivalent lamp.  Or, get an LED "shop light" fixture, and install it between two joists to get a little more headroom.

The laundry shelves are probably a good idea.  This is one place where it might be better to install plastic or wood shelves, instead of metal... the detergent and bleach and stuff may eventually rust a metal shelf.  If your tenants like to fold their laundry down there too, maybe some kind of table to make that easier, like @Mike B. said.  If there's not a lot of room, you can get or make a table that mounts to the wall on one edge and folds down against the wall when not in use.  If it's awkward to set up an ironing board near the washer (and the washer outlet), find a good spot for an ironing board and make sure there's an outlet on the wall there.

If your tenants trust each other enough, I have seen storage rooms in an apartment basement that were made by building walls out of 2x4s, and then just stapling chicken wire to the studs.  Each room had a door with a hasp for a padlock.  You may need to extend the walls (or at least the chicken wire) up into the space between the joists.

If the pipes aren't super rusty and crusty, and don't get real hot, you can either paint them white to dress them up, or go nuts and show them off.. paint the water supply lines blue and red, the sewer lines green, etc.  :)  Don't paint any forced-air ducts or the flues from gas appliances, though.

If you have any gas appliances down there, be careful about building them into closets or other small spaces.  They need combustion air to operate (unless it's a newer high-efficiency furnace with its own intake air pipe coming from outside the house).  The installation manual will tell you how many cubic feet of room per BTU/hr it needs.  If you can't find the manual for exactly your furnace or water heater, look up one for a current model with equal or higher input rating (BTU/hr).  You can build a small room around them, but you then need to provide vent grills in the wall or door, or a pipe that brings air down into that room from the attic or outside.

Maybe this is obvious, but if you add storage rooms, make sure there's still enough room to move a replacement water heater, washer, dryer, etc, from the basement door or stairs to the place it needs to live.  On mine, the water supply comes through the foundation wall about 3 feet off the floor, goes into the meter, and then goes up to the ceiling... I built a fairly stout box of 2x4s around the whole thing, to help prevent tenants from accidentally shearing off the pipe when they're moving boxes around.

I hope this helps!

Matt R.

This is the only part of Jim K's post I disagree with.  LEDs are good, but the "daylight" ones (5000+ K) look incredibly blue and harsh to me.  I did LEDs in my rental (both bulbs and ceiling disk fixtures where there used to be can lights), but I got the 2700 or 2750 K ones - pretty close to a plain old soft-white incandescent.  One of the disk lights is 3000 K, and I can tell the difference, but I don't know if the tenants care or not.

The daylight LEDs might look a little better if the whole house has them.  If you want to check, maybe buy a couple of daylight and a couple of 2700 K ones at the store, and try them out at your house.

This rating (the color temperature) is not always on the front of the LED lamp box.  Usually there's a little box on the side or back that says "Lighting Facts", and it will be listed in there.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional electrician.

If you have to get it inspected, the inspector may not like hanging a painting or poster over it.  Sometimes people need to get in there in a hurry to shut off a breaker.

If it isn't already painted to match the walls, doing that would help a little.  I would take the whole front off of the breaker box to paint it, but you can't do that if the place is occupied.  Clean it first with Windex, 409, or equal to get any kitchen grease off of it - if it's still installed, spray the cleaner on a rag and then wipe the rag on the metal.  Maybe sand it very lightly with something like 220 grit sandpaper, and wipe down.  Open the door and mask off the "well" where the breakers are, or at least run a strip of masking tape around the edges of the well - you're trying to not paint the door shut, or end up with a blob of paint around the edge of the well that makes the door not shut.  If the door latch has to slide to open the door, either mask it, or see if you can take it off.  Then, paint it with regular latex paint.  Wipe up any drips that get onto the back side of the door.

I have seen at the store, but not used, "chalkboard paint" - it's supposed to make a surface you can write on with chalk.  Maybe paint it with that, put a little piece of wood molding underneath it to hold bits of chalk (but be careful of drilling into the wires), and sell it as a spot for family messages or a grocery list.

Depending on where it is in the kitchen, maybe get some cute refrigerator magnets from the dollar store and sell it as a good place to display the kids' artwork.  :)

Disclaimer: I am not a professional electrician.

Also, wall of text incoming.  :)

As has been said, do you know you have any aluminum wiring?  And, did the person who told you that actually look, or were they guessing based on the age of the house?  In general, two-wire (without ground) cable and aluminum wiring didn't really overlap in time, when houses were being built.  If somebody did an addition or renovation later, you might have aluminum wiring.

If you don't mind taking the cover of the breaker panel off, you can check in there for aluminum wiring.  CAUTION: There are things in there that are always live, even if all the breakers are off.  Don't do this if you don't know what to stay away from.  You're looking for the bare metal part of the wire, not the insulation - if it's silver-colored, it's aluminum.  If you have aluminum wiring on any of the normal branch circuits - the 15 or 20 amp circuits to the light fixtures, receptacles, etc - it should probably be replaced.

If you don't want to open up the breaker panel, you can check some of the outlets and switches around the house relatively safely.  Turn off the breaker first, and flick the switch or try a lamp (that you know works) in the outlet to be sure it's really off.  Then take the switch or outlet out of the box and look.  If there is an addition, or a part of the house that was finished later (finished basement or attic?), make sure you look at the wiring in that part of the house.

It is not such a disaster if the cables to the electric range or electric dryer are aluminum.  These usually only have two connections - one at the breaker box and one at the outlet for the appliance - so they don't usually have the problem of a daisy-chain of bad connections all over the house.  If it were me, I'd turn off the breaker, disassemble the outlets at the appliance, and inspect for scorch marks, melted plastic, etc.  If the damage was on the receptacle, I'd get a new receptacle, but if it looked like the wiring was damaged, I would think real hard about rewiring that circuit with copper.

If you have an electric furnace or electric air conditioner with aluminum wiring to them, those may take a little more work.  An electric furnace usually has set-screw connections, which is OK-ish, as long as they were rated for aluminum wire - it's probably a good idea to take the furnace cover off and look.  There should be a label somewhere near the connectors, or on the main nameplate label, that says if the terminals are suitable for aluminum.  An electric air conditioner often connects with wire nuts, which aren't such a great idea on aluminum - you either need wire nuts that are made for aluminum, or to get an electrician to install a crimp connector instead of the wire nuts.

Okay.  Assuming you don't have any aluminum wires...

Depending on how excited your area (city, county, state) is about permits and inspections, they may have some ideas on what standard you need to bring things up to.  It may be worth talking to them.  The rules vary - sometimes you only have to meet the electrical code for the year that the house was built; sometimes all the new work has to meet modern code, but the old work can be left in place - sometimes you have to upgrade everything.  The local inspections department will know for sure.

It's probably worthwhile to check the outlets to see which ones have ground and which don't.  If the house is before approximately 1955, probably nothing is grounded.  From about 1955 until about the mid-late 1960s, you might have grounded kitchen, laundry, and maybe bathroom outlets, but nothing else.  Past about 1970, usually everything is grounded.  Just because there's a three-prong outlet doesn't mean it's grounded.  What happens is that a two-prong outlet wears out and cracks, and so the owner goes to the hardware store.  New two-prong outlets are $3 and new three-prong outlets are $0.50, so they buy and install the cheap one and just don't hook up the ground.

The way to tell is with one of those "three neon lights on a plug" testers from the hardware store.  I have the $5 one without a GFCI test button; you might splurge on the $8 one with the GFCI button.  Also get one of those adapters that screws into a lamp socket and gives you a two-prong outlet, and a 3 prong-2 prong adapter.  Try the tester at your house, or somewhere you know that has working grounded outlets, to see what the lights look like.  Plug the tester into the 3-2 adapter and then into the wall at your house, to see what that looks like, and then plug the tester into the 3-2, the 3-2 into the lamp socket adapter, and screw the whole schmutz into a lamp socket, to see what that looks like.  (One of the lights will never be on when you test a lamp socket, since there isn't a ground.  If you're testing a ceiling fixture, grab a short piece of any kind of insulated wire, strip each end back a half inch, and touch one bare end of the wire to the tab on the 3-2 adapter and the other bare end to one of the screws that holds the fixture to the ceiling box.  If the box is grounded, that will make the second light on the tester come on.)  Then take all your toys to the rent house and have fun.  Put a Post-it note or maybe a piece of masking tape on the wall or floor near each thing you test with a note.

While you're testing, also note if the 3-2 adapter is "too easy" to plug in to any of the outlets - in other words, see if the contacts in the outlet are worn out.  It's better to use a 2-prong plug for these tests, even on a 3-prong outlet - most things only have 2 prongs, and using a plug with a ground prong for this test can make an outlet feel OK even when it isn't.  If you're not sure what it's supposed to feel like, plug a new plug into a new receptacle at the hardware store.  Outlets that have been in use for a little while may not be quite as stiff as a brand-new one, but the plug shouldn't just fall out of the outlet, either.

1.  If you do have some outlets without grounds, the cheapest thing to do is probably to install a GFCI in the first outlet on each circuit.  This provides some extra protection to those circuits, without rewiring them completely.  If you find any 3-prong outlets without grounds, or a 2-prong outlet that's worn out, replace them with new 2-prong outlets.

If you can't figure out which outlet is first on the circuit, or if the circuit is a pain in the butt in some other way, you can also get a GFCI built into a circuit breaker that can be installed in the panel.  However, the GFCI breakers are about $60, whereas the GFCI outlets are about $15.

You also have to think about whether you want to install a GFCI for things like a refrigerator or freezer, such that if the GFCI trips, somebody might not notice for a while.

If I was doing this, I'd also go around to the 2-wire outlets I was keeping and see if any of them were "back-wired" or "stabbed" or "back-stabbed", and if they were, I'd move the connections to the screw terminals instead - cut off the bare end of the wire, strip the insulation some more, loop it around the screw, tighten.  Some outlets just let you poke the wire in the back, where it is retained by a spring clip.  These connections inevitably loosen up over time - sometimes you can pull the wire out of the outlet by hand!  This can lead to heat and FIRE at that connection.  (The screw terminals don't loosen up.)

Another way you can test the regular outlets involves a voltmeter and either a small space heater or a hair dryer.  The voltmeter can be any digital voltmeter that will read 120 V AC.  It helps to get a 2-prong plug with some cord on it (cut it off of a dead appliance), strip the ends of each wire a half-inch or so, wrap each wire around one test prod, and then tape it up really good with electrical tape - that way you don't need three hands for the next part.  Or, if your meter leads unplug at both ends, get a replacement set of leads, cut off the test prods, and wire the red and black wires directly to a 2-prong plug.  If you like gadgets, get a "Kill-a-watt" or similar plug-in meter online, or at some hardware stores, for about $30.

Go to an outlet, plug in your meter, and write down the reading.  It's normal for it not to be exactly 120.0 V AC, and it's normal for it to bounce around a few tenths of a volt while you watch it.  If it's consistently way low (below maybe 110.0 V) or way high (above maybe 125.0 V), you may want to seek help from an electrician before proceeding.  Now, plug in the space heater or hair dryer, and crank it up to high.  Watch the voltmeter while you do this.  It is totally normal for the voltage to drop down when the heater/dryer kicks in, but let the heater/dryer run for a couple of minutes and write down the lowest voltage you see.  Then, turn the heater/dryer off and do some math.  If the voltage dropped 5% or less (like, it was 120.0 V with the heater off, and 114.0 V at its lowest with the heater on), then the circuit from the breaker panel to that outlet is in pretty good shape.  If it's between 5% and maybe 8%, that's not as good, but it might be OK.  If it's over 10%, then you should investigate further, or have an electrician investigate - you've got a loose connection somewhere between that outlet and the breaker box, which is potentially dissipating a lot of heat inside the wall somewhere.  Back-stabbed connections, loose wire nuts, and terminal screws that aren't tightened all the way down on receptacles and switches can cause this problem.

2.  The next step up used to be that you could run a separate ground wire from something you knew was grounded (the breaker panel, or a metal water pipe (NOT THE GAS PIPE) coming from the street, or a ground rod) to the outlets that didn't have them, and then install 3-wire outlets.  This has since been removed from the electrical code.  Your local area may or may not let you do this.

3.  The next step up from that is to rewire with 3-wire cable and 3-prong outlets everywhere.  This can be uncheap, but then you don't have to worry about it anymore.

If you do this, you're probably hiring an electrician.  Ask them to use the "spec grade" receptacles and switches - the ones that cost about $1 each at the hardware store, rather than $0.50.  They will also have "spec grade" stamped into the metal mounting strap.  In a 1,000 square foot 3 bed/1 bath house, using the cheap receptacles and switches will cost about $30, and using the spec-grade ones will cost about $60.  Since you're usually looking at a couple of thousand dollars for a rewire, the cost difference is minimal.  The spec grade stuff lasts longer before wearing out.

If you do this, you might also ask the electrician to install wired smoke detectors.  (Your local area may even mandate this.)  It's pretty easy for them to do while they're already wiring everything else, and in my opinion, it's safer for the tenants - even if the smoke detector batteries are missing for some reason, the detectors still have a chance at working.

Like @Johann Jells said, if there is access in the basement and attic, the rewire gets a little easier.  If the attic is unfinished, you might think about getting some 1"x12" (or so) boards, or ripping a 4'x8' sheet of plywood into four 8'x12" boards, and putting those across the rafters down the middle of the attic.  Shoot a couple of screws through the boards into the rafters so nobody does a Laurel and Hardy step-on-the-rake move.  Leave one 1x12 loose up in the attic so the electrician can put it where they need it.  If there aren't lights or windows up there, maybe get a couple of cheap used 4' shop light fixtures from the ReStore, hang them in the attic, and plug them into an extension cord that goes downstairs.  All of this reduces the chances that you find a work boot dangling from a new hole in the ceiling during the job.  :)  Sometimes in the basement, it helps to temporarily remove a built-in shelf, or move the washer and dryer - stuff like that.  Ask the electrician when they are there to give you the estimate.  Don't pull out any of the existing wiring on your own, though - sometimes they can use the old wire to pull in the new, and they can at least use the same holes for the new wire.

(If your area requires you to bring the house up to very recent code, they may also require a thing called an AFCI on some of the circuits.  At first, you could only get AFCIs as breakers, but I think you can also get them as outlets now.  The purpose of an AFCI is to make money for their manufacturers, IMHO.  If we actually wanted to fix the problem that AFCIs are supposed to solve, we'd put fuses in all the plugs, like the UK.  Regulatory capture is a thing, though.)

Is that far more than you wanted to know about it?  :D

I don't get money from any companies mentioned.

Matt R.

I rehabbed and rented my first house with just a 2001 Toyota sedan, including hauling a 22' extension ladder to and from the house.  I rented a U-Haul truck or van three times (which could have been reduced to two, with better planning), and I think I rented the Home Depot truck once.  I borrowed my other half's car (Chevy HHR) once, to pick up a new steel garage door section.  I had a refrigerator delivered.

Putting the ladder on the Toyota is an adventure.  It's reasonably secure, but I also only drive on city streets (35 mph max), and not the Interstate.  The rent house is 8 miles away from my house, so this is not too bad.

I found it hard to make it out of U-Haul without spending about $50-60.  The sticker price on their "in-town" trucks is $20, but you also pay about a buck a mile, and they make up some other fees too.  My rent house was only about a mile from a big U-Haul dealer, so pick-up and drop-off were close; if the U-Haul dealer is further away, that adds to the cost.  If you're in a big city, it is usually a little cheaper to go to the big U-Haul dealer, rather than "Bob's Auto Service" that also rents U-Haul.  The big dealers also have better availability of trucks.

Where I used to live, there were a couple of car-rental places that might have helped, if I was investing at the time.  One specialized in older pickups for use around town - their site says they'll rent you a 1/2 ton for 3 hours, unlimited miles, for $29 all in, or for 24 hours, 75 miles, $45 all in.  The other place specialized in new pickup and van rental and was more expensive, but I also hopped in one of their trucks and drove it from Oklahoma to New York without worrying about the truck.  So it might pay to look around at the local options.

One local landlord I know has a full-size older Chevy truck that he got cheaply from a family member.  Another one has a Dodge minivan - he likes the idea of the minivan but doesn't recommend Dodge after a couple of expensive repairs to his (it's only a couple of years old).  Like @Thomas S. said, an advantage of a van is that it's a little more secure.

The folding trailer idea may also work for you.  There is another kind of folding trailer where the bed doesn't fold, but the tongue does, sometimes sold as a "dump" trailer.  If your garage is either tall enough or wide enough, you might be able to set that kind of trailer up against the wall in the garage, and still park your car in there.  The trailer like that I used had steel pockets along the side rails for 2x4s, so you could build yourself a "fence" for the outside edges of the trailer if you needed something more than a flat bed.

If there is a Ford, Chevy, or Toyota dealer in your area that has a big commercial truck department, you might prowl around their lot on Sunday, or on their web site.  Sometimes they will have used work trucks for reasonable money, and they usually already have ladder racks, toolboxes, shelves, etc installed.  You may also be able to get a short warranty in the deal.

If you know any contractors (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc), you might ask if any of them are selling a truck.  A private sale takes a little more work, but sometimes you can get a better deal.

I don't get money from any companies mentioned.

Disclaimers: I am not a professional electrician. I am not affiliated with any companies mentioned.

That's not that weird, even for a house with a relatively modern electrical system.  A lot of space heaters are about 700 or 800 watts on "low", and about 1500 watts on "high".  A single 15 amp circuit has a capacity of 1800 watts.  In a lot of houses with 3 or fewer bedrooms, at least a couple of the bedrooms will probably have their outlets on the same circuit.  If you have that situation, and you put a space heater in each of two bedrooms, and put one or both of them on "high", you will trip a breaker or blow a fuse.  If both heaters are on "low", you'll probably get away with it... as long as there isn't too much other stuff on that circuit.

As a comparison, one space heater on "low" is equal to about 53 compact fluorescent "60 watt equivalent" lamps, or 77 LED "60 watt equivalent" lamps.

> It is a 15 amp electrical system.

This is highly unlikely, unless the house was first wired for electricity before maybe the 1920s.  Even back then, a lot of houses would have had a 30 amp service.  The next step up was 60 amps, then 100 amps.  (Picture a standard 1950s-1980s tract house, 2 to 3 bedrooms, roughly 1000-1500 square feet, and a gas furnace... that house would have probably been born with a 100 amp service.)  Beyond that, there are 200 amp and even 400 amp services... 400 amps is mostly for houses that are either huge (5+ bedrooms), or that have an electric furnace in North Dakota.  :)

If you mean that the fuse or circuit breaker for most of the circuits is rated 15 amps, that's fine.  Houses are being built brand new today with that.  All the "normal" lights and receptacles in the house will be on 15 amp circuits - some special cases, like the bathroom outlet and the outlets for the kitchen counter, will have 20 amp circuits.  Some cities mandate that everything gets a 20 amp circuit minimum, but many (most?) don't mandate this.

> The bedrooms only have one outlet each as well.

This is a little more of an issue, if only because you don't want people running extension cords all over the room.  I have seen a 1950s house where one of the smaller bedrooms only had two, but that's better than one.  Modern code would be probably mean three or four outlets in most reasonably-sized bedrooms.

You said the house has been in the family for 50 years, but not how old it is.  If it was new in 1968, the circuit breaker panel and the cable in the walls might actually be in pretty OK shape, and some relatively minor upgrades will get you going.  However, since you mentioned only one outlet in the bedrooms, I suspect it might be older - like pre-WWII.  In that case, it may need more work.

Here's a rough checklist that I would use to make this decision.  There are other variables here, such as local code requirements, what electricians cost in your area, your budget, and other things.

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1.  If you still have any knob-and-tube wiring, it needs to go away.

This is where they didn't use cables containing several wires each, but individual wires, and strung each wire around the house on ceramic insulators - kind of like a power line you see on poles alongside a road, but inside the house.  Any of this you still have is probably not newer than the 1950s, and probably has cloth or rubber insulation that is past its design lifetime.

Also note that the main electrical box doesn't tell you much about what kind of wiring you have.  You can have fuses with knob-and-tube, circuit breakers with knob-and-tube, or both.  You have to snoop around in the attic and basement to figure out if you have knob-and-tube.

2.  If the main electrical panel still has fuses, think real hard about at least upgrading to a new panel with circuit breakers.

Most of the time, when a fuse blows, you can replace it, and everything is fine.  However, in older fuse panels, it was possible to install too big of a fuse for the circuit, like a 30 amp fuse on a 15 amp circuit, which would lead to overheating the wires in the walls and possible fire.

In this case, you may be able to re-use some of the existing wiring in the walls, but you will probably have to run some new wires in the walls too.

3.  If the main electrical panel has circuit breakers, but it was manufactured by Federal Pacific Electric (FPE) or Zinsco, think real hard about upgrading to a new panel.

FPE probably faked the UL listings for their breakers, and some Zinsco breakers are probably more likely to fail.  (One simple metric: if you can still buy circuit breakers, from the original manufacturer, at Home Depot, Lowe's, etc, then you probably have a decent-quality panel.)

If the panel is made by GE, Square D, or Cutler-Hammer, you probably don't need to replace it just because it's old.  You might have to replace it if you need a lot more new circuits than it has spaces for.

4.  If you have a lot of two-prong-only outlets in the house (no ground), think about rewiring to install grounded outlets everywhere.

Grounded outlets were phased in starting in roughly the early 1960s.  You don't have to have them on some circuits; some people feel it is enough to install a GFCI on a circuit to protect ungrounded outlets.  For some circuits, like the kitchen and bathroom, I would plan on rewiring those specific circuits to have grounded outlets - the extra safety is worth it, to me.

5.  If you have aluminum wiring on the regular receptacle and light circuits, think hard about rewiring to eliminate it.

This is mostly a 1970s thing - the price of copper went up and aluminum wire became popular for a while.  However, it turned out to behave a little differently than copper did when connected to terminal screws, with the effect that the connection would loosen over time, and then start to overheat.  Even if the house was built before the 1970s, any renovations done in that time frame might have used aluminum wire.

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I would further suggest that you talk to at least your city building code people, and a couple of local electricians.  The code person can tell you if you need a permit, and how far you have to go to bring the house up to code.  Often the answer is, approximately: if you're just doing things like replacing switches or receptacles or light fixtures, then it only has to meet the code from the year the house was built, BUT if you do something big like replacing the fuse panel or breaker panel, then you have to bring the whole house up to current code.  Also ask if any of the answers change if you rent out the house, because they might.  Ask the building codes people to be sure.

An electrician will know the tricks for fishing cable through existing walls.  He or she will probably have to make a few holes to run new wires, but they will be smaller and in more strategic places than tearing out a whole wall.

You can also get some stuff called "Wiremold", which is conduit that can be run on the outside of the wall.  It was originally developed in the 1910s (!) to solve the problem of wiring houses that weren't built with wiring at all.  It's kind of expensive compared to normal conduit, but sometimes using a few feet of it in strategic spots will save you a lot of tearing into the wall.  There are both plastic and metal kinds; I'd use the metal kind in a rental.  It comes painted in either a white or cream color, but you can paint over it with regular interior paint to help it blend in.  An electrician will know about this, too.

Disclaimers: I am not a professional electrician. I am not affiliated with any companies mentioned.

I hope this helps!