All Forum Posts by: Todd Whiddon

Q&A OPEN HOUSE - DEMO VERSION

I'd like to do this tomorrow. But afternoon Halloween Traffic pretty much starts at 10am... So for everyone interested in checking out the Demo'd house leave a comment in the thread or shoot me a PM and I'll see you next TUESDAY the 4th from 11-12

@Julie Kern Any updates? Remember...  If they counter back anything different than your original offer, you must PUNISH them. Even if terms are acceptable to you, you cannot GIVE without a TAKE.  

They want more money, get a longer due diligence. They want to use their closing attorney, make them cover closing costs. 

There are ALWAYS more things to negotiate AFTER ORIGINAL contract is accepted, begin your negotiating strategy with the END in mind and keep things fluid until you sign on the dotted line. 

@Julie Kern Screw the 50% and 2% "rules", if you like the property and it meets YOUR investment criteria GO FOR IT!

Since it is a buy and hold I would be MORE concerned with the REPAIRS in thinking about your MAX offer price than the ARV

How did you come up with estimated repairs? Inspection? Contractor you KNOW and TRUST walk through? 

Foundation Footers - Part 1

Our foundation guy came out to dig the footers we marked out the other day.  Only problem is the ONE footer we did NOT mark ended up a wee bit short.  

Actually that's NOT the only problem.  A couple pier footers did not meet compaction requirements when dug down 12", so when our foundation guy comes back to extend the deck footer, he will have to dig the others deeper and possibly take other measures to make sure they meet the engineers expectations.

We've got the siteplan revision back APPROVED from the county! Dealing with some rain today but we are hopeful to have these footers passed off and poured by the end of the week. 

Lumber is being delivered Monday!

@Azeez K. Let's do this! 

@Jerry Robinson Thanks! I'll keep you posted!

You can pretty much guarantee NEW floor joists for a second story addition, with most houses having 2x6 or 2x8 ceiling joists.  This house had 2x8 ceiling joists...

Since most buyers in our area want 9' ceilings MINIMUM with 10' becoming more and more popular, it was a no-brainer for us to go ahead and raise the existing 8' walls up a foot with a cripple wall and the run new i-Joists for the second story floor framing.

Here is an example of a "cripple wall raise", a cripple wall is basically a short wall with a new double top plate, in our case it would be constructed from 2x4's.

 I've also seen ceilings raised with LVLs... unless required by code in your area this way is MUCH more expensive than just a 2x wall raise.

WRONG HOUSE!?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN WRONG HOUSE!!!

When you tear houses down for a living, you NEVER want your phone to ring and the first words out of someone's mouth to be...

"Wrong House"

But that just happened.  Luckily we didn't tear down the wrong house, but we did end up with the wrong house on our siteplan.  The ORIGINAL house accidently made it onto our PROPOSED siteplan that was APPROVED by the county!

When the inspector showed up to do his initial inspection, first thing he noticed was our permit for a second story addition didn't match the siteplan. The inspector also wanted an ORIGINAL stamped copy of the foundation plan and foundation letter from our engineer in the permit box, which we have, just not in the box...A quick call to our surveyor got the siteplan corrected...

But now we have to have it reprinted, RESUBMITTED to the county to get stamped, and back into our permit box BEFORE we call call back to reschedule this inspection. Hopefully this won't cost us too many days, but it has already brought our demo to a standstill since we don't want take the roof off without a clear path to put one back on ASAP!  

DEMO's a GO

Time to kick this project into high gear! 

Hammers are swinging.

Dumpsters are filling.

Floors are getting scratched....

Good news is our demo guys started a couple days early. Bad news is they beat the floor protection going down so there will be a few extra bumps and bruises on the original hardwoods for our flooring guys to work out at the end. Not a big deal, but something that shouldn't have happened. We have checklists to prevent this kind of thing, but in our superintendents defense, he just a baby and kicked off 4 new projects in the span of 2 weeks!

We had a minor setback on getting our new footers poured yesterday so that will delay the actual removal of the roof till later this week....