All Forum Posts by: Virginia Jones

I wrote clearly in the lease, "absolutely no modifications or improvements, including hanging pictures, are to be made without prior landlord approval"

my trouble is I just have a hard time telling people no

I have a tenant that will start a lease on May 1. The house was already in livable condition but I have improved it by installing a new toilet, painting every room, tearing the kitchen down to the studs and installing brand new flooring, cabinets, and appliances. I have added a LOT of value to this property.

I have been sending her updates of the new kitchen and freshly painted rooms and all she comments on is small things that she wants me to do and frankly do not have time to do between now and her move in date.

Recently she has asked that I paint the ceilings. all of them look fine to me. there is one bedroom that has some small yellow stars painted on the ceiling but they are not very noticeable. she wants me to paint at least this one room but I am getting married this weekend and will be gone until she moves in. I told her this so now she wants her and her husband to do the painting.

she has also asked me to tear down the paneling in the third bedroom and replace with drywall. I said no, so she asked If they could do it themselves.

another time she asked if they could frame in the basement. I said no, she asked if they could do it themselves.

now she has asked if I will do a lease to own.

I feel like I have made this house into a comfortable home for her and her husband to live in so when will the questions for more improvements stop and how can I politely answer all of these never ending requests?

i have a tenant that wants to pay me monthly rent through direct deposit. this would be going into the rental checking account for that specific unit. is it safe for me to give the tenant my routing and account number so they can set this up with their bank? or should i just have them mail me a check through the bank's bill pay instead?

Jason Hirko it is a rental

The house I am fixing up had very dark walls. I did a primer and one coat of paint and if the light hits the walls a certain way, you can see some of the old color still. I have people interested who don't seem to care about this cosmetic issue.

is it worth is to go on and do another coat in the whole house or leave it how it is? 

I'm in the process of renovating my first rental house Right now the kitchen is torn down to the studs. The sink valves have been turned off and not touched for days. Every time I work on the house I usually turn the water to the whole house on when I arrive and turn it off when I leave.

Today, an hour after I turned it on, I heard water dripping. I went into the kitchen and there was water spraying up from the sink pipe. (no sink attached to it and valve was turned off)

Does anyone know how this happened and why it randomly happened over an hour after the water being on??

The water supply to the kitchen is right above the breaker box in the basement and there was water pouring down over all of the electrical wires and behind the box.

I'm in the process of renovating a rental property. Everything is cosmetic except for the kitchen. We have torn everything out so it's down to the studs and subflooring.

A potential tenant contacted me and said he was willing to live in the house as-is and do a lot of the kitchen work himself and then use his own appliances for the kitchen.

I'm thinking this could either go very well or very terribly.

What do you all think??

i did get a closing disclosure. just seemed like a huge amount. Kind of just seeing if this was typical.

I'm closing on my first rental property on Friday. The closing costs will be close to $5,000. (Secondary market). The one purchase price is $55,000. This seems like a huge percentage of the overall cost to be paying in closing costs. Is this typical?

Thanks for all the advice. I think i'll go with the GFCI outlets.

one follow-up regarding the GFCI outlets: Do I need one in every outlet or just find out what's on each circuit and choose one per circuit? Will having just one on each circuit prevent a short on something not plugged into the designated gfci outlet?