A similar thing happened at my parents home - not the shower party - but one obese brother taking a shower lead to the failure of the shower floor and the drain assembly.

@Steven Maduro,i think there is someone on the diY threads where they consolidated the ikea cabinets (plywood top and bottom to make the boxes sturdier for granite on top)google for hi-end kitchen with ikea cabinetsalso look for RTA (ready-to-assemble) cabinets: usually they are plywood with wood-fronts.search a distributor in your area. or a small mom-and pop shop that just had a custom order cancelled...also check craigslist in your area: maybe somebody just remodeled their kitchen......also you can get a few older furnitures, remodel them like a certain "lazy landlord" vanity and have some chic kitchen like no other....

Focused on assembling land for commercial development.

The larger banks are nearly impossible to approach, and once it's in their system as a repo, the house is on the assembly line to be cranked back into the market, and it's really hard to pull it off that line since they have systems and procedures in place that everyone in their line must follow, which is directed from corporate and not up for negotiation. 

I really want to find if there are any local investors who could just sit down and talk about how they got started, their first deal, how the assembled their team, etc.

While still doing a small amount of business in Las Vegas, we have recently zoomed into Indianapolis as our remote market and here we are :) Two weeks into this, we've met close to 20 buyers and now we are working on assembling our A-team in Indy.

If everything still looks good it is time to go see the location yourself and start to assemble your investment team.Your Investment TeamIt is imperative that you have a trusted local team.

In some neighborhoods the value of the 2nd or 3rd property is more valuable to you than anyone else because it might be too small to buy for another investor unless they also assemble the lot on the other side.

I like that you're already assembling the pieces and have a great plan of where you're going.Looking forward to watching you build that portfolio, hope to see you around the site!

When I as assembling land for a big commercial developer we would only go hard with the EM once certain commitments from anchors were in place and the chances of the project going through were at almost 99%.On the sellers side if I was representing the seller I would tell them that since the developer wants no skin in the game to put in right to continued marketing.