Other seem to want to hang the guy without a trial.

For example hang drywall is a 3 day activity tape and mud five days.

Or should I hang on to that and hope the busy summer months pick up?

What is the main hang-up with financing, when it comes to adding bedrooms?

Stop hanging out with your deadbeat buddies who spend all day drinking, talking sports, and otherwise wasting away.

Credit scores are a reflection of someone's ability to learning and understanding the rules of the game and haveing the discipline to play by them.If you already have good credit, already pay everything on time (autopay), then increaseing your limits will probably help you the most, because it gets your utilization down, ideally under 10%.Higher hanging fruits are average credit and account age (just have to wait for that I guess) and inquiries, which are sometimes unavoidable as real estate investors.  

Stop hanging out with your deadbeat buddies who spend all day drinking, talking sports, and otherwise wasting away.

My hats off to you for hanging in there at 74.

That's one reason I hang out on BP - most people in my life can't appreciate the level of work it took to get to this level.

I just keep plowing money into the mortgage  my goal is not to have it hang around long term so I would avoid the recast idea .