With older houses usually comes more expensive rehabs; especially if your goal is to restore the character of the house.  

HI Andrew,You do not have to refinance your current VA loan however if you want to restore her full VA entitlement you may consider refinancing it.You'll want to look at the VA limit in the county that you bought your home in currently and will want someone who is pro with VA loans to look at how much entitlement she used in buying that home for 0% down and 0% origination as you had mentioned.Your loan amount relative to the county limit (expressed as a percentage) is how much of your entitlement you used.

As the owner of a roofing company, I have seen far too many examples of slow roof leaks that's go unnoticed only to end up costing homeowners thousands in water damage restoration costs.

So long as your lease states it, I would require them to clean up anything that you have to restore to original condition upon move out.

Handles and pulls came from the restore and were about $1/ea~Bought all our paint from the restore... it was quite a bit cheaper but didn't cover well so we did a lot of coats.

A seriously fire-damaged house could cost a lot to restore...much more than 50k.  

The loss payee will run you ragged with process and inspections causing massive delays (in my specific case loss of 5 months from beginning to end).Eat the expense (maybe hard money bridge loan) and get the property restored asap so as to make it income producing again.

In spite of all that there's some gorgeous homes there screaming to be restored to their former glory.

Thanks Jason Eberhardt TMK Restorations  

We did decide to just use "restore" on the cabinets, put on new hardware and install new vinyl plank flooring ourselves.