I recommend you search the forums, I suspect you will find a lot of answers you are looking for. 

As far as cash on hand is concerned, we only have about 25k on hand for a down payment, not including potential money we could take from HELOCs, etc.I suspect the obvious answer is we should be selling one of those rental properties to make this happen, but we're just hoping to get some advice from seasoned real estate investors on whether it's possible to make this happen without doing that.

I suspect the parts tobe relatively inexpensive, and appears easy to replace.

Always use your possible walk away clause if that subject property is more work than you suspected. 

I suspect there are hundreds of thousands of vacant homes in MA built before 1978, assuming everyone is abiding by the laws there.

God knows what she suspects the LL did to the cats.

I'd suspect that the first time the debt service isn't coming like clockwork OR if the bank becomes financially strained, they'll be less lenient on these personal loan --> entity ownership sidesteps than they currently are in the "era of untouchable bull runs".

We do our own on-going pool maintenance (mostly emptying baskets and checking/adding chemicals), but I suspect the professional pool maintenance costs alone would consume any rent increase from having a pool.Good luck

I suspect if your insurer was different than the tenant's insurer that your insurer would go after the other insurer for costs.To be safe/conservative you should assume you will get stuck paying the deductible and be pleasantly surprised if the deductible is ever refunded.Good luck

This is what I suspected but I wanted to get confirmation from another source.