The pipes work for a long time, and there are a lot of tricks you can learn to flush faucets and keep things working for a while. 

House 2004. im trying to decide if it makes sense to keep it  or lose it now before big expenses.

Keep good records of every maintenance request and what you did and when.

In TX we can hold the money in interest bearing accounts and keep the interest.

It makes sense that you'd just need to figure out what qualifies for 5, 7 or 15 year depreciation from the rehab, keep the rest of the property on a 27.5 year schedule, setup a depreciation schedule and call it a day right?

I've started using Rental Hero to track my income and expenses for each of my rentals and flips and I really like how easy it is and that I can upload my receipts straight on their app to keep track.

Just keep it in your personal name, carry $1M or so in liability, as an umbrella once you have another home, sleep well. 

I always recommend to my clients keeping if possible because passive cash flow is never a bad thing and you can leverage equity down the road if you need a little extra.

But we keep our day jobs and I have never thought of just retiring on rental income alone. 

Purchased with plan to live in permanently, put it as a STVR while traveling in our RV during the pandemic, and it did so well as a STVR that we decided to keep it as a rental and buy another cabin in Yosemite as our primary residence.