A mixture of half bleach half water works great on on outside walls and furniture.

It's loss of rents or "loss of use" coverage, for example, next year it's rented and a tornado rips the roof and a wall and it takes 2 months to fix.

We just purchased a home in Briarwoods and are looking to renovating the kitchen, which involves tearing down two walls, and a full upgrade.Marvin, how did your project go?

My intention was to extend the wall between stairs and put in 2 doors.

Warren Buffet was quoted as saying, "Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from those who take the subway”.

We walk through the unit with the tenant, ask them about things which need repair and look at all the typical problem areas (under sinks, behind toilets, wall behind shower, ceilings below bathrooms, walls around windows, etc.  

Though the rent amount is in line with the area, your tenant pool is more limited, and there's a lot more space to maintain and get damaged, so your returns likely won't be so great.If you find that it's difficult to rent, I thought @Corby Goade's idea of converting it to a duplex is a good one if the building and zoning will permit it; alternately, you could knock out a wall to combine a couple of bedrooms to make it a 5/3 or even a 4/3 (or use some creative marketing - it's 5BR + office/den/whatever) to help make it sound more in line with norms.Hopefully you'll find a family that will want to rent it for years and years - it'll no doubt get torn up, but we all run that risk with our properties.  

However, getting inventory has been my biggest hurdle here lately and I've been banging my head against a wall thinking that there must be another way to find good deals on homes.

He starts telling me how you have to remove trim to paint walls, and he'd need to rent a bobcat to fix the yard, which would cost me 1k plus 35 bucks an hour for his time, and even then he wasn't interested.  

This is for a 1,200 SF ranch with 500 SF finished basement.New 2.5 ton AC unit & coil - $2750 Replumb entire house (1.75 baths) - supplies, wastes, & vents (excl. fixtures) - $5300Rewire entire house & garage to code - new panel, service ok (excl. fixtures) - $5300Paint interior 3 colors (walls, ceilings, trim), incl. removing some wall paper, most surfaces required 3 coats, incl. paint utility basement walls & floor - $4650I'm in a medium-sized midwestern city with average material & labor prices.