I Rent Therefore I Own

It is because there is a legal rental apartment in my house that I was able to purchase it. If I did not have the income from that apartment, I would not have been able to qualify for the loan. It has been a mixed blessing. For the most part, it has worked out well. I did have one bad tenant, but I learned my lesson. The last few tenants have been great. Both living spaces are accessed through the front door. The tenants’ apartment occupies the entire second floor.

In the picture below, the door on the right is ours. The door at the top of the stairs opens into the hallway in the apartment upstairs. This is a current picture (September 28, 2012), but it does not look much different than it ever did. We have not done anything in the hallway, except to give the door at the top of the stairs a fresh coat of white paint.

When you enter the apartment, you are in a small hallway with a linen closet straight ahead. Unfortunately, I do not have any pictures of the hallway. Immediately to the right there is a door into this room. The wooden panels separated the room into what they called a bedroom and a living room. I took the panels down immediately after moving in. You can read about what I did with them here and here.

On the other side of the house, to the left when you walk in the door, is the kitchen. Here is what it looked like in 2009.

In between the two rooms is a decently sized bathroom. At least, it is bigger than our bathroom downstairs. Here is the picture from the realtor.

On February 15, 2010 my first tenant moved in. He was a strange character, but things were ok until he stopped paying me in October of the same year. It then took me until February 2011 to get him out. It was a frustrating process, and not one that I would ever like to repeat. I did not get much sleep for four months because I was so angry and stressed out.

Luckily, that tenant did not do any damage to the apartment. You have to be thankful for the little things in life. We did have to clean up a huge mess and take care of his three cats. Seriously, who would leave their animals at an apartment? One of them escaped when we tried to put him in a crate, but the other two were friendly. We took them to the SPCA. The most implausible part was that the guy had the audacity to call me two days later and scream at me when I told him that I no longer had his cats. I guess he expected me to take care of them indefinitely, but he would not answer or return any of my phone calls. Some people are unbelievable.

The only thing that I did in the apartment while he was living there was to take down the demi-wall in the big room. Here is a picture.

In February 2011, a good friend of ours moved into the apartment. I will call him K for this post. K is such an awesome person that he even helped me clean up the other guy’s mess. Since the carpet in the bedroom was pretty bad, I put in a wood laminate floor for him. K and Douglas helped me. Douglas certainly got his exercise that day, because his job was to make all of the cuts in the basement two floors down. Another friend lent us the chop saw. I really want one of my own! Someday.

Here are K and I laying the floor. It was my first time, and neither K nor Douglas had ever done it either. I had one conversation on the phone with my brother before we started where he explained the process to me. I called him once with a question after we began laying the boards, but for the most part, I figured it out by myself.

And here is the final product. It looks pretty good if I do say so myself. K chose the color of the walls and actually painted the room as well. We had to take off the closet door for the project. The pictures are taken starting with the Northwest corner of the room turning in a counter clockwise direction. What a beautiful floor!

K moved out of state at the end of the last year (2011), and we had to look for new tenants. We took the opportunity to fix a lot of little things that needed doing around the apartment. Douglas did most of the work. We had to re-grout the tile in the bathroom, fix the latch on the cabinet under the bathroom sink, paint the medicine cabinet and paint the hood of the stove in the kitchen. We also painted the entire apartment white.

Here is the apartment the way we staged it to show potential tenants. We separated the large room with a couple of bookcases to show that it could be used as a bedroom/living room.

The bathroom looks nearly identical, but it is actually much brighter with a fresh coat of paint and new grout.

The kitchen also looks much better now that the yellow is gone. The next project upstairs will be to re-do the floors in there. I also just realized that I took this picture before I painted the hood of the stove. It looks a lot better now.

We are very pleased with the tenants that we have now. They moved in February 01, 2012 and only signed a six-month lease. I am so glad that in August they decided to sign a year lease. They are awesome people and great to have as tenants. So, life as a landlady has definitely improved along with the apartment. Here are some some of the pictures side by side so you can get a true feel for the before and after.

Happy Homemaking!