We’re a week into the Gifford St project and we are making very good progress. The inside has been completely gutted and we’ve prepared the exterior for the siding and the new dormer. Have a look at the house now….. there seems to be something missing:
Since the roof was in such poor condition we decided to chop it right off. We’re now going to raise the roof line and add the full dormer off the back of the house. Heres a look at some of the new framing:
The raised roof is going to allow us to make the upstairs alot bigger and alot more functional. I’ve got some video footage of our contractor ripping the roof off. He didn’t do it by hand, he used some pretty heavy duty machinery to get the job done. I’ll post that once I get it edited.
I posted a video of this property last week but I wanted to post a couple pictures to show you what we’re up against at this house. I’m amazed that it wasn’t condemned…. actually if the city knew just how bad it was inside I’m pretty sure it would have been condemned.
It’s not the worst house we’ve done but it is up there…. the house is kind of a cross between Bessemer St and the Ware House. It is definitely real spooky inside!!
Gifford St
Gifford
Gifford - rear of house
Back Roof... notice the sweater coming through the hole in the roof! Who needs a tarp!
Living Room 1
Living Room 2
Kitchen.... love the chair!!
Bathroom
Dining Room/Bedroom
Bedroom - First Floor
Bathroom Ceiling
Second Floor Bedroom
Basement
Basement 2
The sweater coming through the hole in the roof is classic…. as you can see by the holes in the ceiling it didn’t do much to stop the water from coming in!!
The house is all gutted out now and ready to be framed. I spent the day there today and we had a lot of fun. I’ll post a video and some pictures of the action there today, you’re not gonna want to miss it!!!!!
We put the property at 93 White St in Westfield MA on the market last Thursday and we accepted an offer after the first weekend of showings. We actually had multiple offers on the property and sold it for slightly above our asking price. We priced this one pretty aggresively so I’m not surprised that we received a couple offers.
239 Plumtree Rd is looking like it will be sold this week…. probably on Friday. 37 Mansfield St is under agreement with a closing scheduled for December. We were able to get a buyer for this one without even having to put it on the MLS! I’ll get some photos up of the finished rehab…it came out great!!
We have six properties under some stage of renovation and we are suppose to buy another this week.
104 Columbus Ave Holyoke MA
We closed on this property about two weeks ago. It’s a small cottage style home with 3 bedrooms, 1 full bath and a little over 1,100 sq. ft. This house has some structural issues that we need to address. The roof had four layers of shingles and was so heavy that it was literally crushing the house!! The weight caused the rimm joist (the main joist that the exterior walls sit on) to crack and buckle out, which caused the house to sink about 3-4 inches. When the rimm joist cracked and kicked out it caused a bunch of the floor joists to also crack and bend. To fix this we are going to have to jack up the whole house and build a new foundation. Once we have a fresh new foundation we will fix the rimm joist and floor joists and set it back down. While we are at it we will gut the first floor and finish the attic space into another bedroom with a half bath.
We closed on our latest rehab project on Friday located on Gifford St in Springfield. When I first saw this house I thought it was a pretty nice looking cape and would make for an easy rehab….. until I got inside. The house was trashed! It smelled like a mix of cat piss and dirty diapers. There was trash waist high in the basement, living room and upstairs bedrooms. The roof was leaking so bad that it caved in the ceilings along the back half of the house and caused the hardwood floors to buckle. Needless to say this is my kinda house!!!
We are going to be doing a complete renovation of this house including adding a full dormer to the second story just like we did at 17 Bessemer St. When we’re done this house will have new siding, windows, roof, electrical, plumbing, heating system, kitchen, bathrooms and flooring…. plus we’ll add the second story dormer which will give us two very large bedrooms and another full bathroom upstairs.
Have a look at the house:
So what do you think of this place?? I don’t think the camera does it full justice…. you really need to experience all the sights and smells first hand!!
We wrapped up another eventful week here in beautiful Springfield, MA. We purchased two more rehab properties; a full gut in Springfield and a light cosmetic rehab in East Longmeadow. We put both of these properties under contract less than two weeks ago. It’s great to have access to that kind of Cash… and to be able to close on these deals in less than two weeks…. pretty powerful stuff when you are making offers to motivated sellers!!
We also finished up the rehab on two of our ongoing projects. 37 Mansfield St is complete and we accepted an offer on it prior to even having to put it on the market. One of our “preferred realtors” took a client through while we were finishing up and they made us an offer. After some negotiating we came to an agreement yesterday, with home inspection scheduled for Monday.
Our other finished property is a two family home located at 93 White St in Westfield MA. We started the rehab on this home earlier this year, prior to me even starting this blog, and we finally finished it. It was another fire damaged home and required a full gut renovation. The rehab took way too long, mainly due to us having to fire a couple of contractors, but it is finally complete and looks great. Here are some of the finished pictures:
Exterior
Kitchen - Unit 1
Kitchen - Unit 1
Bathroom - Unit 1
Living Room - Unit 1
Bedroom - Unit 1
Kitchen - Unit 2
Dining Area - Unit 2
Bathroom - Unit 2
Living Room - Unit 2
Bedroom - Unit 2
I’m not too sure how the market is in Westfield as we’ve never sold anything there before, however we already have 5 showings scheduled for this weekend, so I’m hoping we can move this one quickly.
After our two purchases this week we will now have 6 rehabs going with one more in the pipeline set to close in the coming weeks. The winter months tend to be a little slower on the resale side, but I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble moving our finished rehabs as they are always head and shoulders above our competition!!
Well we are looking at another very busy week. We should be closing on the purchase of two more rehabs and putting two finished properties on the market. One of the finished homes is our fire damaged two family at 37 Mansfield St, we actually received an offer on this property Friday…. before we officially even put it on the market…. however the price was a little lower than what we are looking for so we may either negotiate it up, or test the open market and see what we can get.
Also an update on 239 Plumtree Rd; we accepted an offer on this home last week. All inspections have been done and we should be good to close in another 2-3 weeks.
Video Update:
Heres a walkthrough we did of the property at 42 Wexford St in Springfield. This video was shot a few days after we closed on the house……
We’ve got so many projects going it’s hard to keep current video/picture updates on all of them…. but I’ll do my best to keep them coming!!
We just spent the last 5 days at a Raising Private Money bootcamp in Denver and we had a great time. The event was put on by my friends at Fortune Builders. We learned alot of info, met some great people and made quite a few new business contacts.
Now it’s back to work……
We closed on our first ever REO/MLS purchase last week. Working with the bank and closing the deal went very smooth. This property does need work, we are going to be installing new siding, new windows, adding a new kitchen and redoing both bathrooms. The major problem with this property is the way the second floor bathroom is layed out. They built the tub into the sloping roof line of the house, so if you are over 5 foot 6 there isn’t enough head room to take a shower. To fix this we are going to be gutting the bathroom and rearranging the layout to make it more functional.
Here are some pictures of the house;
Front View
Rear View
Kitchen
Kitchen
First Floor Bath
Living Room
Living Room 2
Dining Room
Second Floor Bathroom
Second Floor Tub built into Roof Line
Bedroom 1
Bedroom 2
Bedroom 3
This house has 4 Bedrooms 2 Full Baths and 1,500 square feet. It has a really nice floor plan and is gonna look great once we’re done with the renovation.
Things are still moving fast and furious! We’ve had six closings over the last few weeks with one more scheduled for Monday. In total we sold four of our properties and bought two new rehabs, with a third new rehab set to close Monday.
We spent today touring some of our projects with a couple of our private lenders from the Boston area. While we were out walking the properties we got two more offers accepted!! One is a MLS listed property that we offered on Thursday. The second is a private owner that we met with on Friday and presented them with an offer. Both are looking to close ASAP so we’re gonna be busy getting everything together for these purchases. These two properties are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum. The MLS property is in terrible condition and will be a full gut. It’s real nasty and kinda spooky…. just like Bessemer and the Ware House were. The second property is a very light rehab; condition wise it’s probably one of the better houses we’ve purchased. It will need paint and light kitchen and bath updates.
I’ve fallen behind with the updates on the fire damaged multi family on Mansfield St. We’re almost done with this one and should be able to get it to the market next week. Heres a pictorial timeline;
All the walls were insulated throughout the house.
The sheetrock was delivered and put on all three floors.
All the sheetrock was hung…. it finally looks like a house again!
Sheetrock gets taped and mudded (is that a word??)
Vandals break in and completely TRASH all our new walls
Just kidding…. thats a picture from when we were doing the Demo…. just making sure you’re still paying attention!
All our new walls are painted in our beautiful TAN
These pictures are from a few weeks ago. Right now all the hardwoods have been refinished, all the doors have been hung, everything has been trimmed out, the bathrooms are in and we are finishing up the kitchens. I’ll have some more current pictures/videos pretty soon.
well maybe not the whole house….. just the first floor.
Heres a look at how we fixed the fire damage at 70 Glenwood St. If you remember from my previous post(video or photos), the fire in this property started in the basement and burnt all the floor joists and support beams in the front half of the house. So to fix it we had to cut out the whole floor. Luckily I was there with my camera to capture the whole thing. Heres a look:
Cutting out the Floor
First Section Gone
Second Section Gone!
Almost There
Ripping out the Last Peice
Can We Save these Hardwoods??
All Gone!!
Looking at the Front Door from the Basement
Heres Whats Left of our Floor!!
After cutting out the whole floor our contractor rebuilt it from the ground up.
Heres our shiny new floor:
New Floor
And a look from the basement:
New Center Support Beam
New Floor Joists and Plywood
Whew, that was a lot of work…. I’m tired from just looking at those pictures!!
