Renting is working. Living across the street means constant requests for attention by the renter. Market is high now for real estate. Sell and invest the remaining funds in something hands off.
My instincts say to rent, but that has a whole bag of caveat to it. If you find the right renter, you can swing a deal for them to maintain and improve the house for discounted rental rate, can always sell later.
Well today we started down the tiny living road; at least for us. After considerable thought, we worked out a plan for moving into my Grandmother's existing house and came out with a rebuild budget at about $14,000. We developed a time line too, and figured out what needs to be done, and when. We have quite a few things to do to make it liveable, but managed to clean it out today of all the excess junk, and soon will get it cleaned up. I found (7) windows kicking around, so we will need to put a few of them in, swap some doors around, and get the woodstove in. We have to turn the electricity on too, check the plumbing to ensure that works, and then should be all set for moving in. At 1100 square feet, as a family of (6) we have to make some changes. The first is for Katie and I; we will have a pull-out couch as bed in the livingroom for awhile. No master bedroom suite with ensuite for us! No massive bedroom closet either so I have NO IDEA where she will keep all her shoes (84 pairs or so). But the biggest issue is not having a specific spot for a kitchen table. We always eat as a family, so we will have to sort that out fairly quickly. We hope to build a mudroom/dining room addition in the future, along with master bedroom down the road. Here are some pictures of what we are starting with...NOT MUCH! But we can hopefully make it work. In the meantime, I mentioned our move (250 feet East) and putting up our house for renton Facebook, and in 20 minutes time I had (3) people who wanted to rent our home. I don't thinking renting our home will be an issue.
It may be small but you will make it work. At least you have a structure to work with. I hope you get most of the work done before you move in. Interesting siding layers on the outside.
My mom's parents house was like that, but without an addition. There were 7 kids raised there. 5 boys and two girls. Can't imagine them all piled into a couple beds.
Sounds like you have a plan! We have a large kitchen island, the counter has a 12" overhang on 3 side with stools on those 3 sides, works just fine as a kitchen table too.
Housing market is a sellers market. Take the cash and run as fast as you can. I had a rental house and the maintenance and headache will eat at you too. Just my two cents.
We struggled with whether to sell or rent was the best idea or not was the best idea for us, but finally settled on renting. Having multiple houses can suck at times, and one was spending all our time and money on one house, and not doing anything with the other. We know once we are in that house, we will be motivated to really fix it up. We should, it is a resource we were granted and should make the most of it. We will just use the rental money from the other house to fund the renovations in my Grandmother's house. Once my grandmother's house is fixed up we might move back to our original house and rent her house out. My Grandmother's Home we could never sell. Not because of sentimental reasons but because of the land. It cannot be subdivided, yet has an 8 acre gravel pit on it. With a depth of 32 feet, we are looking at 500,000 cubic yards of gravel...at $2 a cubic yard in gravel stumpage...well you do the math. Land values do not take into account individual resource values, kind of like how a person can make more money on parting out a used car on ebay then it is worth as selling it as a whole. It is the same thing with land values, they give an average price on a per acre basis and do not calculate the value of the timber, the value of the gravel, etc.
We are still working on this, but we came up with a design like we had in the cabooses on the railroad. The one we drew up had fixed benches with seats that flipped up for storage of seldom used pots and pans. (crock pot/pressure cooker, etc). Then the table top would serve as a table, but then could be detached, lowered and used as bed for Katie and I, or as an extra bed when the inlaws come to visit. Being a tiny house (1100 sq feet) we really need to make this house work for such a big family (6). So its taking an area and getting multiple uses out of it that will be required to make it work.
Yes, interesting is one word to describe it. Trust me, the vinyl siding is coming off! This lifetime logger is not about to have a thousand gallons of oil pumped out of the sand halfway around the world, hauled over here, squished into a form, and then nailed onto the side of my house under the false pretenses of protecting it from the elements. My uncle was a carpenter and his standard operation was to cover every house with plastic. He was so bad he was going to put vinyl siding on his cedar shingle mill building until I told him there had to be a law against it. Me... There is no way I am going to have an oil rig puke all over the side of my 1890-1930 Foursquare Home, not as a lifetime logger in the most forested state in the nation. They say "vinyl is final", but that must not be taking into account wind, sunlight, and extreme cold. Not to mention vinyl does not add even a single R-Factor to your walls like cedar shingles or clapboard's do. Thankfully the cedar shingles under they vinyl siding are in excellent shape, they just needed to be painted, so my uncle clad the building in siding-puke instead. But this makes it easier for me, because it means I can remove the siding-puke, just put new cedar shingles where we ripped the additions off the house, tuck them underneath the exiting shingles, then paint the whole house. I dislike painting shingles because eventually it peels, but when that happens I can just reshingle the entire house.
Different climate I guess. My Mom's house has had painted shingles for 65 years and they don't peel. The paint just fades.
LodgedTree piece of advice, do not paint, Stain, stain now comes in many colors, when it wears out no scraping, wire brushing gets tape paper to Windows and re-spray much easier!!
Yeah that is sound advice; they have come a long way with tinted stains. Myself, I like the look of natural cedar shingles, but it is not perfect because if a person puts in a new window, loses a shingle and splices in a new one, it looks like a wart on Tiffany Amber Theisen's face. (Okay, so I am giving away my age here, but it still makes my point; the repair of raw wood is glaring against the gray weathered shingles around it. On my Grandmother's house I have little option because they already painted it. I cannot stain over paint, and right now I do not want to reshingle the whole thing. About the only options I have would be to: 1: Shingle just the areas void of siding then paint the whole house so everything is matching 2: Shingle the whole house and leave bare to weather or stain 3: Sandblast with Walnut hull medium the old shingles currently on the house, and then leave to weather or stain Tiffany Amber Thiessen
Yesterday I was pretty proud of Katie, we not only had to put some permanent cedar posts in the basement to help level the upper floors of this old house, but we had to put some temporary ones in there too so that the jacks above would transfer their loads to the ground in the basement. That was because the second floor was sagging something awful. Some 75 years ago, someone had the bright idea to remove a load bearing wall leaving no header at all, and no support for 2x4 floor stringers spanning 18 feet. To get the 2 inch sag out of the floor, we had cut an 8 x 8 beam, 12 feet long made out of spruce. Putting one end of the beam on a skateboard, and lifting the other end with my log loader, I slid the beam into the room. Then using 2 x 4 ramps, we slid the beam into place, then rolled the beam up using (2) 20 ton jacks, then repositioned the beam and jacked again. We had enough tonnage on the jacks to press the sag out of the floor and probably for the first time in 75 years, the floors upstairs, and the first floor ceiling are flat. After that we slipped in a 4 x 8 inch post under the beam along the walls, we removed the jacks and had very little settling. In the written word it does not seem like much, but an 8 x 8 inch beam 12 feet long is darn heavy.
When you dig into old houses, you find interesting tidbits of information. On this house you can see where there is a tin square box in the opposing wall of this photo. All around it was singed with charring. They almost had a fire from not having a good flue between the chimney and the wallpaper glued to the drywall. Since only 2 layers of the 12 layers of wall paper on the wall were charred, I would say it happened a VERY long time ago.
