LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!

There is soooooo much happening right now it's hard to keep up! Which is very exciting but at the same time a little overwhelming. Let's see if I can summarize...

The same contractor we have working on Medallion started on Sun Bay week before last. Yes, I know I've complained incessantly about him but he's all we've got right now and we bought the two properties as a package so he was (supposedly) giving us good prices because he knew he'd be doing both properties. Leaves me wondering why he didn't get started on Sun Bay until it had been sitting for a week but, hey - school started and he was busy with the kids that week. Whatever! I'm going to attempt to stop complaining... this whole process was intended to be a learning tool and it definitely has been that!

So in one day at Sun Bay we got the trees trimmed, a new roof, all the trash cleaned out and all the demo done. And no, I didn't manage to grab any of the great stuff left in the house before it got tossed (LOL). The next day all the popcorn had been scraped from the ceilings and all the baseboard got pulled along with the first coat of primer on the ever-so-colorful rooms.

Medallion has been painted inside and out, door and window trim has been installed and painted, they're in the midst of painting the kitchen cabinets, and the place is starting to look like a house someone could live in (some day... still no flooring anywhere).

The long and short on both of these projects is they're moving right along and what we've learned is 1) we bought too high, 2) renovations cost more than we anticipated (like twice what we thought), and 3) the sale values in the areas we bought are lower than we thought at the time we bought them and have gone down even further since then. All in all... we've learned that we've done nearly everything wrong. And it's going to cost us... our profit. There won't be any. In fact - we'll be lucky if we don't go into debt on these two. The good news is - we got a "hands on seminar" possibly for free... possibly for a couple of thousand bucks. And that's OK. It's a learning experience. And the most important part of what we've learned is that you need experience to do this right.

We cant wait to get these sold/leased and buy some more!!! Let me just say, though, for those of you out there that want to make a living at this... unless you are passionate about it, this is not for you! You need to learn, learn, learn from books, seminars, networking, etc. even before you jump in to learn, learn, learn from experience. This is a bonafied profession like any other (unless you're like us and not making any money doing it... then I guess it's just a full time hobby - LOL) and it takes a good education and on the job experience to be good at it. We work 7 days a week at whatever time we have to in order to keep the projects on track (last Friday night, 10:30pm to 12:30am, Sponge and I were out at Medallion in the dark moving all the construction debris the crew left in the front yard into the garage just in case Hurricane Ike blew in and wreaked havoc in our area).

This is a lifestyle more than a job... you've got to LOVE it, or LEAVE it!