The Renovation Dissertation, Part 6

Our group continues to expand and become even more international. Tony, Luke’s brother and our master carpenter, returned from Miami this week to be on hand to supervise the framing, cabinet and millwork installation, and to give me a hug since I hadn’t seen him for about five years. Freshly back from the Sunshine State, he noticed it had started to rain and then, in mid-conversation, ran out to his new car to find he had left his sunroof open – soggy seats and a wet ride home for poor Tony, I expect.

Mack’s crew of electricians came as a surprise – they’re from the Ukraine! One of them reminds me of the bad-guy-from-another-planet, Talec, played by German-born actor Matthias Hues in the 1990 Dolph Lundgren movie, I Come in Peace, albeit with more hair and less muscle. (Hey, I never claimed to be a highbrow film enthusiast!)

Tomorrow we order the kitchen cabinets, a beautiful tight-grained Alder in a flat panel, frameless design with a warm brown, Chestnut finish. Yum! The open den on the second floor will contain a built-in office credenza and bookshelves in a similar style with a finish called Rouge, slightly redder than the Chestnut as you might imagine, but very elegant. To top it off, the cabinets in the master suite “refreshment center” (see photo) will echo those in the den, and that area will be outfitted with a bar sink, a small refrigerator and a mini-microwave for popcorn, sodas and a movie in bed or that first cup of coffee in the morning. (Sounds like a real estate ad, doesn’t it?)

Karen and I had great fun at the condo board meeting last Thursday. Everyone welcomed us warmly and we got to meet several neighbors. We learned that the condo is incredibly well-sustained and has reserves of $94,000 – not bad for a group of only 53 homes! We also got a parking pass and chatted with John D., the appointed “enforcer” of parking and monitor of work done by the condo’s subcontractors. Good man to know. With any luck, we’ll not encounter him in his official position.

So far, we are on target for plumbing and electrical inspections by the middle of the coming week. I am headed over today with four new bathroom fans to be roughed in before inspection and on Tuesday, I will be meeting with a representative from a company that fabricates cable railings to price out our contemporary staircase rails and posts. What a treat! Then I can post a posting about posts. Whaddyathink?

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 5

Greetings to all from Valerie (a.k.a. Bobbie Vila) Blake! Yes, This Old House is now on target to become Someone’s New House. It is now affectionately known as “The Job Site.” Karen also has a new title – The Queen of Riggs Street. Yes, Riggs Street at 14th in Logan Circle. We finally settled on February 27th and I’ve barely had time to take a breath since.

In the past two weeks we have accomplished the following:

* Obtained permits,
* Completed demolition,
* Finished about 15% of the plumbing,
* Finished 50% or more of the electrical,
* Designed the kitchen & baths,
* Ordered gobs of materials & supplies, and
* Spent an obscene amount of money.

The general idea here is to make a profit while using high quality construction techniques and materials deliver a superior product. I know we have the latter well in hand, but I will reserve judgment on the former until we have finished the purchasing phase of the project and see what the spring real estate market has in store for us.

The construction crew is a cast of characters. Our general contractor, Luke Stewart of Luma, Inc. (lumainteriors@comcast.net), refers to working on my projects as “creating art with Valerie.” Luke has done tons of projects for my clients and me over the past eight years. He is also affectionately known as “Sweet Baby Luke,” lead crooner of Black Sheep, to those of you who moved to the island beat at my welcome back and anniversary party last summer. Although he has lived in this country most of his life, he can still break into his native Jamaican patois at will.

Mack, the electrician, originally from the island of Greneda, is a man on a mission. Give him a plan and he’s the executioner. Bobby, our Jamaican plumber, says, “Tell me what you want and leave ma alone, Mon.” He’s a perfectionist who works his magic based on photographs and specification sheets.

David is our Demolition Man (and framing and drywall guru). He is Hispanic and supervises a small contingent of equally talented construction guys. Luke refers to him as his “right-hand man,” an inside joke if you haven’t yet met David, who his left arm below the elbow years ago. It’s simply amazing to watch him heft construction debris onto his left shoulder and balance it all the way out to the dump truck. This is one man who has not let anything stand in the way of success!

Lorrie Addison (ladesigner1@verizon.net), our kitchen designer, has done 8 kitchens for me in the past 10 years. She switched companies just as we were beginning this project and now works for Stuart Kitchens in the Lorton area. Lorrie’s best asset is the ability to take a semi-custom cabinet product and add just the right touches of glitz to make the entire project look high-end. We thank you, Lorrie, from the bottom of our pocketbooks.

Donald Williams (billiboix3@hotmail.com) and his partner, Johnnie (the Stand-up Comedian) are in charge of landscaping and a variety of other tasks. Donald is a local, my neighbor in Brookland, and a jack-of-all-trades who runs both Williams in Brookland Landscaping and D. L. Williams Auto Detailing (a must for real estate agents).

Our suppliers are numerous, ranging from Barron’s Lumber in Rockville, to Lumber Liquidators in the College Park area to a host of Internet vendors. I know we’ve come a long way when I can sit in my home office in my jammies and order faucets, cabinet knobs, lighting fixtures and, yes, toilets at 3 a.m.

So far, I have learned three new lessons.

Don’t bother with fancy moulding on the inside of closets. We spent money on demolition there and now have to replace in kind at additional expense.

Expect things to be delivered to the wrong place. I sent three notes to the vendor to use the job site address for delivery and yet I still have three toilets sitting in my garage at home, looking like a series of plywood-encased thrones for the Royal Family of Riggs Street.

Expect the wrong things to be delivered. I returned home last Tuesday to discover that my husband had kindly accepted delivery of a package for me. Well, it didn’t look like anything I had ordered, so I opened it to find a very nice air nail gun for attaching moulding. Not that it wouldn’t be handy, but it was supposed to be a jetted shower fixture. I’d rather be sprayed with water jets than nails anytime!

Karen, I think, has had the toughest job this week – trying to get signatures from the neighbors in support of our exterior renovations that must be approved by the condo board. Luckily, there seem to be several retirees among the neighbors and she was successful in time for us to submit the request to the condo board tomorrow evening. She’s a trooper and now knows most of the neighbors.

I, on the other hand, was able to introduce her to G***, who is the neighborhood “stand-on-the-corner” guy. I always make it a point to meet the local entrepreneurs.

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 4

Yeah, OK. I know that by now those of you who have been following along are thinking, “So what happened? Why haven’t we heard anything more since they bought the property?”

Well, I gotta tell you that even agents and lenders are not immune to our own bureaucracy.

Unlike the folks on Flip That House, our contractors are chomping at the bit to begin, our permit applications are in process, our suppliers are tapping their feet waiting to ship our cabinets and fixtures, and our own creative juices are flowing like a burst pipe in an unwinterized, bank-owned property.

The problem? An obscure change in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac procedures that require that the direct lender (the bank to whom our loan will be sold) review condominium documents!

Now, I ask those of you who own condominiums (condominia?) – How much time did you really spend reading those documents? Sure, I know I told you to go over them, to make sure the reserves were sufficient, that you really could keep your 200 pound Chihuahua and that you were allowed to play your Barry Manilow CDs on full volume after midnight, but did you really go through all 300 pages? Never fear! Now your mortgage bank will do it for you.

But here’s the catch…

They have to keep from losing the documents when you send them.

First, let me applaud all the listing agents, loan processors and property managers out there who do everything possible to keep the process moving along by assembling, obtaining and transmitting these valuable documents. Most of the time, this procedure is routine. The documents are simply another set of checks and balances to raise the buyer’s comfort level with the purchase (or make him run screaming from fee increases and special assessments).

Even the bank reviewers need our sympathy. They are now buried in a ton of paper, trying to sift through ground leases and insurance forms and the impact of commercial storefronts on the ground floor of high-rise buildings. Reading War and Peace would be easier (and probably faster). They ask for only 3-5 days to accomplish this task.

In our case, we are simply asking 3-5 days from when? We got our documents a bit late due to an emergency situation that is totally understandable, but well within the timelines for closing. In this case, they were not contained in a three-ring binder, on a CD-ROM, or simply stapled together, but were bound in hard cover. Try to stick that in a copier! Page by page later, by the next business day after we received them, we had a viable copy which we gave to our processor to transmit to the bank.

Our processor scanned and e-mailed them. The bank lost them. She faxed them. They lost them. She e-mailed and faxed them again. Feeling comfortable, she took a couple of days off. Guess what? They lost them! I think our 3-5 days started about four days after she first sent them, but boy was it fun to read her e-mails to the bank once she returned to work. She was not happy and was pretty direct about letting them know it.

In the days of Bonnie & Clyde, people were taken hostage in banks. Now the banks take people hostage outside their homes. Instead of settling on Friday, Karen and I had a great lunch in Bethesda at Mon Ami Gabi, where the pommes frites are simply amazing and our waiter, Omar (a fellow Boomer), kept us in stitches with childhood references to 1960’s television commercials.

My cup is always half full. Now we will get to do it again on Monday (or maybe Tuesday if the condo reviewer isn’t old enough to have taken an Evelyn Wood speed reading course). Omar awaits.

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 3

When was the last time you Googled “contemporary toilets?” If the answer is never, then take a moment and do it now; you will find about 439,000 hits. During the past three weeks, I swear I have looked at them all.

I began my quest for the perfect toilet to go with the perfect contemporary vanity cabinet (another 168,000 hits) naively thinking, “So what will a toilet cost – maybe $500?” Well, think again. Sure, you can go to the orange box store or the blue box store and get one for about $100, but will it have a real chrome handle? Will it look “high end?” Will a potential buyer look at it and say, “Wow! Where did they find that?” Will anyone even care?

Now, I had in mind something that was ecologically sound such as a dual flush model. (For the uninitiated, that does not mean two people can flush at the same time, but that you have independent settings for when you need an easy flush or a tough flush – you’ll forgive me if I hesitate to explain further.)

I also wanted something that was streamlined, stylish, ergonomically designed and easy to clean. And not stainless steel, please. I spent too many years in law enforcement to be able to think of a stainless steel toilet as chic.

I cast aside the models with little painted flowers and Victorian pulley systems. I sped right through the photos of standard, two-piece toilets and went straight for the one-piece models. I looked at round ones, elongated ones, pillbox ones and even square ones (!). I studied toilets both foreign and domestic: Japanese, Italian, English, Czechoslovakian and the good old American brands we all know and love. But when the prices shot up over $4000, I sat down on my own Kohler Rialto and put my head between my knees. A toilet for the price of a granite countertop? Oh puleeease!

So for the moment, I have put the toilet search aside and have moved on to faucets. In the end, however, (pardon the pun) the toilet selection will probably be based on comfort and cost. The coveted Creative Commode Award may have to wait for another project.

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 2

As real estate transactions go, this one is a peach! I certainly don’t want to jinx it, but I am delighted to have people involved in this who are knowledgeable, professional, polite and efficient. What a concept!

Our home inspection last Saturday included a cast of characters. Karen, Larry Wasson from Affiliated Inspectors (www.affiliatedinspectors.com or 301.986.8866) and I were there and were joined by Karen’s son, Brian, and his girlfriend. Brian is in construction and is part of the crew working on new condos around 14th and Church, so his expertise was extremely valuable.

We began late (unfortunately, that’s perfectly normal), but that allowed me to take some measurements and let Karen show Brian around the place. The sellers had vacated the property to give us a wide berth to look around. While that too is normal, we didn’t realize until later, when they begin straggling in to use the bathroom, that they had vacated by sitting in their van in front of the house for nearly 3 hours! Whether they were cursing us under their breath or just glad to get their house sold, I will probably never know, but I think a special gift for them will be in order at the settlement table.

When Larry inspects a house for me or for my clients (which he does frequently), he looks at it based on what would be considered “normal” for the age in which it was built. For example, what’s normal for a 100-year old rowhouse would certainly not be the same as for a new condo in a mid-rise building. Our project was built in the 70’s, so we don’t have to worry about things like the lead plumbing, old electrical wiring, or crumbling foundations you often see around town. Hooray!

The type of home inspection we had selected for our contract was “general,” meaning that we would inspect everything from nook to cranny. We had also agreed to buy the property in “as is” condition, with the home inspection giving us the basis for determining what “as is” really meant, but knowing that we wanted to upgrade the property substantially.

The result? Our project house got a clean bill of health with only minor annoyances. Our investment was heralded by Larry and Brian, and Karen and I shared a hug before she went home and caught the flu from her husband. Get well soon, Karen.

I am meeting our appraiser at the property tomorrow. Our loan is in process, the title work is being done, the termite report is clear, the house is solid, and we are on our way to settlement.

Only 22 days to go!

The Renovation Dissertation, Part 1

My friend Karen and I still have so much faith in the real estate marketplace that we have recently embarked on a project to bring a 1970’s townhouse-style condo kicking and screaming into the new millennium. I have the real estate knowledge and a handle on what sells in this market, as well as experience in renovating properties all over the country. Karen, a senior mortgage lender with a local firm (klucey@masondixon.com), is both financial and design consultant on the project. We’re gonna have some fun!

Our “flip,” as they say on TLC, is a 4-level building that currently has 5 bedrooms, 2 baths, an outdated kitchen, plain Jane baths, carpet everywhere, an unfinished basement, more than 1500 square feet of finished space, a great location, central air conditioning, huge closets, a fenced yard and gated parking. I hope you will understand that until we close on the deal, I must keep the address to myself.

I am an avid watcher of HGTV and TLC, but Flip That House really makes me cringe. I commend those who are lucky enough to stay on deadline, not overextend their budget and sell the property in a reasonable amount of time. For the others, well, I feel their pain. Yet my main concern is that while people get drawn into renovating properties by the promise of large financial gains, TLC merely adds what the people paid for the house to what they spent in renovations and subtracts the total from the final sales price to arrive at the “profit.” This, I believe, does a real disservice to John and Jane out there in Viewerland, who are sitting on the sofa munching Cheetos and thinking this would be fun.

Where are the costs associated with buying the house? Where are the costs of carrying the mortgage, utilities and, in some cases, condo fees? Where are the costs of selling the house? What about the time involved in researching properties, locating and monitoring suppliers and subcontractors, and even doing your own demolition? Isn’t your time worth something? All these costs play a prominent role in figuring profit. And that figure is only a pre-tax profit, so you haven’t really even reached the bottom line until you pay Federal and State tax on the gross profit you received.

So, by using this Blog as a reality series, complete with photos, descriptions and recommendations for the uninitiated renovator, I have several objectives.

1) To let people who are thinking about renovating live vicariously through Karen’s & my experiences,
2) To point out pitfalls and celebrate successes,
3) To provide a more accurate analysis of the time and money involved in this type of work, and of course
4) To let would-be buyers follow our progress and provide input.

Stay tuned as we march from contract ratification through inspection to settlement and beyond. If all goes as planned, the Open House will be in June.

A Modern Day "Bidding War"

(Note: There is a sad start to this story, but IMHO the happy ending outweighs it.)

I recently had the pleasure of helping my new clients, Robert & Onelio, purchase their first home at an incredible discount. No, this was not a “fixer-upper” or some shell in a “down and going” neighborhood, but a lovely, recently renovated condominium in Columbia Heights. So lovely, in fact, that they had rented it two years earlier and were the existing tenants when we met.

Robert & Onelio had learned from their landlord that he was going into foreclosure. He even went so far as to give them the name and number of the foreclosure trustee. Nonetheless, when they decided to try to buy the condo early in the process and shoo the wolf from their landlord’s door, he failed to respond to all attempts at contact. Since he still owned the property, there appeared no way to buy it except to bid at the upcoming foreclosure auction. It was at this juncture that their neighbor, also a client of mine, suggested that they call me for help.

Well, even old dogs can learn new tricks, I thought, as the questions poured out. “Do we have tenant’s rights?” “Will we be evicted from our home?” “How does the auction process work?” And the kicker: “Can we really afford to buy it?”

After putting them in touch with Karen Lucey-Guess at Mason-Dixon Funding (klucey@masondixon.com), who helped them through the pre-approval process, I started to make some inquiries about foreclosure auctions. I don’t purport to be an expert by any means, but here are some basic tips from my research.

1) You can find out which properties are to be auctioned at the websites belonging to the auction houses. There are several in the area.

2) The trustee (person selling it on behalf of the bank) must publish the auction in the paper in advance, so check legal notices in the Post or the Times to find out more about the property you want.

3) If you are interested in a DC property, for a mere $4 each, you can download from http://www.dc.gov/ any document available in land records, including the Notice of Foreclosure which will tell you when and where the auction will be, as well as how much is owed on the loan.

4) Go to a foreclosure auction in advance, just to see how things work. Then it won’t be as stressful when you go on “your” day.

5) You must have a certified check to play this game. Each foreclosure notice will tell you how much to bring. Make the check out to yourself.

6) Be on time. Auctions can be scheduled for as few as five minutes each. If you’re in the parking lot or the restroom when the auctioneer begins, you’ve already lost.

7) The bank will set the opening bid and it will be announced those in the room. After that, the auctioneer will invite bids. The highest wins.

8) At the conclusion of each auction, the winner will sign a contract document and endorse the certified check to the trustee. In some cases, there will be an additional deposit needed soon thereafter. Most settlements must occur within 30 days or the deposit will be forfeited.

Please remember that this process may not be for the novices among us. It is not like traditional real estate sales; this is an “as is” deal in the strictest sense. No inspections, no contingencies and no closing cost assistance. In fact, you pay both your own closing costs and those of the bank. Then, as the happy winner, you might find a tenant or the previous owner still living in the property who is not welcoming you with open arms.

So what about our heroes? Well, when all was bid and done, Robert and Onelio had left their home as tenants in the morning and returned in the afternoon as future homeowners. Maybe it was winning the auction, maybe it was the thought of instant equity, or maybe it was the celebratory bottle of champagne we shared at the Cheesecake Factory at 11 am, but the three of us were on a high all day!