#114: Did We Nearly Simply Buy Another House?!

Our duplex renovation is not even close to being done, but we cannot assist but think about the next house we will transform – because there will be another one. So today we are sharing our hashtag goals to own more rental properties through retirement, and the story of how we nearly did more than simply think about the recent one we toured. What caught our eye? What were our plans for it? And why did we ultimately pass it up? We are also explaining why we took a large saw to our front porch – and how a break-in scare turned into a highly embarrassing moment involving a police officer.

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What is New

• First, if you missed all of our talk about painting our brick house’s exterior white, you can catch up by listening to Episode #101 with another update in Episode #105 (spoiler alert: the mineral paint we found allows brick to breathe and has an excellent warranty).
• As a reminder, this is what our porch has looked like for most of the years we have lived here:

• Now that we have took out the Chippendale railings, it is looking much more open – and a few steps closer to our inspiration image (but still QUITE much a work in progress!). Does not the brick porch floor look a lot wider in the shot below than the shot above?!

• It is remarkable what a difference simply taking down those railings made (code in our area does not require them since the porch floor is so close to the ground). They were nearly cage-like, kinda like our old deck in the back of the house before we took out it.
• We are planning to add a clean iron hand rail on the steps eventually, simply to make them easier to navigate for someone who prefers a railing.
• I also forgot to mention in the episode that cleaning the railings was the bane of our existence each spring. They collected mildew, pollen, and spiderwebs in every nook and cranny, but because they are simply painted metal, we could not powerwash them without removing the finish. It is going to be so much better to have them INSIDE at the duplex so I do not have to worry about that anymore.

• As we mentioned in the episode, the process of taking them down was remarkably straightforward. After we took out a few screws that were holding the railings up (you can see one in the photo above that is painted over, but was still plain to get out) we simply needed to run a box cutter along the paint around the seams and they came out with a couple of wiggles. Then to remove the extra posts – which were not loadbearing! – I simply cut right through the middle and wiggled them out from the top and bottom.

• As luck would have it, we were able to send them to Cape Charles when Sean The Contractor sent one of his folks over to pick up the replacement diamond door (remember that whole thing?!). So they were off to live their new lives as interior stair railings in no time.
• And the most exciting part is that the crew has already began installing them in the duplex!! We will share a peek of them in this week’s email newsletter if you wanna see how good they look in their new home.

• Lastly, here is what we did to our previous home’s front porch columns. You can read our process for chunking them out here, and see the final look after we painted the siding too.

Well That is Embarrassing

• Not much to add here about our embarrassing story of the cops getting called, except that in this old photo of our kids’ toy closet in the foyer you can see the offending motion detector up in the corner on the crown molding.

Buying Another House?

• None of the houses pictured here are the one we talked about touring and briefly considering as our next renovation/rental project. In fact, these are not even anywhere near our neighborhood (these are from Richmond’s Fan District – named for the way the streets fan out from a park on one end), which is a place we ENJOY to walk around because of all of the striking houses.

• The ones shown here are already especially pleasant and ridiculously out of our price range, but a recent walk there inspired us to consider a location like this as another potential place for our next project after the duplex is done. Whether it’d be a long-term rental or perhaps another vacation rental will depend on the place we find, but these would be tempting to Airbnb because they are in strong walkable locations for anyone visiting Richmond. Plus, there is plenty of colorful painted brick!

We are Digging

• As promised, here is that picture of Sherry buying that new trimmer at the same time as the tubs we talked about in Episode #105.
• Since they discontinued my old trimmer (which I use here in Richmond) she ended up grabbing this new trimmer/edger. And below you can see the two new features I truly appreciate. The foot pedal for switching from trimming to edging mode is so much faster than twisting the pole with your hand.

• And this is our vacuum cleaner that Sherry mentioned you can switch from carpets to hardwoods with your foot. We enjoy this vacuum so much we picked up another one for the beach house.
• You likely do not need to be told how to see the movie Crazy Rich Asians or how to read the nationally bestselling book trilogy (Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems), but we hoped to shout out the author – and all around especially pleasant person – Kevin Kwan, who we were table-mates with during the Cincinnati stop of our 2015 book tour (more photos here).
• I also double-checked and you can see Gillian Flynn’s inscription at the bottom of this recap from our other book tour stop in Cincinnati in 2012. Memories!

• Also, as a side note, the star of the movie Constance Wu is from our town! And we second her feelings about it. :)

If you are looking for something we have dug in a past episode, but do not remember which show notes to click into, here is a master list of everything we have been digging from all of our past episodes. You can also see all the books we have recommended on our Book Club page.

And lastly, a big thank you to Agility Bed for sponsoring this episode. Remember to score $150 off your hybrid mattress order with the code YHL150 at AgilityBed.com. They’ll ship it to you for free and if you do not like it, you can return it within the first 100 nights, no questions asked!

Thanks for listening, folks!

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