On our day off, Ben,
Joel, Taylor and I did a partial demo to
an investment property recently purchased
by a friend. Over the years, this North
Seattle craftsman house had been slowly
disguised by chintzy "wood" paneling
covering plaster walls inside, cheap wall
to wall carpet hiding the fir floors, and
too-wide vinyl siding over intact wood
shingles on the exterior. In just 6 hours
we added thousands of dollar in
value by removing these ill-conceived
"improvements."
There were a lot of brown recluse spiders
hiding in the siding.
There's a wild west feel to Seattle's
housing market right now, with properties
appreciating 10% annually for the past 10+
years. The game now is to buy fixers and
flip them fast. It's so competitive that
many are becoming realtors just so they
can get the jump on the competition and
save money processing the paperwork
themselves. Of course, there's some risk.
Seattle's relatively brief history (as far
as white people go) is one of boom and
bust, but today's real estate speculators
project confidence that in the worst case
the market will plateau, not burst. In the
meantime, there's a glut of work for
construction people, thereby lowering the
bar for quality. So much so that on a
different flip job where we picked up some
cabinets, the new owner's carpenter asked
me if a certain beam he wanted to remove
was structural or not. He was asking the
wrong guy. I hope that house is still
standing.
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