PROJECT NASHVEGAS

Friday, October 12, 2012

SOLD AND SOLD!

Long story short, our house was on the market for less than 4 days and sold after the first showing. In addition, we bought our next home/project a few streets away and took possession of the property about 2 weeks ago. Here are some additional details;

As you may or may not know, I am a very superstitious person and have avoided posting any updates to the blog over the last month. As mentioned in the last post, we listed the house for sale on 06 September. We had some agents walk through the next day and got a call to schedule our first showing on Saturday, 08 September at 12:00pm. We had friends coming into town so we pushed back their arrival until 2:00pm and decided to visit an estate sale around the corner to pass the time. Both of these items are noteworthy so here are the details on our existing house….

The showing went as planned at 12:00 and our friends arrived at 2:00. We went to lunch and then took them on a driving tour of the Broadway strip and the Vanderbilt area. As we were wrapping up we got a call that the same people wanted to tour the house again at 5:30pm- we didn’t want to turn down a showing so we killed time by walking the dogs with our friends through East Nashville. Just after our friends left town the next morning we got a call from our agent with an offer. After a few hours of negotiation we reached an agreement and the house was SOLD by the end of the day on Sunday! Over the last 4 weeks we have been busy with home inspectors, appraisers, reinspections, paperwork, etc. and we officially closed Wednesday at 2:00pm- it was actually kind of sad to drive by the house later that night to see a new family moving in. Anyway, moving on to the next noteworthy item …..

As I mentioned above, we visited an estate sale a few streets down while our house was being shown for the first time on 08 September. My girlfriend spotted the sign and I dropped her off to shop while I drove around with the dogs. After about an hour I got a text from her telling me that I needed to see the inside of this house so I went back and took a tour of the house with the owner’s son. The house was built in 1928, was owned by the same family since being built and had sat empty for the last 4 years. While the house wasn’t on the market, the family had an agent ready to list the property when the time was right. I took the agents information, my girlfriend bought a mirror and we went back to our house to welcome our friends. Over the next week I started looking at houses with our agent and passed along the information from the estate sale. Our agent made contact with owner’s agent and arranged for us to have another showing even though the house wasn’t on the market yet- I liked the house even more the second time around. We continued to look at potential properties over the next few days and I brought my dad down to help make a decision off of our short list of homes. We ended up making an offer, negotiating and buying the estate sale house and took possession on 28 September! Here is a street view although I will post some “before” shots in the next post;

I am really excited to work on this house- it is a beautiful home in its present state and we will make it absolutely amazing with some updates over the next 2 months! We are going to start with a complete kitchen remodel so hopefully you will tune back into the blog as we begin “Project NashVegas: Part II”!

2 comments:

AnonymousOctober 15, 2012 at 2:17 PM
It is pretty from the outside!! Nice houses on either side too. Can't wait to see pictures of the inside. Good luck!
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kmOctober 16, 2012 at 7:46 AM
Lets see some inside shots and backyard!
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JOE'S INTRO

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! Since I have started this forum a week into my project I thought it would help if I gave you some background on the events leading up to my relocation. In addition, I have posted a few brief posts on each room just so you can see some “before” pictures and the initial work that has been done over the last week- most of this has been demo/rough work so there won’t be any glamour shots just yet. I am tagging each post by room so hopefully you will be able to see the rooms develop simply by looking at the
history of each tag. Like I said in the blog description, please send over ANY and ALL comments regarding the blog and
the house. I am looking for everything from design ideas to technical advice to blunt criticism- all of this feedback will help me in some way! Also, please look around the page as often as you can because I hope to add features and rearrange the layout as time progresses. Lastly, please take a minute to complete the survey in the right sidebar. Being that I am color blind and male, I have no idea how to decide on the “cute” details for the finish work (paint colors, materials, trim options, etc.). I will be changing these polls frequently and they will play a huge part in how I complete each room.

Thanks again for checking in on me!

Joe

THE PROJECT

My name is Joe and I have created this blog to document the progress of my first complete home remodel. In May of 2012 I left my job & life in Ohio to attempt to make a living by remodeling distressed homes for a profit- I have relocated to Nashville to follow my girlfriend as she begins a 2 year fellowship in the area. Armed with the knowledge of my father, the support of family & friends and the financial backing of an investor, I started work on the first house and hopefully a new career path on Friday, 31 May 2012. Please keep in mind that this is my first attempt at a blog so consider it a “work in progress”! Also, please post any and all comments because I would appreciate all of the feedback I can get as this thing evolves!

THE BACKGROUND

While the entire Nashville plan was technically set in motion in the spring of 2011, my dad and I made our first house hunting trip on Saturday, 14 April 2012. In February 2012, I was connected to a fantastic agent who specializes in dealing with distressed properties in the Nashville area. We decided to center our search around Historic East Nashville. From my research, this area entered a rebirth about 15 years ago and is now a very progressive, eclectic neighborhood within minutes of downtown- I would compare it to Ohio City/Tremont for my Cleveland friends and Oakley for my Cincinnati people. Unfortunately, with our timing, the heart of East Nashville has been turned and the houses are now beautifully restored and extraordinarily expensive! In an effort to stay as close to this community as possible we continued looking into the nearby Inglewood neighborhood. We actually found a house and struck a purchase agreement within days after our first trip however we decided to pull the offer because of some negative street information that surfaced at the 11th hour. Our agent continued to email similar listings & comps and I took a solo trip down on 23 April to tour our eventual house. The home was horribly neglected and virtually uninhabitable after going into foreclosure/abandon almost 2 years ago however it showed a ton of potential if we could get it at the right price. We then began what we would later describe as one of the most inefficient and insanely bureaucratic processes of all time-dealing with Fannie Mae/The Government! Fannie Mae uses a program called HomePath which requires a mountain of paperwork for the realtor and a negotiating process that is completely tilted in the governments favor. We made our initial offer on 25 May and spent the next FIVE WEEKS renegotiating, filling out paperwork, waiting for emails/phone calls, etc. - it was extraordinarily frustrating and will probably mark the first and last time we deal with this type of purchase. We finally closed on 25 May however we had to wait almost another week to go through the process of having the electric
connected (up to this point we had no idea if anything worked in the house and had only toured a couple of the areas with a flashlight). I made a trip down with a friend on 30 May to drop off my personal effects in a storage locker and attended a “Walk Off the Earth” concert downtown- the trip was a great time and the concert was as amazing as we expected. I went back to Cincinnati the next day to pick up my dad and our family’s 30’ Mallard camping trailer which would be my home for the next 3 weeks! My dad and I parked the trailer on the front lawn and started working on the home the morning of Saturday, 02 June 2012.