Day 6

Here's the living room with the new wall color- it looks so much brighter already.

Tina came over to help me paint today. We spent most of the day working on the bedrooms. One of the best things about painting in a flip house is that we're planning to carpet the bedrooms. So it really doesn't matter if we get a little paint on the floor- SO much different than painting in your own home. The walls in this house are mostly plaster, so there are cracks everywhere. My dad has really gotten good with the joint compound! Then a coat of primer, and finally the paint can go on. We're using Sherwin Wiiliams "Killim Beige" for the bedrooms.

I mentioned the carpet. We are planning on carpeting the steps, the hall, and the bedrooms. We always go through Lowe's because they have a whole-house install for just $139. Our "floor guys" Lakefront Flooring installs for Lowe's, so we get the best of both worlds. We chose a neutral colored "frise" ( short shag) to use throughout. The downstairs dining room and living room hardwood is in great shape, so we'll keep that.

Adam Frano from Affordable Plumbing (he's the plumber I met on Myspace!) came today, and it's a good thing he did. Alot of times the homes we buy have sat vacant for awhile, and they will have the pipes winterized. We've learned from experience that just because the pipes have been winterized, it doesn't mean you won't run into problems. Sure enough, when Adam turned the water on, we had 3 places in the basement where the pipes burst. He quickly fixed them and explained that it is common for copper pipes to do that if water sits in them and freezes. It seems that the lines had not been completely drained. The good news is that the pipes in the walls seemed to be fine- no leaks. For some reason, there was no water to the toilet, so we made it another day with no potty. Adam's coming back tomorrow to take care of that.

We're thinking that we'd like to have our first open house on May 17th, we'll see what surprises this house may have for us. The first house we did took us four weeks, another one took us eleven, so it really just depends on what the house needs. With the weather getting nice, we'd like to get this on the market as soon as we can, and hopefully start another one as soon as this sells.