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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