Exterior First
August 11th, 2009 by under Real Estate Investment. No Comments.
The four plex that I bought was a little run down as I mentioned earlier, and really was in need of an exterior face lift. Paint is the easiest way to really make a place look nice, especially when we are talking about curb side appeal. Paint will only do so much, so replacing window and door trim needed to be done along with replacing several soffit pieces and repairing some of the siding.
Replacing the soffit was a real task because of the fact that the building is 2 stories and it was very difficult to reach them. The house was originally built in the 40’s and the siding of choice for them was cedar. The cedar siding is strong and looks good, but for me personally i prefer a kind of cement board siding. In the few places where the the cedar siding needed to be replaced, I was able to use hardiplank in its place that was textured to resemble the cedar exactly. Once it was all painted you could even tell the difference. If you want to do some more reading on hardie siding, I found some good information at home owners resource guide.
The four plex has a nice covered entrance patio, that was plain concrete, well actually it was painted concrete and it was peeling. I scraped the paint as best I could and laid down a nice slate tile. From there I moved to yard and simply watered the grass every morning that I was there working. In a just a week or so the grass started to green, and I added a small flower bed along the front of the building to give it some color, and a couple bushes in front of the downstairs windows for a little privacy.
The drivesway was in great shape, and so was the car port in the year of the apartments. Didnt take too much work to sweep the carport clean and paint the roof trim work and the sides of it. The roof was in good condition and should last me several more years before it needs to be redone.
Some of the exterior plumbing clean outs needed to be replaced, but I can touch on those in another posting for another day….Thanks for checking back.
