We bought a house! Rental property number 1

If you’ve been following me for a while, you might know that we’ve been looking for a property to start some official real estate investing. It had always been my plan to do a house flip, but I couldn’t quite find a property I liked, and as a beginner real estate investor we weren’t ready to take a risk if the numbers didn’t work.

Then something switched and I decided to pursue a rental property that we could fix up a bit, add some sweat equity, then rent it out.

Then up popped this lovely little two bedroom, one bathroom bungalow in the town of Morrisburg, Ontario. We made a very nice offer with no conditions and a quick closing date, and this renter friendly home in a great community is now ours! (with a lot of help from our lovely real estate agent)

There is a bit of cosmetic work to do on the house, but that just wouldn’t be me if we had bought a house that was ready to go. I will give you a tour and give you a quick idea of the plans we have for our rental property

*Update: we finished renovating this house in December 2019 and it has been rented ever since. Check out the final house tour*

Kitchen

This house was built in the 1950s, and I’m pretty sure the kitchen is still original. At first I thought we could keep the cabinets and just paint them, but we decided it would be better just to replace the whole kitchen. The laundry machine is in the corner, so once we get that out of there it doesn’t make sense to try and save the cabinets.

We’re planning to close in this large window and replace it with a much smaller window. This way we can extend the cabinets to add some more storage. The window will need replacing in the near future anyways, so it makes sense to do it all at the same time.

Living room

We’d love to take the wall down between the living room and the kitchen, but we still have to evaluate if it’s worth the time and money. There’s a weird door there too that doesn’t really need to be there. The carpet is pretty stinky, so that will all go. The half wall by the front door will come down, but I’m planning on keeping the wall paneling and just painting it.

Storage room

The storage room is the first room on the right going down the hall. It is very tiny, and the previous owner used it as a storage room. We would like to make this the laundry room and have the washing machine moved from the kitchen to this small room.

Bathroom

Across from the storage room is the bathroom. The carpet will definitely go, as well as the wallpaper, tiles, and wood toilet seat.

Bedroom one

This bedroom just needs a paint job, new trim, and new flooring. I’m not sure yet if I will be keeping the orange curtains…

Bedroom two

The second bedroom is very similar to the first bedroom. All it really needs is paint and flooring and trim and it will be fresh and new.

Exterior

The outside of the house needs a good cleaning. I’ve love to paint the front door and shutters a different color. The roof will need to be done within 5 years, but that won’t be part of our initial renovation for this rental property. All of this we plan to finish in the next 6-8 weeks. If you want to stay up-to-date with our progress, please sign up for email!

RENO TIMELINE

We finished renovating this house in December 2019 and have had it rented ever since. If you’d like to look at all the stages of the renovation, check out the following links