Specialized Knowledge: Wandering in Real Estate

A lot of you know me from the fashion industry and the podcast industry. During the pandemic, I started looking into real estate investing with Julie and we've decided to dive straight in. For me, that looks like getting my real estate salesperson license, learning to broker commercial real estate loans, and studying to become a home inspector.

This newsletter will be a combination of my own experiments on my house and on investment properties we acquire, information about the real estate market in the Hudson Valley, tips and tricks from experts, interviews with successful investors, and conversations with others on the home buying and wealth building journey.

I've been working on the restoration of an older home that we just bought for the past few weeks. The house was built in the 1920s and the goal is to quickly get it ready for our family to move in. We have a lot to do, as the house is in disrepair and needs cleaning and significant repairs. We're replacing the entire electrical system, most of the plumbing, and redoing all the floors and ceiling.

A quick note: I'm not at all skilled at doing this. I've done some work on houses before but I'm very much a novice. As one investor said, I'm a YouTube expert. I also think with my hands and not afraid of diving in and learning.

TL;DR Takeaways:

• If it is your house, don't be afraid to play around and experiment.
• Many contractors will bid on what you ask for and won't experiment to find a better solution.
• Safety first.

The halls and stairways have a very old school texture to them which we want to remove prior to painting. The quotes we've received for the work have been around $6,500 just to remove the texture, which is plaster on top of either the first (literally) version of sheet rock or an original plaster wall, depending on where in the house it is. On top of that, the earliest start date for a contractor was in late November, after we wanted to move into the house.

As I was walking through the house today, I noticed a hairline crack in the plaster and picked at it with my finger. A piece came off, so I grabbed a screw driver and was able to remove a bit more. I switched over to the dull side of a paint scraper and kept going.

A quick safety note, after the initial success with the screwdriver, I grabbed an N95 paint mask, eye protection, and put on leather work gloves. I've already taken the skin off two knuckles on this texture just carrying things up and down the staircase. As I progressed with the removal and started to work over my head, I was really glad to have the eye protection. Small flakes were falling all over and some were cracking off with velocity.

The best results came when the tool head was at a 45 degree angle to the wall. This allowed it to pick up the chips and resulted in sheets coming off. I was usually able to go slow, but occasionally need to ram with speed when the texture was fully adhered to the wall.

One hour after starting, the plaster was off the chimney (which runs through our hall) and the original wall was exposed. On the other areas that didn't peel off, a Diamabrush cutting head made short work of the texture and a skim coat will resurface the wall with a beautiful finish.*

I'm thinking that a muriatic acid etching on the original wall will give me a good surface to run a quick skim coat over as well.

* Unless I screw it up.