animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 

rental

I’ve been wanting to get out of the rental business for a little while now. But, since we have continually had renters since we bought our rental house in 2011, getting out hadn’t been an option–until now. Our most recent tenant moved out at the end of last month. This has given me time to sow the seeds of my discontent with Brian. After spending yesterday afternoon painting the living room of the rental (and my argument was helped in a small part by the fact that the toilet wouldn’t stop running when we were there and, when he tried to use the shut off valve, it started leaking all over the place. now the water to the whole house is off…), I think I finally have him convinced.

On one hand, having the extra income is great. On the other hand, our main source of income keeps us quite busy and it would be nice to be able to relax on the weekends instead of having to do improvement projects at yet another property (in addition to our house, we also own our office building, so we’re already maintaining two properties).

Of course, if we’re going to sell it, we have a lot more work to do than if we’re just going to rent it again. Our intention of painting the living room and dining room and replacing the carpeting has turned into painting (or possibly remodeling the kitchen), replacing outlets/switch covers,installing new blinds, doing some cleanup maintenance outside, performing a thorough cleaning of the place, and more! So, I guess this means we’re going to be busy for the next couple of months.
That said, I would be amenable to having rental properties in the future. Note, that I said properties. If we had a couple of them, we could afford to hire someone for all of this maintenance stuff. With one, not so much.
Worst case, if the place doesn’t sell quickly, we could always rent it out again.