### MY FIRST HOME WAS A DUD
I made the unforgivable mistake of going into my first home purchase uninformed. I bought the house in 2008 – for those of you who don’t know, 2008 was far from the best time to buy. The real estate market started crashing right around 2007, and in 2008 it started to tank. I saw all these foreclosures and short sales and thought, “This is it! This is the time to buy! Look, everything is going down. I need to jump in before it goes back up!”
I was working up near Boston at this point and I lived in Fall River with a one-hour commute each way, so I decided to move to a city that was between Fall River and Boston so I’d be closer to work but still close to my family and the city that I love. I bought a single-family home in a city I had never lived in before – Taunton, MA. Taunton is a great place, but I didn’t know it and my real estate agent didn’t know it. This was before I met Jim.
My real estate agent at the time was getting frustrated with me and my future wife because she was showing us all these different foreclosures and different things. She was a sweetheart, but I get it – she was trying to find us a place for $120,000 that wasn’t a $120,000 house, and it wasn’t working. Finally, I told her to start searching for up to $180,000 houses, and the search was going a little better, but there were still houses that were missing pipes or were too small or whose yards were too small. Every single house had massive compromises.
### The Real Estate "Unicorn"
As a real estate agent now, I have a name for what people like me and my girlfriend were looking for at the time – we were people looking for a “unicorn”. We wanted the dream, the beautiful, magical and mythical creature and pure in all its magnificence, that doesn’t actually exist. We wanted the amazing deal, the beautiful house with a huge bathroom with two sinks and a massive yard closed off from any neighbors, and we wanted it with a very small budget. We figured we’d just fix things. HGTV syndrome.
I had watched hundreds of episodes of different shows on HGTV with my girlfriend by my side. In fact, that was one of our favorite things to do – cuddle up on the couch with some tortilla chips, dip and watch HGTV. We used to joke about how we were in one of those episodes. We went to a house and said, “Well, we could do this! We could do that! We can blow all this out. It’s going to be amazing!” But we learned. Slowly, over time, we learned. I was a slow learner back then – I had in my head that we were going to find an amazing deal on a single-family, and I wouldn’t stray from that.
### Getting Realistic About The Cost Of Real Estate
Of course, then I wizened up and we did stray from that. We eventually upped our price to the whopping $220,000 range, and magically the houses got significantly better. The houses were bigger. The yards were bigger. For me back then it was important to have a big yard, though now I look back and don’t understand it. A bigger yard means lots of maintenance. Back then, it was important to me because I was a hard worker and I liked the idea of making my yard a haven the same way my grandfather had, pruning fruit trees, planting a huge garden, trimming faces into the bushes, the patio, the grapevine, the perfect landscaping with everything immaculately manicured.
I wanted a big garage so I could work on cars, even though I’ve never liked working on cars – it was something my father did, so I wanted to have the option. Those were the things that were important to me. The house? I didn’t care much about that. I was a hard worker. I could fix anything.
So, we found this house that was the best one in a decent neighborhood. It was a real fixer-upper, but we ended up getting a great deal on it. It was on the market for $220,000 and our real estate agent advised putting an offer in at $200,000, but I knew it was a short sale. I thought an offer closer to $180,000 would be good, but our agent said, “No way, that’s going to make them really angry. They aren’t going to like that.” After counseling with my girlfriend, we decided to put in an offer at $170,000. We could tell our agent wasn’t looking out for us and we decided to put in a crazy low offer.
Just so you all know, a good agent will never tell you what she told us. A good agent would never say, “That’s not a good idea when the market is just turning.” A good agent will say, “Let’s put in the offer and if you get it, you get it. If you don’t, you don’t. Who cares?” I certainly didn’t care if we got the house or not. It’s not like it was our unicorn. We were settling.
### Time To Put In The Low-Ball Offer
So, we put the offer in at $170,000 and it went to the bank. The previous owner had been foreclosed, everything just falling apart and leaving the bank to watch the market turn down. From what the agent told me the bank folded and had to liquidate as they went out of business. To our amazement, the bank accepted our offer, which always made me wonder whether I should have asked for a bit less. It’s all in the past and I got a great deal, but could I have gotten a better deal? Maybe $160,000? Maybe $150,000? I don’t know.
Anyway, we got the house and I brought my uncle, who went to a vocational school for carpentry and has been a carpenter since he graduated from high school, to the house. He looked around and said, “Gualter, there is a lot of work here. This is a big project. It’s a lot.”
I said, “Yeah, we can do it, right? It’s not that big of a deal. You’re a carpenter and I’m willing to work.” I’ve always been a hard worker.
My uncle looked around again said, sighing. “Look, if you want to do this, yeah, I’ll help you.”
My aunt was there too, and she looked at my uncle, her face had a mask of worry. She knew she wasn’t going to see her husband for a long time. And she was right.
### They Say It "Has Good Bones"
It was a 1,200 square foot home built in 1760, before America was free from England. It literally had the severed trunks of trees holding up the first floor in the basement and three different additions with crawl spaces. This place had been through a lot; it was a mess – it really was.
We spent the next four years renovating the heck out of it. While the market was turning down, we were dumping money into this house and trying to bring the value up. In fact, if I’m being honest, I think most of the time I didn’t even care about the value of the house – I was just trying to make it what I wanted it to be, what my girlfriend wanted it to be. I wanted to give her the home she had always dreamed about.
My entire family supported me in this. My grandfather came and showed me how to do things in the yard. My dad, brother and friends came to help me tear down walls and put up new drywall and plaster and sand and paint and put up moldings. We filled trash bags with old insulation and chunks of horsehair plaster and filled dumpsters with all the refuse of a madman working on a mad project.
My girlfriend wanted everything new, so we ripped out all the paneling, ripped out the wooden beams, repaired the floors that were crooked and sagging. My uncle helped me raise the second floor so we could replace all the ceiling joists and pull out the column that was sitting awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen. We leveled the whole thing out, putting in new LVL beams all the way across, straightening out the hardwood floors on the second floor. We raised the ceiling on the second floor from six feet to eight feet so my head wasn’t dragging across the ceiling every time I walked. I even added these awesome lights at the top and bottom of the closet so we could see at night – they doubled as some pretty good mood lighting when the times were right. We put in baffles and vents and insulated the entire thing, framed it all out, did everything a hundred percent up to code. My grandmother and mother put aside their differences and came together to help clean the house to pristine conditions when we’d finished tearing the place apart and putting it back together.
### Dedication, Stress And Eternal Renovations
My uncle was there with me for weeks and weeks and weeks. Every weekend, he came over, worked for twelve hours each day, and on Sundays, he would give me a big list of things to do during the week to prepare for our next big task the following weekend. When I got home from work after my hour-long drive, I would work four to six hours on that list. Sometimes I’d get up early and work on some stuff after I’d gotten ready for my office job. More than once I had to use a lint roller to get the dust off my clothes before work. My dad was there every weekend and some nights during the week, teaching me to run electrical wires and plumbing, all the things he’d learned from his own father when they’d renovated my grandparents’ house. My dad and uncle taught me how to insulate, how to frame, how to hang drywall, how to mud. Between the two of them, they knew everything in the trade.
### The Value Of Having Someone Who Knows what They Are Doing
I’ll never forget one of the moments I respected my uncle the most. We were lifting the second floor to replace the joists and we ended up having to cut the drywall to allow the house to lift the amount we needed because the jacks kept kicking out downstairs. As we were cutting through the drywall, my uncle accidentally cut through one of the water lines for the radiators, causing water to spray everywhere, soaking the second floor and the kitchen underneath. He was devastated. “I’ve been in the trade for 27 years and I’ve never cut a pipe, but in my own nephew’s house, I cut a pipe?” He was sad and embarrassed.
Honestly, he cared more than I did. I was just happy having my family there helping me with these crazy projects, putting in unbelievable amounts of effort to make sure my girlfriend and I had the amazing home I pictured this house could be. My uncle paid for the plumber against my wishes. He solved the whole problem and worked it all out. It was a project of passion and love between me and my entire family. I remember my grandmother, at almost seventy years old, grabbing huge heaps of wood and throwing them in a fire that was twice as tall as she was, then walking away to grab another. We all put so much into it and I can never find the words to thank them for everything they did for me. I have a lot of good memories in that house.
### More To come...
Over the next few posts I will continue to reveal some of the critical experiences in my early life that formed my view of the world and why I continue to building my real estate empire and likely what has lead to my new found love of Silver, Crypto, business and the Stock Market as ways to diversify my wealth and income streams.
These posts are being pulled directly from my first book, Broke To A Quarter-Million which can be found at Amazon and Audible! Get your copy and let me know what you think!
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