Doughty Rental

This is a short update.  Last year I saved up enough money to buy a second home.  It’s a larger home and more well suited to be a rental.  But it’s in an area I’d rather live.  So I’m fixing it up and will move into it.  Then I’ll get the house in Wyandotte rented out and start looking for a third home.

At the moment I’m working on the same issues I had with the first house.  Silly insurance annoyances where they don’t want to insure you for ridiculous reasons.  And the new house is a foreclosure so I’m getting a furnace guy to come in, I’m re-plumbing the house(God bless Pex) and I had Teague install a new 200A service panel as the last one was stolen.

I also am going to put a full kitchen into the new house.  I’m tired of using toaster ovens and horrible old cabinets.  I’ll upgrade to some mid-grade kitchen cabinets in the new place, an actual real stove, etc.

I think the greatest change will be for my dogs.  They’ve lived most of their lives on a third to a half an acre lots and they will now be on a small city lot.  The dreaded chore of picking up dog poop will no longer be optional.  But it’s good to see business progressing.  I’m sad that the economy is doing so poorly but the horrible real estate market is the only reason I’m able to keep picking up homes.

No more home purchases though until I get the house in Wyandotte rented.  Work is crazy, but it always is.

I finally bought a Rain Barrel to catch rain water.  This is a kind of a cool one that has a tap at the bottom so I can use the rain water to water my potted plants and perennials out front.  I bought it for $50, including the barrel(made from recycled plastic!), and then had to buy $30 more of parts to finish it out.  It started raining the day I installed it and it was full of 55 gallons of water by the next morning!  The water is just gravity driven, but it has pretty good water pressure.

I bought them at my local Habitat for Humanity Restore location near 55th and Kansas Ave in KCK.  It’s a great place to go for cheap parts.

While it’s nice to have water on-hand, for free, to water my plants I really just bought this to try to help with stormwater runoff.  It’s not good for all our lawn chemicals to get pulled into the waterways as it creates algae plumes and other nastiness.  When I rent this house to someone, I’ll remove the barrel and take it with me.

Here is the downspout I chose.  I chose this one because I found some slight erosion at this one and it was near my plants.

Here I’ve used a saw to cut the downspout off.  I did a rough cut just to have space to get the barrel close.  Don’t use a recip, use a hacksaw.  I used a reciprocating saw and cut into my siding with it.

Here is my leveled cinder blocks that are on top of some pea gravel.

Here is the finished install.  Sorry there are no pics of the middle of the install, but I was racing a storm.

So I’ve had a few minor run ins with poison ivy this summer and one major one.  I just didn’t know where I was getting it from.  I’d killed all the vines I’d found in the yard last year.  I made a round this summer and did find a few new sprouts and killed them with round-up.  Then I cleaned the house like crazy and got the poison ivy two times more.

Finally, I scoured the yard again and realized that the poison ivy I’d been fighting was peanuts compared to the whopper vines I had in the yard.  These suckers were so big that I had to use a branch trimmer and a bow saw to kill them!

Anyhow, here are a few pics.  Because everything is better with pics.

Chris from Teague Electric did a really nice install.  He thought it would take 4 hours, maybe a bit more and that was about what it took them.  $550 more and I’m in a much better place.  The AC guy stopped by today and is going to get me a bid by Thursday.

Here are the after pics:

A wall with no conduit running outside of it!

And the panel door is re-installed and no wires are running through the front of it.

Here’s the tunnel for that conduit

And here’s how a properly terminated run of conduit meets a hot water heater

Here’s how an outlet should be mounted.

Here are the two new outlets that are more appropriately places, so the washer/dryer will be spaced away from other utilities and the freezer cord won’t be stretched so much or block the rear door.

He also realized that I didn’t have water run to the area where I’m moving the washer/dryer to, so he left that run open for the plumber.