Friday, October 17, 2014

Starting our Business - Mullens Home

We were very fortunate enough to recently buy our second dream home for a great deal.  We had bought our first home with the goal of turning it into a rental as it is in a perfect location and is a perfect size (not too big - not too small).  This process just happened a little faster than we were expecting.  That’s what life is filled with, though - unexpected things happening at the most unexpected times.  Luckily this unexpected situation was definitely for the better.  Since this process happened sooner than expected, we weren't as far along in the renovation process as we had hoped before putting it up for rent. 

Let me tell you, the overall process of "flipping" our home to be up to our quality standards is a TON of work when undertaking the renovations all by ourselves.  Matt and I come home from our “more than full time jobs” as engineers and immediately work on our rental.   This is very exhausting as we need to get this house up for rent as fast as possible.  Lots of friends have asked us why we don’t just show it in the condition it is in and the answer is simple… we want our products and name associated with a high quality product, not something that ‘we promise we are going to fix’.  Not that the house is falling apart or anything – it’s not, we just want it to be beautiful and pristine.  Our goal is to have the house be as maintenance free as possible for both ourselves and our renters.  The funny thing is we have fixed a lot of little problems that we wish we would have fixed when we lived in the house.  We used to have a blanket in front of our back door since there was a gap which air could get though which was super annoying.  Now we have completely fixed the weather stripping and threshold of the door to have no gap.  Man, do I wish we would have fixed that job way earlier.  


The top picture is looking down on how nasty and rotted the threshold used to be and the bottom picture is the proper way the door should have looked all along :)


Another thing we have done is completely re-wire and add electrical with new 3 prong plugs on the right breakers.  I am super jealous of our soon to be renters of having this amenity.  We had to have lots of extension cords and 2 to 3 prong converters all over our house.  The picture below is of a nasty 2 prong plug that used to be in the house and we had pulled Romex for a connection to a new, pretty, white, 3 pronged plug :).  


It is great having the peace of mind that we now know there is no knob-and-tube wiring and that everything is wired correctly with a ground.  

Doing this renovation work is not for the faint at heart as this has become our second full time job.  Our social lives have definitely taken a hit which can be hard when our friends invite us to go out and we feel bad constantly saying no.  The thing we remember is that this is a ton of work right now, but once we get the rental up and running, it will be self-sufficient for a long time.  There is no doubt in our minds that this is worth it, especially because we love doing it.


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