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Rehabbing & House Flipping

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Linda Weygant
Pro Member
  • Investor and CPA
  • Arvada, CO
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Well Crap. Literally. Advice and Recommendations Requested

Linda Weygant
Pro Member
  • Investor and CPA
  • Arvada, CO
Posted Jul 29 2015, 13:26

Saturday night, we received a call while we were out from the guy who rents the basement of our personal residence.  Sewage was backing up into his bathroom and all over the carpet outside the bathroom.  

We managed to get it snaked ourselves so that everything went back down, but I wanted a professional out to do it again and figure out what might have happened.  The rooter guy hit a blockage that he was eventually able to push through and then scoped the sewer.  He found a crack in the pipe pretty much right where the pipe exits the house, right under the front porch.

This is a house that my boyfriend bought in 2008 as a foreclosure.  It needed a ton of work then, but he had a couple of personal setbacks over the years (including a job loss about six weeks after he moved in) and he's been fixing things as they break, but not much else.  He's in a much better financial position now.

The front porch is wood and in terrible shape (probably a safety hazard), so having to dismantle it to dig to the pipe is no real loss.  

But here's where things get interesting.  We had plans to begin remodeling the house anyways and the plan was to start at the top and work our way down.  However, with this setback, it probably makes more sense to start in the basement and work our way up.

As long as we've got a digger there to do the pipe, we figured it would be good to go ahead and dig out the windows to make them proper egresses.  The rooter guy said that their digger will do the windows at $500 each as long as they are there to do the pipe, but we'll obviously have to get somebody else to actually cut the foundation and put in bigger windows.

I'm in a position to be able to manage subcontractors myself, so I don't think I need a GC for this.  However, here's what I do need:

1.  Somebody to cut through the foundation.  (Do I need a structural engineer to determine if this is even a good idea???)

2.  Somebody to install windows (if not the same person)

3.  Somebody to inspect the roof.  We've got an intermittent leak in the laundry room ceiling and it occurred to me after the last rain that that seems to be the common denominator.  Need somebody to inspect the flashing or whatever around the roof and figure out what's wrong.  Then fix it.

4.  Somebody to design and build a new deck.

Everybody should be licensed and able to pull permits.  

Denver area folks - can you start throwing some contractor recommendations at me please?

I've done plenty of rehabs myself, but not roofing, not egress windows and not decks, so I'm at a bit of a loss here.

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