All Forum Posts by: Bruce P.

Hi BiggerPockets,

After you're done with an improvement project and there are leftover materials - pipes, etc. And then let's say you start another one and the new contractor wants to use some of the materials in another project - is the norm for a contractor to buy it from you/give you a credit on a current project? Or how have people approached this?

Thank you both for the input!  I like the idea of walking the price down.

Hi,

Just doing an informal community survey to see if anyone has a good general "rule of thumb" for how much to price a room rental in a single family home for the purposes of a house hack situation?  Someone in this BP thread said they do about 75% of whatever a studio rental was in their area. I'm mostly interested in the Southern California area. Looking at craigslist for Las Vegas and Los Angeles, it seems that a room rental w/shared bathroom situation is roughly 50% (maybe 60%) of a 1 bedroom apartment. Thanks in advance for any answers!

Loving your ninja time management hacks @Elijah Brown and thanks for sharing! I'll be becoming much more focused on multifamily in Q3 and Q4.

Hi BP,

Thinking of doing a driveway widening project for a single family home (no apron modification). To widen the driveway, I'd like to trim half of a 10 foot tall and maybe 7-8 ft wide privacy hedge (my adjoining neighbor is ok with that).

One issue I'm running into - talking with others it's possible that the machines used to help trim (and tear out?) the hedges would accidentally rip out the whole hedge or even if they could do only "half" a hedge, the hedge might die due to the sudden loss of 50% of itself.

Other than to manually trim 50% of the hedge without touching the roots (sounds expensive), is there a near maintenance-free way to approach this? E.g., could you manually trim the hedge and then put some kind of plastic dividing wall to keep the hedge from encroaching and force it to grow towards the neighbor's yard so you only have to trim it once in a while?  I realize this probably isn't doable, but I thought I'd tap into the community for ideas.

Thank you all for these wonderful suggestions, I hadn't even thought about the Father's Day sales!

Hi, my friend recently acquired their first SFH for house hacking. They are starting to need basic tools (e.g., they want to mount a security camera but the instructions call for a 15/64" drill bit to drill some holes for mounting) to do things like mount a security camera, fix a screendoor, attach a Ring doorbell, etc. They already have a small hammer and a set of screwdrivers but not much else.

Does anyone have recommendations on a general purpose toolbox they can buy that would be perfect for home maintenance and other related chores as mentioned above for house hacking?

Thank you all for the feedback and camera suggestions, especially around getting creeped out about the monitoring...My friend was thinking about monitoring common areas from the perspective of planning for the "worst case" scenario - e.g., roommate decides to throw a crazy house party in the middle of Covid-19, which would be a lease violation. It would also easily identify any intruders (e.g., break-in) in the house for police reports.  But you all made a good point about "feeling watched" and using external cameras would probably accomplish the same thing while keeping an inviting atmosphere for tenants.

Hi,

Living in the state of CA (Malibu / Ventura County area), how can one safely and legally rent out part of their garage to an existing tenant? (It's a house hack situation - owner lives on-site and rents out rooms to roommates/tenants). One of the tenants wants to store their motorcycle there (rather than on the street).  Does the owner just amend the existing room lease agreement? I saw threads talking about renting out the whole garage as a self-storage unit but not just letting someone keep some of their stuff in there for a fee. Asking for a friend. Thanks!

Hi BP, so over in this post, there were some great suggestions on cameras for outdoor security. But for an interior of the house where you as the owner reside while renting out to roommates ("house hacking") - is there a camera or system anyone can recommend for:

1) Monitoring guests brought over by roommates in the common areas (my friend has a guest policy and cameras would obviously help ensure the policy is adhered to)

2) Potentially helping police identify someone should they break into the house?

Hopefully the system is easy to install and makes it easy to monitor the feeds via your computer or phone. And hopefully it doesn't require too many battery replacements/recharges.

Thank you BP community.