“The Mold House” Story

Wes and I are really excited (well, I’m really excited…) to announce that we closed on our first property that we intend to flip! This will be a major project for us both and we’re both pretty nervous about being in over our heads.

“The Mold House” is what we’ve been calling it, but we’re trying to begin calling it by it’s street name, Rocky Ridge, because it won’t be the mold house anymore when we’re done with it!

Rocky Ridge came about the way that most good real estate deals do; word of mouth. The original owner is a co-worker of my father’s. He and his wife and two kids lived in this beautiful property that they had converted into three units, along with some tenants, until the divorce. I don’t have any details, but in what I can only assume was a contentious split, everyone left the property and went their own ways really quickly. As in…they left food in the pantry and the fridge, house work partly completed, clothes in the closet, kids toys in the living room. And then the house sat empty. For 6 years. Even though the owner was stilling paying a mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities on this empty property every single month. I can only assume that the divorce was painful enough he would prefer to throw money at this property every month than to think about it long enough to get it cleaned up, emptied out, and sold.

The most important part of this drama is that the previous owner had been in the process of making repairs to the gutters on the roof when it all befell. He had taken the gutters completely off, and then never replaced them when he left the property in a hurry. This means that for the past six years, water has been running down the side of the house every time in rains (which in Alabama is quite a bit), and then soaking into the siding. Because of this, the entire ground floor of the property is now completely covered, floor to ceiling, in mold. The first time I viewed the downstairs of the property, I put a bandana around my nose and mouth, wore gloves, a head lamp, and glasses, and I was still worried just the few minutes I spent walking around would make me sick. I tried to take photos for Wes, who wasn’t with me at the time, but by the time I got out and looked at them, most of them were blurry because I was trying to get out of there so quickly!

We got the property under contract using the “subject to” strategy. As we move forward with the renovations, I can explain more of the technicalities, but for now, we’re excited to actually get back to Alabama and get started!