I have learned so much over the past few years through owning my house in White Rock, BC. Being a landlord and issues arising from that position are one. Renovating has been another huge learning experience as well. Three months ago I posted on Steemit on the start of the renovation of my rental suite on the bottom floor of my house. The renovation began with the simple objective of completing the drywall of a few walls and the ceiling in the living room, kitchen, and hallway. As with all renovations the project got bigger as it went along. The people working on the renovation also changed as the project turned out to be too large for my friend K. to undertake so I hired a friend who I have used with renovations on other parts of my house, my friend Jamie Miller. Jamie is great for renovating as he is a perfectionist and when he renovated my office last year he made sure the walls were perfect, any imperfection had to be corrected, and since I am very much of the same mindset I find working with Jamie to be quite enjoyable.
The suite looks like a construction site but we are making much progress in the past week. Right now we are working on setting up the lighting and the electrical and putting up the drywall. There are still a few walls that have to be put up. We closed off the passage way underneath the stairs to block the noise of the laundry room and to give the living room more structure.
We are also renovating the laundry room as the plumbing in that room was recently changed and improved. Underneath the stairs we are building a storage room. We have some industrial lights that were left from a previous tenant and I was happy that we were able to incorporate these lights in the storage rooms downstairs.
We have decided to put 12 pots lights in the kitchen and living room and we are planning on using a dimmer light switch to control them. When the ceiling in the living room is put up the suite will look a lot better and we are almost at that point.
Renovating my rental suite has been my focus for the past month. I figure we can have it finished in two weeks which will be great. Given the extremely tight rental situation in Vancouver, BC and White Rock the demand for a suite like this is very high. The vacancy rate is below 1% and I have already had 4 people ask to rent my two bedroom rental suite for $1500 a month. One thing I have learned though is that you have to be very selective on who you rent to as once you give permission to have someone move in it is extremely difficult to have them removed if they turn out to be not great tenants. I have hired a property management firm to actually help find a great tenant and they will actually do all the property management work like collecting the rent and dealing with problems in the suite. I have found that it is better to outsource this work since property managers are better at finding good tenants and are more adept at dealing with the issues from tenants. For about $100 a month I believe it is well worth the cost.
I will post the final result of my rental suite renovation when it is finished in the next few weeks. If you have any advice on being a landlord or renovating rental suites feel free to make a comment below. Take care.