We try to do a lot of work ourselves when we can. In the case of the house that we have a contract to sell, this week we just couldn’t. We went through the inspection process and because the buyers are buying with an FHA loan, they had some requirements we had to fix in order for them to get the loan.

Some of these are repairs that were definitely a little past due, others, like drywall in the garage and covering the kitty door seemed a little like overkill. And when we bought the house, most of these were never even mentioned by our home inspector…hmm. In any case, we hired out the work because we didn’t have any time this week; Britton was on call, and we had a quick deadline. But they are all done and will be writing check instead. Our contractor was an old school guy that our real estate agent knew. He made quick and good work of these tasks that would have taken us much longer to do!

Here are some of the before and after pictures of the work he did on the little house. I think they turned out really well!

Kitty/doggie door between garage and house was not allowed due to “firewall” requirements

Door after with kickplate filled with fire retardant

Above the door in the garage was built with wood -another firewall issue apparently

So he put in drywall

The hot water heater vent cap was old and rusty

So he installed a new one

There was an old window on the outside of the garage. Inside the garage it was drywalled in, so it was not useful. The sill was all rotten out.

So he just took it out and sided it.

After it was installed and painted

The siding by the window before- we could slide our hand under it

With the new siding you couldn’t

Another part of the house had some siding problems from leaves and the water soaking the area over time

So there was quite a bit of siding repairs on this side of the house too

After the repairs were made and it was painted

A bit of soffit needed repaired

Soffit repairs after

We’ve come to find that anything can be fixed on a house, it just depends how much you want to spend. These repairs were a bit spendy, but like we said in the post about the car repairs, it really depends on if you want to do it yourself, and if you know how to (and also the time factor). We figured with these repairs, it was just a part of the process to move the closing along. At least we had a cushion to pay for it since the offer was full price. Next major step is the appraisal. As long as that goes fine, we’ll be closing and selling this house in less than 3 weeks! Phew. Selling is much more difficult than buying.