Housing

One thing that I have learned over the years is that if you try to do something that is beyond your skill level, it will likely cost you money in the long run. That being said, you probably can do a lot more than you think you can. I am by no means a handyman, but I try to do as much around the house as I can.

A perfect illustration of this is a new balcony that we had built. Could have I built the balcony? Possibly, if I had taken a lot of time and effort. Realistically, I would have never had the time and it would have been one of those projects that would have been perpetually in progress. Therefore I made the decision to have someone else come and build the balcony.

Once the balcony was built, we took bids on paining it. They came in around $500. Even though I am no expert in painting, I know that it is something that I can do on my own and can finish in about a week or so (we’ll see when next weekend comes around whether I’m finished or not). It is also a nice distraction to get me off the computer for a few hours each day, so I decided to make that my non computer project this week.

As you can see, I have started to prime the wood and will be painting as soon as I finish there. I’ll be sure to post photos when I’m done…

My mom wants to get a new deck for her house. The old one is quite old and really needs to get replaced. She wants it to be a good medium grade redwood. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how much a deck should cost.

The first thing I did was make some calls to people who build decks to come out and give estimates to the job. I was shocked at the wide range of bids we received. We gave the exact same information to each contractor, but the estimates ranged from $2000 to $4300 for the deck. This really goes to show that when you are having work done, it is well worth your time getting a minimum of 5 estimates.

I briefly thought of trying to put the deck in myself, but I think it would be a bit beyond my ability and time restraints. We still haven’t decided which bid to accept, but will probably do so this week. We are ruling out the lowest bid because we didn’t feel comfortable with the person who made it. Sometimes you just get that feeling that you will be disappointed with it even if it is the least expensive and that is they way we felt after talking with him.

The question is now whether to take the second or third lowest bid. We liked the contractor that gave the more expensive bid (he spend more time detailing exactly what he would be doing, about the wood he’d be using and options we had), but feel his bid is a bit high. I will call and if we can get him to lower his bid to be a bit closer to the lower bidder, we’ll go with him. If not, we’ll likely pass and go for the contractor that gave the second lowest bid.

While getting this all sorted out has taken quite a bit of time, those 5 extra hours probably will save us $1000 or so.

I went to a San Francisco Giants Game baseball game today and while walking from BART to the stadium, there were several harbors with a large number of sailboats docked there. My dad loves sailboats, so of course we had to go and take a closer look at some of the betters ones. That’s when I found a secret about how some people are getting the best rental rates in the San Francisco Bay Area (which can easily be duplicated in any city with high housing costs on a coast or by a large body of water).

Boat dock slips cost between $300 and $400 a month. There is a group of people who purchase sailboats (they run from $50,000 on up), dock them on the water in front of prime real estate often costing millions of dollars and pay rent of about $400 a month. Some don’t even pay rent or purchase the boat. They have traded upkeep on the boat to live there and then vacate for one weekend a month when the owner of the boat wants to take it out sailing.

This is a variation on the long term house sitting idea, but there are a lot more opportunities available. Of course, you have to be willing to live on a boat and that means a pretty minimalist lifestyle when it comes to “things,” but considering that San Francisco is least affordable rental metro area in the US and one bedrooms are renting for between $1000 and $1500, the price of a boat can’t be beat.

Much like the commute helper, this is another example of how a bit of creativity can go a long way to keeping a lot more money in your own pockets while living in a prime real estate location.