Life Transplanet

I’ve heard about the new law, the Impulso Vivienda or Puerto Rico Housing Stimulus, that Governor Fortuño recently passed. Basically it sounds like they are trying to spur growth in the housing sector by encouraging more construction and more sales of existing houses. It seems the thinking is similar to the U.S. mainland use of the tax credits to spur more home buying.

I am not sure how much CRIM, sellos y estampillas (property taxes, seals and stamps) normally cost, but it sounds like with this program they will be waived for a period of 5 years if you buy a house between September 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011! 

We’ve received conflicting information about property taxes in Puerto Rico and housing in general. It’s hard to find accurate information as every person we talk to has a different interpretation. Some people have even told us there is no property tax!? In any case, it sounds like good news for people like us who may buy a Puerto Rican house within this time period.

To read more about this new law check out this Caribbean Business article or this blog post.

We’ve been working on our rental pushing really hard to get it done in only 2-3weeks with the goal of having it rented by September 1! We took some time off of work to do it, but now we are back to work and have all of our other responsibilities in addition to working on the rental. BUT we are over the hump. We are almost through the ugly part.

In a remodel, as in life, sometimes you have to go through ugly parts to see the beauty underneath. This house wasn’t too bad to start with so it was a real struggle for us whether or not we wanted to do a complete renovation or just a minor refurbishing. We decided to do it the way we would want it if we were to live there.

But in the process, you make things really, really messy and ugly. Britton tore out all the cabinets, cut a hole in the wall in the bathroom in order to put a showerhead up, pulled out the bathroom vanity and toilet so tile could go there. The only outside help we hired is for tile installation (but we still picked out, bought and delivered all the tile) and the floor refinishing. Everything else (painting, installing cabinets, cutting and installing the countertops, trim, new faucets, etc, etc) was done by us!

Making it ugly (Bathroom)

In order to make it pretty (almost finished!)

I really love doing these rentals. I think it’s because it’s like life. You go through so many frustrations, and joys all in the same project. You are able to have both end goals and process goals all in one. (The end goal being having the house remodeled and someone renting it, the process goals being all the stuff to get there, the checklist of items-showers, tile, floors, painting).

There can be a real sense of accomplishment and achievement. You learn as you go. You try your best. You make mistakes, and try again. You want to make things a little better for you having been there.  And you want to get ahead; you want to keep moving forward. And sometimes when it looks so ugly that you just want to give up, you have to look deep inside and find the strength to push just a little harder, a little further, and it will all be worth it and beautiful in the end.

Making it uglier than before we started (kitchen)


Nearly complete -and looking good

Today Britton and I celebrated 5 years of marriage! Together with the amount of time we dated before we got married, we’ve been together 10 years! It’s amazing how time flies. I remember our wedding day so vividly. It was nice and warm and sunny. We were worried about the weather since we were having an outdoor reception at my parents’ house in Nunn. But everything turned out great! We had great live music, good food and drink and lots of lovely family and friends turned out.

I like how you can see the Nunn Tower in this picture and how happy we are

Out in front of my parents’ old house -the house I grew up in!

So to celebrate our five year anniversary…well, we worked on our new rental property. Or I could just say Britton bought me a house for our anniversary, lol. But seriously, we did work almost all day on the property painting and Britton put in a shower faucet fixture for the bathroom. But we DID do something just for fun, and that was to go out to Bisetti’s our favorite little Italian restaurant in Fort Collins. It’s also where we had our first date. We got all spruced up and took the Corvette over there. The food was great and it was fun to reminisce about our time together and to think about what the future could hold. We also walked around downtown and heard a live drum band. Overall a great day moving us into the future and remembering our past.

Anniversary Dinner at Bisetti’s in Fort Collins

Time to celebrate!

We’ve been extremely busy these last few days. For one thing, we bought another rental which means lots of work. It is very similar to our last one, and at a great price. We’ve been doing a lot of work to it, and I will show the before and after pictures like I did with the last one when we are all done. But for now, here’s a preview:

Newest Rental Property

In addition to this huge demo/remodel project (mostly in the kitchen and bathroom), we are also coordinating the finishing of another rental’s basement. We have been working on that off and on now for about 3 years, so we figured it was about time to finish. We also have a paint job scheduled for the exterior of another one too! Really expensive to do this all at once, but it needs to get done sometime, so we figured while we have the time off, we might as well pull the trigger on them.

So Britton took the whole week off and I took off three days to do this. Some of it is hands on work, others it’s just calling and arranging for bids and quotes and meeting with contractors. In addition to these planned and expected projects, we also had a water heater we needed to replace in one rental and then our air conditioner at our house pooped out on us so we (Britton) had to fix that as well!

Overall, we have fun with these projects and I enjoy being busy. Usually with our rentals we hardly have to lift a finger, but I think it is because we are pretty pro-active property mangers and we treat each of them and the tenants the way we would want to be treated. If I could work doing stuff like this all the time without working for someone else I think it would be great! And it’s so rewarding to see the results of your efforts in tangible form. Plus we’ve had a chance to spend more time with our friends and family as a result.

I’ll update as these projects come along.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July and Happy Anniversary to my parents!

Sparklers were the extent of our fire works

Speaking of anniversaries, I was just reviewing some of the old posts from this blog and realized that we just passed another anniversary of blogging! Our very first post was on June 28, 2008! It’s funny reading it now, because I remember that I had no idea what hosting and writing a blog would be like, let alone all the technical aspects of it (thanks to Britton for working most of those out…). The content of the post is basic and used mainly as a test, but it still reflects many of the summer posts here we’ve written about life in Greeley -messing around in the greenhouse, spending time outside, enjoying the hot weather.

However, we had no idea what would happen between then and now. I figured we would be living in PR by now, but a few twists and turns in life and here we still are. And actually we have had some great opportunities pop up that we just couldn’t turn down. The cost benefit analysis of some of the investment and work opportunities here outweighed our immediate and strong desire to move. And while the date has been pushed out and out, we are getting more and more ready to be able to move without too much of a worry once we arrive. These last two years have been creating a great launching pad for us whereby we might not even HAVE to work in the traditional sense of wages for hours of our life.

It looks like my job will be saved and I will continue working past August 1 which is overall definitely good news in the sense that losing a job is always really stressful and it will give us more time to save money and invest. On the other hand, it also keeps us here. Britton says we have to know when to get out. Kind of like in poker -know when to hold them, fold them or walk away.

We are definitely emotionally and mentally ready, but financially I think we want to be prepared for the worst -no job, no income generated there, not understanding fully the system and also dealing with isolation away from our family and friends support network.

We have another investment in the works right now, and when it goes through I’ll blog a little more about it. Another step. That’s all you can do, just keep moving forward. Having goals (like for us moving to Puerto Rico) helps you to know which way to go, but you just have to keep moving forward.