Nobody goes to a sick doctor, a skinny cook, or a lawyer in jail. When I’m working with an expert I ask “what would you do? It cuts to the heart of the matter. Not sure what to order for dinner? Ask the waitress what she eats on break. Trying to decide on a traditional or tankless water heater? Ask your plumber “what’s in your house?” Make adjustments for personal preference and move forward. The “what would you do” type questions let you get the message without the static of “every option is both good and bad” ambivalence. Of course your experts can lie, cheat or funnel you to a certain product for their own reasons, but if you suspect them of that type of behavior why are you working with them in the first place?

So, I think it is fair game for you to ask a realtor about their house. Did they sell their McMansion and move to a smallish ranch ahead of the coming wave of aging baby boomers? Do they tell their friends to rent for another year but echo the “now is a great time to buy” commercials to their clients? Did they buy a foreclosure, an estate, at an auction? Do they move every two years or plan to never move again? Much of this is personal taste, but knowing what they did, and asking what they would do in your sitation will get you a more actionable answer than asking “is this a good neighborhood?”

In that vein, I’ll take you through my situation. If any of you have wondered why articles have been few and far between in recent months on this site, this is your answer. We gave up a great home and brought money to close its sale, but we cut our monthly payment to less than half, bought a “fixer” and expect to make somewhere in the mid five figures when we sell, tax free if we handle it properly. But we had to do a double move, weeks of intense changes to the house before we moved in, and are now facing years of renovation projects.

Watch for a flurry of posts based on our project in the coming months.  But this week, I’ll start with the basics. Check back daily for posts on how we sold our last home, how and why we bought the house we are now in, and the numbers behind the strategy of living in a house while you slowly fix it for resale.

I write a lot about condominiums on the South Bend Area Blog, because it’s an active market that I watch closely and because there aren’t many good places on the web to learn about them.

In South Bend, a condo’s primary appeal is its simplicity. For the same price you can usually find a larger single family home with a yard, but then you have to repair, maintain, mow and shovel. If you travel for work, use the property as a second home, or just don’t want to spend time thinking about your house, then a condo makes sense.

Despite this focus on condominiums, we sell more single family homes than condos. It’s a larger market in the South Bend area and we work with many families for whom a condo wouldn’t be a good fit. The South Bend – Mishawaka – Granger area has an ample supply of homes from the affordable starter to the grand showcase. The only type of house I don’t often see is a fully renovated pre-war home.

There are many older homes for sale, but they often have odd floorplans, don’t have a bathroom on the main floor, have outdated kitchens and obsolete mechanical systems. Many are in neighborhoods that contain vacant and dilapidated homes. Some have been partially rehabbed and a few have been restored to their original look, but it’s rare to find a home that has old world charm and lives like a modern house. It takes a lot of time and money to make such a house, so people who have done so tend to stay in them for a long time.

I’m currently involved in a project to create that old-yet-new house. As part of a small family team, we’ve purchased 1108 Woodside, a beautiful 1926 brick two story that was in heart breaking condition. No heating system. No functioning plumbing. No insulation. No kitchen. Broken windows. Very few walls that didn’t need repair. A garage door that had been driven through? I think it may be the polar opposite of a condominium.

But it had an attractive face, a great floor plan and that one magic item – potential. We closed on the house December 20th, and plan to have it ready for new occupants by mid February. If you’re interested you can follow our progress, learn from our mistakes and comment on our decisions at 1108woodside.com .

Today I spent many hours arranging water service to an investment property. After creating an account with the South Bend water department and making an appointment to have water turned on at the house, I met the technician during a 7 am to 11 am window at the property. At its simplest, turning on water to a house involves a technician using a special tool to open a valve buried in the yard below the frost line. Today was not that simple.

Our serviceman had no difficulty finding the valve in the yard, despite the snow that still covers most everything. After he found it though, he came to look in the basement for the meter. He quickly realized there was no meter in the house. Worse than that, there was no easy way to hook a meter into the existing piping.

I learned that it is a straightforward process to adapt the plumbing for installation of a meter, that you simply need a “Ram’s Horn” which is designed to accept the meter. These are not available at the big box retailers, but can be obtained at Underground Pipe and Valve near the intersection of Prairie and Chapin Streets. It’s an unlikely location for such a helpful store, in a declining building with an easy to overlook sign. Call ahead at (574) 282-2323 and they can help you find the store.

Once you do find it, tell them what you need, and the city it’s for, and they’ll supply the appropriate parts. Our Ram’s Horn for South Bend was about $55. I asked the salesman if he sold many of them, and he said “Oh yeah,” that ‘scrappers’ often take meters from vacant homes to sell for the value of their base metals.

Reworking the plumbing to be ready for a meter took about five minutes, and after another call to the water department, we had an appointment for early afternoon. During this second attempt, we had our 5/8″ meter installed, and learned the water had been (illegally) on to the house the entire time, but shutoff at the first valve before the (missing) water heater.

Check back often for more stories from this house, and more subtleties of the South Bend rehab market.