Believe what you receive
Being in the middle of a difficult situation is no fun. Often when I look back, hindsight provides me with perspective. I understand that life usually unfolded was the way it’s supposed to be. Our real estate experience taught me valuable lessons: patience and trust pays off.
In June, 2016, my husband and I invested in an historic old miners’ cabin in Old Town Park City. We partnered with a builder who had vision to renovate and resell the property. Although we had never participated in an opportunity like this before, we were optimistic and excited about our “fixer-upper.” My husband is a real estate attorney and sees many deals like this which all seem to make money. We wanted in!
We spent the next year making plans and exploring the city permitting process. Our ski town is very strict with historical homes and the regulations were stunning. In addition to being historical, our cabin had “landmark” status making the guidelines even stricter on renovating old homes. Paint was OK, but even a new window needed a permit.
As laborious as the process was, I appreciated the history of the home. It was the “gatehouse” for the Ontario Mine. Back in the 1860s, the gatekeeper lived there and closed the gate when all the miners had gone home for the evening. I imagined their life inside the cabin. The wood stove, molding and closet-less bedrooms would have been the same. Families sat on the front porch and cooked in the kitchen. If the walls could talk, I wonder what they’d say. Some workers reported to us that they thought the house was haunted. I never experienced that first-hand, but it doesn’t surprise me.
For over a year, there was very little progress. We lost faith in our partner, so in 2017 we bought him out and resold his share to another builder. We were optimistic for the future of the house.
The next chapter was painful.
In 2017, we knew that we needed to do something with the house in order to rent or sell it - it was not in good condition. In order to add square footage to the cabin, our builder partner suggested lifting the house up with a crane and digging a foundation. We could add a basement, a garage and then gut the inside of the house. We’ have to leave the exterior exactly as it was per the historical guidelines making it very difficult and expensive. The proposed budget was over a million dollars.
We opted for Plan B: the “lipstick” plan. We planned to upgrade the kitchen and bathrooms. We could freshen up the floors and paint the outside and then hopefully sell. All of the planned work could be done without City permits and inspections.
The adage “we plan while God laughs” sums up our experience. A few months into the renovation, our carpenter Ellie pulled up the bathroom floor and saw dirt. The entire foundation was rotted. Surprised and horrified, we stopped all work.
Slammed with with other projects, our building partner stopped paying attention to this project. There were holes in the floor and my heart. We didn’t know what to do and my husband and I could not fix it ourselves. We needed to either hire another company to fix the entire bathroom foundation or work with our partner, who at the time was MIA.
Of course we wanted to work with our partner, but weeks passed with no action. Without any other viable options (and mortgage payments due with no rent coming in), we drafted an email to our partner with a proposition to end the relationship. We began to surrender to the reality that we were going to have to take out another loan to buy them out and hire someone to help us rebuild the cabin.
When I’m stuck, I often turn to angel cards for guidance. I own a deck of cards that have various messages. Knowing there is no right or wrong card, over the years, I am continually surprised on how apropos the cards’ messages can be. The message often seems fated or synchronistic.
After we sent our partner the “break-up” email. I pulled a card. It couldn’t believe it. It was the “Angel of Union”. The guidebook described the card, “A merger, partnership or relationship of some kin is being formed which holds long term benefits for your life. This relationship, partnership or merger which is with someone you already know or deal with, is blessed and destined for great success of some kind…Thank the universe for this wonderful blessing!”
I laughed out loud. I didn’t quite feel like this relationship was a blessing, but I was relieved. And I was even more relieved when the next morning our partner called me and apologized for being out of touch. He received our email and said that there was no way that he was going to leave the project in that state. He recommitted to the project. I accepted his apology and we moved on.
The rest of the renovation moved forward, albeit painfully slowly. We finished the project in January 2019. The miners’ cabin had a new kitchen, two new bathrooms, gutters, and fresh paint. Our partner’s wife decorated it beautifully. Right away, we tried to obtain a nightly rental license from the city and were denied. We had to replace a bedroom window for fire egress, upgrade a railing and do a few other things to pass inspection. Due to the delays in getting a permit for the window replacement, our house remained unoccupied until the spring of 2019 when a long-term renter moved in for six months. Though his rent didn’t cover the mortgage, we finally had some income to offset the cost of ownership, and the construction phase was finally over.
While the renter lived there, we listed the house to sell. Over the next year, it went under contract four times and fell out each time for various reasons. The last offer we accepted was even lower than our break-even point. We resigned to “stop the bleeding.” However, even that contract fell through. Buyers were wary. We understood. We were wary too.
We obtained a nightly rental license in 2020 and rented it for the winter until COVID struck. With no business after March 13th, we decided to find another long-term renter. I found a millennial woman who said she needed a place to live. She successfully leveraged the pandemic to negotiate very low rent and turned out to be a high-maintenance nightmare. She rented the house on Airbnb over Thanksgiving and left the country. When she came home there was an eviction notice on her door. Bad news.
Facing eviction, our tenant moved out in time for the ski season. We worked with an amazing property manager who rented the cabin almost every week this past winter. Park City became a very popular place to vacation during the pandemic. The real estate market has been on fire and there is little to no inventory left. When the ski season was wrapping up, we prepared to list the house again. Before the house was officially on the market, we had a cash offer for nearly two hundred thousand dollars more than the last offer we accepted just a year before. Twenty-one days later, we closed.
My husband and I went over to the house after we signed the closing documents a couple of week ago. While I loved the location, the history and sweetness of the old cabin, I was not sorry to say goodbye to that project. We walked around the house one last time and I noticed the paint peeling, the gutter disconnected and the deck spongy. But none of it was my problem anymore.
What a relief! I couldn’t be more pleased how the story ended. Like Churchill says, “ If you are going through Hell, keep going.” And I say, along the way, pick an angel card and “believe what you receive.”