Giving the Gift of Home

A few years ago, giving the gift of home was not on my mind.  If I’m honest, my wife is the giver of the family. She’s wired to give and does it without thinking, sometimes much to my dismay.  I think more along the lines of- There could be an emergency! Any emergency at any point in time! And what if there is! We need to save that! Keep that! 

It’s part of my personality, part of my disposition to value stability, consistency, to be risk averse.  Sometimes that can be seen as me being a pessimist. I like to call myself a realist.

And no realism hit home more than when I spent a couple of days with my family of five in a hotel room. By the end of it, I was about to go crazy.  Too many people in too close proximity for too long.

And that realism turned me to the very real realization that I needed to be a giver too.  You see, we have family friends that had been living in a hotel room with six people for over two years.

Finding a Way Out

We had to do something to help them out of that situation. On top of the situation being fraught with too many people in too close proximity for far too long, the bill for the room was $391 a week. You can do the math on what that is a month.  Way too much a square foot as my mind works.

Yes, they have made some bad decisions that have put them in this space, but most of those decisions were years and years ago. Evictions and past records from 7-10 years ago still kept them from being able to rent a home. And the ability to save enough of their paychecks for a deposit and the first month’s rent all at once was a big barrier.

As I launched into Real Estate, the first thing I was really looking for was a good flip.  Something we could buy at the right price per square foot in the right neighborhood, fix up- and fix up fairly quickly- and turn it for a profit.  We made a few offers on a few things, but nothing came through.

Answered Prayer

Then the hotel room stay. After many prayers about how to help this family, and a call from my broker that said she just might have the right house for this need.  We bought it, we were finally able to give the gift of home.  We worked for two weeks focusing on how to turn the house into a home and they moved in!

They are paying us a reasonable rent and are paying us back on money we have lent them over the years.  They will have this all paid back within a year.

As I look around the landscape of the rental market in our area, there are the nice and pricey places and there are the slums and there isn’t much in between.  I’m hoping to make an impact in that in-between space, where we can make affordable houses, homes.

As we went through the process of getting this house ready, here are some tips I’ve come up with for making a house a home: