How crazy that we had never heard of Lake Havasu City and we ended up buying a condo there! Lake Havasu is a very popular place in the winter for retired people and traveling medical professionals. Every year, Lake Havasu attracts over 800,000 visitors. Many of these people need a place to stay, making this a great place for a rental property.
It was a big jump as this is our first large purchase together and we now are home owners! We are beyond happy with the place we bought. Our realtor made the process very easy and our loan company was also very helpful. I will say, we have learned so much already in the 5 months of owning this condo and are so happy we bought it!
The condo we bought is fully furnished, but everything could use a little updating right? Our first project was to install new lights in the closet and bathroom. Aaron is quite the handy man (thanks to his dad Mark...thank you!). Sorry, no pictures. Somehow I forgot to take one!
Another project, which we thought would be simple, was to put in new outlets and switches. At first I wanted to just paint them and be done, but Aaron said those might chip so lets install new switches and outlets...yeah anyone ever done this before? First of all, if you have an electrician do it and they give you an estimate of how expensive it will be, they aren't ripping you off. Just this project alone for the supplies was over $500. We did not realize this at first, nor did we realize how difficult it is to do! We thankfully have made amazing friends here and our charge nurses husband is an electrician! So after Aaron replaced 2 switches and I watched a few YouTube videos on how to replace the outlets we decided, maybe we should have a professional in here... And gosh, did Scott save our lives. It took him maybe an hour to do all of our outlets and switches where as it took Aaron and I 20 minutes to do one.
He wouldn't take our money, so we paid him in beer for his AMAZING work. We are so thankful for his help!
We also installed a key less entry lock for the front door. It makes everything a lot easier. Our first one we installed turned itself, and unfortunately it kept malfunctioning. We decided to return it and install a new one that is a manual turn after you put in the code! Here's a picture of what we originally installed.
Being from New York and Aaron from Kentucky, the heat here is NOTHING compared to what we experienced come end of July thru August. 120 degrees almost every day is pretty crazy and it will make your electric bill sky rocket. So we decided to take our friends Greg and Wendy's advice and get shutter blinds. One of my patients recommended a local place called Colorado River Blinds (Made in the USA) and they were amazing. They came over and measured everything and said within the next couple weeks they would have them in. For the installation it was roughly $200 which at that point we said we would let them do it.
We absolutely love our shutter blinds! They block out the sunlight and heat which is greatly needed in Lake Havasu. If you are ever interested in buying them, they are definitely an investment, so be prepared.
When we moved into our condo we noticed the shower handle was very difficult to turn and out dated. After doing lots of research we found out that if we want to replace the shower handle, we have to replace it with the same brand. This shower handle is a Mixet:
To replace that we have to get the same brand. The design Mixet makes is not what we want, Moen and other brands are easier to use and more our style. So we decided, lets redo the shower if we have to replace it all anyway! Yes, here came more expenses we were not intending to spend, but in the end it was all well worth it. We went with Top Flight Tile & Floors which was recommended by our friends Andy and Rick (the owners of the big Conquest that is pictured in other posts). They had a shower done by them and their friends did as well and all had great things to say.
First the demo:
The demo guy did do damage to our dry wall, so after the entire shower and door were installed, they had another guy come and fix the damage (covered by the tile guys).
The next day, the plumber came and re-routed the plumbing to where we wanted. Then the tile guys came.
It came out stunning! We learned that the tile guy does not install the glass door so they had a recommendation on who to call. You may be thinking, why didn't you install it yourself? Well after a week of not having a shower and spending almost $500 on the door itself, the last thing we wanted to do was to break the tile and have to have them come back to fix our mistake. The guy that came ended up breaking one of the tiles due to the way the door was sitting. Thankfully they were able to repair it quickly and finally we had our finished product!
We are so happy with the way our condo came out. We now have a property manager named Gail who does everything for us and is getting it rented out with no problems. Here is our link to our condo if someone you know, or you needs a place to stay for over a month in sunny and warm Lake Havasu City!
Commentaires