<p>Please check with the city make sure there is no sewer ordinance in place. Just spent 7500 on a sewer lateral. In my area, you need to pass sewer video inspection and based on my contractor, in his experience, very few old sewer passed the inspection. This ordinance maybe is in place for only 4-5 years, so not many people knows about it. In Berkeley, it was there for over 10 years.</p>
<p>The garage is naturally located about 6 inches below the alley and there is no way that I can put in a garage floor that will slope above the alley. I just need to create a hump that keeps the water flowing down the alley - not into our property. Luckily the alley levels out right past our property so I know that it won’t be causing issues to neighbors further down the alley.</p>
<p>I am just going to have to build the hump the day after the City does final inspection on the garage and hope that I don’t get into trouble. Ask for forgiveness later or something. But this is going to cause issues with scheduling because we won’t be able to build the hump until after the holidays probably, depending on when we get final inspection. For now I think I can put sand bags along the front of the garage if it rains again, but filling sand bags and getting them in place is another day of work that I need to pay for.</p>
<p>We don’t have any sewer ordinance for sewer inspections prior to selling a house. I know this because of the sewer lateral issues we had with the poop overflow. The property owner is required to maintain the lateral, but no inspections required during real estate transactions. </p>
<p>However, a buyer can choose to do their own sewer video inspection at their own cost as part of their inspection period. Per the City, owner is responsible for root invasion and that type of maintenance, but if a video inspection discovers broken pipe or mis-matched pipe, they will fix it.</p>
<p>I did have one sale about 2 years ago where the buyer did a video inspection of sewer lines and there was root invasion at the bottom of a large property. I had to pay for a cleanout on that sale.</p>
<p>You are very lucky being in an area that has no sewer ordinance. The inspection is done by the engineers and they are tough. It is no longer “clean the roots”, they are terms you don’t want to hear and in a way, you have to do a new sewer. In my case, a sewer pump is installed and it is expensive to open the street.</p>
<p>A hump over 7 inches will be way too high, if you get caught, you will be asked to raise the garage floor and that is a big expense. The new owner will complain about it if they really start to use the garage. Perhaps you should grade the floor up 3 inches and have a 4 inch hump. </p>
<p>Do what you have to do and good luck.</p>
<p>on another thought, a small hump with proper storm drain will do. But that is another permit another digging and another expense… it will never end.</p>
<p>Wow, so much work and bad luck. I thought the same thing that VeryHappy phrased so eloquently!</p>
<p>The hump doesn’t have to be very high, just something to mildly direct the water down the alley. We are going to copy the gradual 2"-3" hump on the neighbors property. Plus we are pouring a 2" slab over current garage floor which will create a 2" lip at garage entrance. </p>
<p>BTW, yard is drained and clear this morning so it shows the property can drain properly after heavy rains.</p>
<p>busdriver, I am eloquent because I figured out how to use the character keys to replace letters, so the filters don’t block my bad words!!</p>
<p>^^ you thought you are not to pour concrete before. make sure the city agrees on the 2" thick in a garage, thought it might need thicker with mash. otherwise they might ask you to take out and redo.</p>
<p>Here is one of the answers on the net regarding concrete thickness of a garage floor.</p>
<p>[How</a> Thick Should a Concrete Floor Be? - Ask.com](<a href=“http://www.ask.com/question/how-thick-does-a-concrete-floor-need-to-be]How”>http://www.ask.com/question/how-thick-does-a-concrete-floor-need-to-be)</p>
<p>For some reason the City has been very nice about everything, they are just so grateful that someone is fixing this derelict house and garage. The City ‘officially’ does not require that I do anything about the garage floor. It currently is deteriorating 1925 concrete with a lot of lime that is probably about 3 inches thick but broken up everywhere. The City does not require any changes to the flooring on an original garage that is being repaired.</p>
<p>However, the City Building Inspector Supervisor who is personally giving us “advice” and doing our progress inspections suggested a 1 1/2" reinforced pour. The City’s only concern about the flooring is that gas and chemicals spilled or leaking in the garage does not permeate into the dirt. But, the City guy made it very clear that he has not received a ‘Complaint’ about the situation from anyone so he will not cite us if the floor remains. </p>
<p>So, we will be doing a 2" pour with reinforcing fiberglass mesh. I have made it clear in the disclosure documents that there is no guarantee that the garage floor will not crack. I truly believe that the new owner will probably never put a car in there.</p>
<p>Good news today!!! Finally something good. The official Home Inspection is complete and the Inspector actually told my listing agent (I was not present during the inspection) that it was the “Highest quality flip he had ever seen”. Just a couple of minor issues with some of the electrical outlets and a mention that the power line coming onto the property is technically too low. We actually created the power line situation by building the deck on the back of the house which caused the line to be too low if someone is standing on the deck. Oh well, there is nothing I can do about that.</p>
<p>And, the VA appraiser came through the house yesterday and said that he didn’t believe that there would be any problems coming in with a value at our price. This is absolutely amazing because I just don’t know where he is going to find the comps. He rated the condition of the house at ‘excellent’ which will really help with the valuation.</p>
<p>Interestingly, he is going to be using a comp where the owner tore down a derelict house and built a brand new home. That is the comp he’s using because he feels that my property is in similar condition with everything absolutely brand new. He had just finished the other appraisal.</p>
<p>Oh, and one more thing from the inspection. Inspector noted that there was not a pressure relief (or temperature relief??) valve on the complex tankless water heater plumbing. There are so many freaking valves on that thing I cannot imagine that it’s not there, including the fact that the City inspected everything in that plumbing.</p>
<p>So, I’ve got to go analyze the complicated routing and figure out which one of the valves (there are 5 valves) is the pressure relief valve.</p>
<p>coralbrook, lots of good news today! That’s great.</p>
<p>I was watching a marathon last night of Flip or Flop on HGTV. I thought of a lot of the things I learned in this thread about it and wondered how “real” the show was.</p>
<p>I googled the stars and read that one day a nurse was watching the show and saw that the husband had a large mass on his thyroid. She emailed his production company about it, he got it checked out, and it turns out he has thyroid cancer which has spread to numerous lymph nodes. I, too, saw the mass when I was watching it!</p>
<p>Anyway, while the show doesn’t make it look easy, it sure doesn’t show all the hassles as we’ve seen them in this thread.</p>
<p>Glad things are working out for you, OP. :)</p>
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<p>Lets examine this statement.</p>
<p>If you invest in other flipping business you make 12%.
If you DIY you make 30%(lets take to the max)</p>
<p>So your sweat equity is only 18% of the investment(30%-12%), while the 12% is taxed long term cap gain and the 30% is taxed Ordinary Income. </p>
<p>Basically the 18% became 12% after tax differential (long term vs ordinary), and if your investment is 400K that means you make about 48K/year in sweat equity, that is not much to make a living, consider all the risk involved(sec 7044, liability on no permit etc).</p>
<p>Worth the trouble? NO in my mind.</p>
<p>I had a better outcome. I start with 500K of my own money, two years later, I am at about 1M, partly I bought it at the right time, right price. Had I do it today, I will not have this kind of results. My flipping career is basically over.</p>
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<p>As I have commented before, you basically did and you should scrape it and start a new one with two stories and an attached garage, this could be called “major renovation”. You probably can make more money this way, rather spent $90/sf to renovate an old house. I was told from developers that a new two story “apartment” quality construction cost is about $100/sf without any other overheads/charges/fees. Looking at your city’s other homes for sale, it certainly justify the cost of rebuilding instead of renovating with the same square footage.</p>
<p>If I were you, I’d scrape the old and put a pre-fab on it and be done in a month. I have seen pre-fabs and they are as good as stick built.</p>
<p>Regarding the comments on the tv shows by NRD, the tv shows does more or less reflect the reality, they have to show the dramatic part of the process only so to entice viewers to look at it. While we demonstrated the day to day process and some times it is boring.</p>