It has often been heard that one's home is one's sanctuary; your respite from the outer world, a place where you can rest from your weary days of labor & toil. As a real estate wholesaler I see sanctuaries in ruin. Ruin is great for business and certainly ruin is good when you think of how reinvention is oftentimes birthed from ruin. To quote one of my favorite authors from her book Eat.Pray.Love.- Liz Gilbert,
"Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation."
I work with ruin, negotiate around it, reimagine ruin and quantify numbers on ruin based upon that imagined transformation. I could walk through ruin and see a transformed sanctuary, placing a carefully calculated price for the hungriest bidder. I don't transform the space myself, I provide the canvas for my pool of artisans to create their masterpieces. This is the real estate wholesaler's life, this is my life. I literally take shitty structures and create deals out of them, bring them to buyers to make magic. On my seller's end, I relieve them of their ruin and create the capital for them to transform their financial situations. Where ruin was once the bain of their existence now becomes their gift of capital gains. So why does my sanctuary look similar to the ruin in my deals?
This isn't a story about how I transformed my ruin into a sanctuary. This is an awakening, that I peddle the very thing I live in. I'm a renter with interests in purchasing the building I live in. My landlords are an amazing family, we've been family friends for 50 years. This building celebrated it's centennial this past May. It stands as a monument to the booming prosperity and bustle of constant Angeleno transformation. Its time that this building transformed itself unit by unit. Don't get me wrong, my landlords run a tight ship. They're fair, they keep up our building and keep our living spaces clean. Any time repairs need to be made they are done instantly or in a matter of hours. My landlords go above and beyond their call of duty. The magnitude of scope of transformation I envision is far beyond anything they could take on financially. I know exactly how much renovations cost, can estimate down to the cent and creative ways to find the funds to execute the task.
While I work on seeking out the funds to buy this building, I've been looking at renovations on Houzz. This site is like a beautiful, modern spin on the Real Estate Investors Association I'm a part of. This site is all of my contacts and their portfolios come to life! Check them out:
The goal is to rip out the Craftsman built in china cabinet/buffet hutch and cooking area stove. I want to open that entire space up and completely demo the kitchen to move the location of the sink, stove and cabinetry. I'd love to finally install a dishwasher so that I'm no longer busting suds. Imagine my chagrin when I'm washing dishes by hand and have to stop, dry my hands before evaluating deals that filter into my emails. A dishwasher would save me time and money. We need space in the dining room and kitchen, both should be open to each other. I have a nook in the kitchen I hardly use, a pantry too small to hold any amount of food of significance. Everything is awkwardly placed in the kitchen. My refrigerator sits in a corner in the DINING ROOM, yes the dining room. I don't use the built in china cabinet/buffet hutch for china. It is a bookcase/file cabinet/holiday gift wrapping storage. I won't miss that this monstrosity of architecture in the least to be honest. With so many plans, Houzz makes it easy to really envision something practical and doable for even the most difficult of spaces. I have more plans for my ruin's transformation into my dream sanctuary.
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