by Gagner | Feb 18, 2015 | Latest Projects
In this video, we show you the next step in our Berkeley Victorian foundation replacement project. Previously, the foundation had been poured, and above it, the mud sill and shear walls have been built and anchored. Now, the construction of the cripple walls is next. Essentially this is plywood that is attached to the studs and shear walls, and helps to reinforce the entire foundation. Cripple walls are an important factor when seismically retrofitting a house, and help to provide the reinforcement necessary to making our house seismically sound. We hope you enjoy viewing the progress made on this...
by Gagner | Feb 10, 2015 | Residential Wholesaling and Flipping
This article is about finding house deals and helping home-owners that need to sell their house fast. There are many reasons why somebody might need to sell fast. I won’t be talking about why people need to sell quickly, rather sharing strategies on how to find these people. If you are in the fix/flip business, finding and working with distressed property owners directly can help eliminate significant costs associated with “finding deals”. Namely, I am speaking of agent sales commissions or wholesaler fees. Of course, many of the techniques to identify sellers do require some marketing expense. Here I would like to provide ideas on how you can find distressed properties, while helping homeowners that are in a situation to benefit from a cash buyer. If you are on a budget, there are many techniques that require more time and less money. Driving thru neighborhoods and writing down distressed looking properties is a start. Typically there are on-line resources that allow you to plug in an address or APN number to identify the homeowner is. Armed with a name and address, you can mail a letter stating that you buy houses for cash and are looking to buy in their neighborhood. You can create “I Buy Houses for Cash” signs from your own materials (or buy them from companies like www.cheapsigns.com). These ”bandit” signs are almost always effective at getting your phone to ring from all types of people. It is a little like finding a needle in a haystack, so be patient. Placing door hangers on pre foreclosure homes is another economical option (door hangers are very inexpensive to get printed). Title...
by Gagner | Feb 3, 2015 | Real Estate News
In our last video, we showed the placement of forms and rebar under our Berkeley Victorian house, where the original foundation had once existed. This new video shows the result of pouring the concrete foundation into the forms and then removing the forms after the concrete had cured. In addition, we have begun building the cripple walls above the new foundation/mudsill and below the girders and floor joists. We did this work along the length of both sides of the house, and now we will repeat the process at the front and back width of house and down the center length of the property. Some contractors may choose to lift the entire house to do the entire replacement at one time, but my contractor decided it was more economical to do it in two stages (probably because he would have had to subcontract out the lifting process. Hope you enjoy the progress on this Berkeley Victorian foundation...
by Gagner | Jan 27, 2015 | Volunteer Work
Bridge Equity Group recently had the pleasure of helping the local Habitat for Humanity team do construction work on their Silicon Valley project located at 1081 Palm St, San Jose. This house is a complete remodel sitting a mile away from the downtown. On this particular day, work was being done to prepare the roof for new shingles, as well as a complete seismic retrofit. We accomplished most of our goals, however there is much work that still needs to be done. I was assigned the task of trimming out the wood above the mudsill to make the wall surfaces flat. Once the wood surfaces were flush, we began mounting LPF4 brackets every 24 inches along the perimeter of the house. In addition to the LPF4 brackets, larger brackets were screwed into both the concrete foundation and mudsill every 36 inches. Finally, additional fixtures were mounted on top of the mudsill (and screwed in to the concrete foundation) to keep the house from lifting vertically in a quake. I am very confident that this house won’t go anywhere in the largest earthquake! What follows is a little history about this wonderful organization. In 1976, Millard and Linda Fuller founded Habitat for Humanity. The concept was to build homes for low-income families, where the families themselves worked alongside volunteers to construct their homes. The idea for partnership housing came from Koinonia Farm, a small, interracial, Christian community outside of Americus, Georgia that was founded in 1942. In this model, homes are not given to low-income families for free. Rather, families are provided no interest loans to help purchase...
by Gagner | Jan 18, 2015 | Real Estate News
Today, I would like to share a video of the foundation work being done on my Victorian home in Berkeley CA. This house was built in 1902 on a brick foundation. Although there were no major deficiencies in the foundation itself, we decided to replace it so that the buyer would have confidence in the foundation of our new renovation. This video captures how the house is being supported while the new foundation is being formed and eventually poured. In our case, we have supported two side of the house with large beams and 4×4 posts, while the original shear walls were removed. Next, forms were constructed to hold the vertical portions of the foundation structure, followed by rebar placed within the forms and base area. This is where the job stood at the time of the video. ...
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