Accepted Offer!

We have an accepted offer on the investment property we put a bid on, now it's ours if we want it. The excitement in the household has been pretty overwhelming. Had our first meeting with the fellow investors yesterday and started mapping out the plan for the first couple of weeks after closing. Lots of planning, material research (flooring, tile, etc.), calculating (cost and budgeting) going on this weekend. The work begins next week.

Being a computer nerd I've employed a few systems to help everyone stay on the same sheet of music in regards to tasks, budgeting, actual expenses and cash flow. Since this is a two team deal we are handling investor cash separately, two accounts and paying from both for various aspects of the project. That made the need for a system that lets us track the expenses for both parties and the total amount of funds available rather important. It is pretty hard to find a web based double entry accounting system with image upload of expense receipts for a reasonable price.

I compromised a bit and went with www.skyclerk.com it has great support for expense file uploads and a pretty easy to use interface and the ability to tag income / expenses. It's doesn't meet the double entry criteria but it does allow based on tags to tell who spent the money which is good enough for now. It could use more extensive reporting and better handling of exporting data, both of which I'm sure will come with time.

For budgeting I'm using a pretty involved google spreadsheet that tracks the unit cost and quantity of various items. It does the math to figure out how many units of each thing we need to cover the square or linear footage I have calculated for the various jobs. This spreadsheet is shared out with the groups and I've subscribed to change notification so I can stay in the loop if anyone adds / changes a line item. I'm tracking things all the way down to the elbows I'll need to plumb the replacement tile shower we will install. I know there are some pretty good (and expensive) software packages out there for this purpose but I'm cheap :) That may change if this project goes really well...

For planning out what we are going to do to the space I've finally broken down and started learning sketch-up. I've made a mostly 2d layout of the house with the 3d exceptions being various things i'm attempting to layout in the space. Cabinets, appliances, bathroom fixtures and the things that stick into the space and eat up floor space like closets and fireplaces that affect my flooring square footage numbers. Sketch-up has a really nice area feature that calculates the square footage of the rooms for me as long as my area measurements are accurate.

The final piece of software I'm employing is another web based offering Clocking IT. I've used it in the past for my day job and it's actually a better fit for this than it was in my day job. I really like the dependency tracking, time allocations for each task and automatic gantt chart generation based on the task duration and due dates. It's already helping me find problems with my proposed schedule for the first few weeks worth of remodeling tasks. One of the key things this offers over some of the other options that I found is the ability to have multiple assignees to a task. Most systems have a very narrow focus of what a task means. With construction you typically don't have a single person doing a job, it would be a heck of a task to roof a house by yourself or hang cabinets for example. I also like the fact that it has todo lists built into tasks, allowing you to keep the main part of the gantt chart clean but allows you to capture the details involved in a task at the same time.

I'll be sure to post lots of pictures and updates of the progress as time goes on, we go for the home inspection on Tuesday (6/28/2011) and will have a final go / no go meeting on the project by that evening. I'll take the before pictures on Tuesday and will start posting those on flickr and link to them from here.