"Son, stocks may rise and fall, utilities and transportation systems may collapse. People are no damn good, but they will always need land and they will pay through the nose to get it ..."
I cannot offer you advice on any of this (without more information and besides, you haven't asked) but I will say that there was a time when wood floors were for poor people and wall to wall carpeting was a status symbol, so pull up a corner of the rug, you may have nice flooring already in place. If not, my inclination is towards vinyl planking instead of laminate flooring. To me, laminate is basically sawdust, held together with Elmer's Glue. Get it wet and it's ruined. Vinyl planking is (googles) maybe 4x as much, but it looks as good and is basically bulletproof.
Further unsolicited advice: Rent with option to buy is, for some people, just a way to sucker extra cash out of gullible people. And as odd and not to code (in most places if it doesn't have a closet it isn't a bedroom--how much would you pay for a 0 bedroom house) as it is, you could probably negotiate a better deal. I feel like this is Tom Sawyer, looking for someone to paint his fence. Last bit--and personal opinion--is that you're really at a disadvantage on a fixer-upper if you're not a handy person. To me, the money is made because I can do my own work. Case in point: I did have to pay someone to rewire a GFI outlet in the bathroom--those ones with a TEST and RESET button so you don't fry yourself. There was some unholy piggyback/daisy-chain wiring to the bathroom lights and fan and I couldn't cypher it. I mean, I probably could've, but I'd already wasted 4-5 hours on it and probably would've blown another day or so getting it wired up. In the end I wound up paying close to $300 to have an electrician wire up a plug. Took the bastard maybe 20 minutes. Really, it was the right choice, because if my time is only worth $10 an hour, I probably still saved myself money by paying someone , but it is a bitter pill to pay someone basically $1,000 an hour when you don't have $1,000 you want to just blow.
You might not have expected this -- you and I having had some fun going 'rawr' at each other, time to time -- but I've given your thoughts on this some due consideration, and I'll let you in on a little more info where it relates to the topic at hand. See, it's the damnedest thing, but it's my mother who floated this deal at me.
Little background: I cannot fucking
stand my family. Any of 'em. Why that is goes further than I'm going to divulge, so let's just leave it at this: bunch of uneducated dipshits -- what would the word be? "Backwoods"? "Country"? "Rural"? Put it this way: The Con I mentioned above about this Iowa town having jack shit in it by way of 21st century infrastructure? My mother and half brother think that's a
positive thing. Anyway, back on topic:
As for laminate flooring, I'm on the fence there. Apparently, all these little towns between Mason City and Iowa Falls are smack in the middle of the state's floodplain. Which means that if the flooring in this house is going to see water damage enough to ruin laminate, it's going to be water damage enough that it'd probably ruin any other kind of flooring, too. So the advice about vinyl planking > laminate is definitely appreciated -- obviously you know this kind of thing way better than I do -- but the more expensive option might or might not do me any good. I
will be looking into it, though, as far as other benefits, for example re: just daily wear and tear and how it stands up to that.
As far as the Tom Sawyer thing -- nehhhh, don't think so. See, my mother, for whatever fucked up reason,
likes to do this shit. That is to say, she'll buy an ancient, fucked up house for a nickel and pocket lint, make it habitable, then turn around and sell it and move on to the next fucked up ancient dump, rinse and repeat. She just likes fixing houses. Never have been able to figure out why. But whatever place she lives in, be it the swamp that is the Oregon coast or fuckin' OneStaleTurdburg, Iowa, there she is dragging my retarded half brother around to the oldest, dump-y-est-ass house and that's where they'll live, but only until it's marginally less dump-y -- then on to the next one. Okay, I shouldn't say David is retarded, it's Asperger's Syndrome, which is pretty fucking close. Boy has no volume control for some reason. You can be standing right next to him (if you can tolerate the smell) and he's talking at the top of his lungs like you're a football field away. Fuck. Have I mentioned I hate my family? Yeah.
Drifted off topic. Point is, it's not a Tom Sawyer. These idiots actually
like this home renovation shit. Problem is they only 'renovate' houses from a 1910 state to about 1974. Getting the place from 1974 to 2020, that's going to be all me. Some of that, like the flooring, I'll hire out just because I don't know how to do that, don't have the tools and materials to do that, and honestly just don't fucking
want to be bothered to do that myself. The rest can be worked around with furniture.
