I am writing because your interactions with inspectors are interesting to me, in that they are very different from my experiences in Chicago. What you’ve heard about the Chicago inspectors are true – they can be very corrupt. However, these days there have been a lot of busts (Federal indictments all around) so they are less corruptible. I have always played by the rules and have always got permits, which is one of the most difficult tasks I have ever partaken. Sounds great in Atlanta that your contractor can just run to the Buildings Dept and pick up a permit. Here we have to wait at Zoning at 6 am (line starts developing around 5), and then have to get into Buildings Dept where we then have to work with underpaid unhappy Project Managers that recently saw their friends goto jail. I a glad that these are the Buildings Dept ppl that are good and didn’t goto jail, but geez louise, make our permit system more like Atlanta!

Love the blog, keep up the great work.

We’ve been pretty lucky that we always seem to have just enough furniture to fit into the houses we have open. We currently have two full sets and a half-set of furniture, and they always seem to be being used. That said, we have some extra storage space in our basement (of our personal house), and can use that if necessary.

Sometimes we’ll let a house sit without furniture for a week or two if we think that furniture will be ready to move from another house in the near future, and we will occasionally move furniture out of a house before closing (but after we have a contract), if we really need it; of course, there’s a risk of doing that if the contract falls through, but we’ve been lucky so far.

Also, while we haven’t had to do it yet, we’re not against renting storage space for furniture or to keep materials in inventory. We’ve found that the discounts we can get by buying materials in bulk (see my article on getting discounts at Home Depot), will more than cover the cost of renting a storage space, and also cuts down on the need to keep running back and forth to the hardware store.

Just stumbled upon your blog as I have been contemplating starting up my own rei business. Great blog with tons of good info! Quick question, where do you store all your staging furniture? Do you rent a storage unit or just have a massive house with lots of empty rooms? Hopefully you haven’t already addressed this question elsewhere on your blog……thanks.

Lisa G.