Week 26 of Self Employment:

I've been waiting for this post. I'm officially 6 months into this amazing, great, scary, frustrating, annoying, horrible, maddening, positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, productive, wild, and just about every other superlative in the book, experiment. What a roller coaster it's already been. The tough days make the good days that much better.
I still get a mini-high every time the phone rings and again when we rent out a storage unit. It's such an amazing confirmation our ideas and of the work that's been put in. Okay, enough of the mushy stuff.
Houlton Storage Garages: Building 5 is finally seeing some progress as you can see in the pictures attached. We have had a lot of interest lately for the new heated building so it can't go up fast enough. I think this one might be fully rented prior to completion. I think we only have two units left. Crazy. But with that, some of our current tenants will be leaving their unheated space to move into these new heated spaces. So we'll still have something available for a while yet, I'm sure.
This week we also split one of our large units into two smaller units. We're already seeing interest in those. It's just what people want so we'll do our best to accommodate.
We rented out one small unit and took on 3 group storage renters for the winter. We're trying something a little different this winter. We had a customer/friend of ours contact us asking for winter storage. I thought, hey, why not, we'll just advertise it on a per foot basis and see how it goes. So far so good. $3.75/foot/month is a cheaper option for some customers that only have a boat or RV to store for the winter so we're experimenting and helping some folks out. Kind of fun....

Storage Garages of Hudson: Interest has been strong there also. We are at 5 units rented which is a far cry from expecting to be full by this time. We had the shortest renter we've ever had (24 hours). Apparently they found something else, which isn't a problem at all, just a bit unique for us. So we added two renters and lost one. We have a few in the queue too so we'll see how we fair by the end of next week. Still quite a bit of interest. Let's hope that continues.

Other: Still working on the residential development project. It feels like we are getting close to pulling the trigger. We are getting some mixed reviews on the price per lot but others seem to think it's right where it should be. So we'll see if we can get this deal done to do a bunch of twin home lots. Without going too deep into it, I'd personally like to be able to build some 3 beds 2.5 bath twin homes for the masses. We'll see if we can make it happen.

I'm officially a Self Storage mentor for the Self Storage Investing group. I'll be helping others get into their very own self storage facility on a consulting basis. I couldn't be more excited to do this. Should be fun. I really don't have much to lose.

I may also get involved with a bit of railroad consulting too. It might be an opportunity to make a little vacation money. Or tax proceeds for Uncle Sam. Either way, it's a win!

Until next week. (Holy cow - 6 months!)