Week 11 of Self-Employment

We are still alive and kicking! No new units rented. Calls and new tenant traffic has been slow. I think there is something wrong with our Craigslist ad. I will be playing with that next week to get things right.

Most of the week was made up of paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. The good news is that we are only 2 weeks away from getting our appraisal back and hopefully we can get going on the Hudson project (boat and RV storage). We have financial approvals from everyone assuming the appraisal comes back higher than the project construction costs.

We are waiting on our building plans to get reviewed by the state. That is probably going to take 6 weeks or so but we have to get site grading started first anyhow. Which brings me to the most exciting news of the week. We got our DNR approval for the site grading work so we are ready to start the site work. On Thursday, plans and specs went out to the grading contractors for dirtwork bids. I'm very excited for that. I am a bit worried about our timeline. We want to start in Mid August so we can start the first couple buildings by Sept 1, but that is dependant on the grading contractors' schedules. I'm holding a prebid meeting on July 10th so I'm hoping to get a bit more feedback at that time. Everyone seems to be pretty busy on this side of the Twin Cities.

As far as Houlton Storage Garages LLC go, like I said, it was a slow week for our remaining units. Some interest but mostly be folks that want to use the units for something other than storage.

I was able to get the new tractor running and did a little parking area grading to fix all the piles of gravel from winter plowing. Brick was pretty excited to come with and ride the tractor. Fun stuff. I also figured put the rear mower for the tractor too so I think I'm ready to do some cleanup of the area around our stormwater ponds.

Building 5 funding was approved so we are moving forward with that work. We do need to wait until August to get our plans reviewed by the State. The good news is that there is a document called a request for early start that allows you to get a permit and start construction but puts the risk on the owner if the State takes issue with any of the plan. Seeing that we've built a building like this already, it's not much of a concern. It only allows for foundation construction but that should buy us enough time to get the State approvals.

We just hope our grading contractor can get out there before the end of July so our concrete guys can get rocking and rolling. Should be a fun couple of months! Can't wait!

We rounded out the week getting insurance quotes and working through some errors by our insurance company. Hopefully we can get that ironed out. If love to be able to just "set it and forget it". This is probably my least favorite topic in the business world. Sorry no amazing pics or footage of Angie and I beating our heads against the desk while we fill out paperwork.