finite speck

What do I enjoy the most right now? I think one thing that's new for me that I'm enjoying learning about right now is vacation rental property. I have really liked marketing it. Figuring out how to set things up. Especially the social media and website stuff. Learning how to take and edit great photos of our properties. I've enjoyed creating logos for our properties. It's also been fun to interact with people online, although my brother-in-law does the majority of that. I'm just getting my feet wet since it's only been one year since we started this, but it's been very good so far. I've learned a ton. Like some of the best content that we've put out so far was a top ten list of restaurants in the area of Gulf Shores that we gave away on social. We had a huge amount of interest in that piece.  There's plenty to do to keep our properties top of mind for those that are thinking about a vacation and the things we could do are endless.

When do you start a new home project? Do you wait until your cash is in a good place or do you do it when you have more time to devote to it? How do you prioritize what should be done? We have a few more things than we thought we might have this year. For one we want to paint the outside of our house. We need to plant grass seed in the backyard. We need to do some landscaping at least in the front yard and mulch in the back. Then inside the house. We need to renovate our master bathroom because of a leak in our tile floor. In the basement, we want to add a 5th bedroom for guests when they come. We also need to do some repair drywall work where we fixed a basement wall that was leaking outside. I think I placed those all in the order that we want to do them as well. If we get all of that done it will be a busy spring, summer, and fall it feels like. The thing is I think we thought we were getting close to being done with home projects.

Today is a new day. Will I waste it? Will I maximize it? How will I spend it? Today is Saturday. Sometimes it's a day of projects. Sometimes it's a day with family. Sometimes it's a busy day and sometimes there's not a lot going on. I'm just thinking about how I even qualify if a day is a good day or a bad day. I love to accomplish things, like a project, but I also have 3 little kids and there's plenty that can be done with them as well. A good day could be teaching my kids something. Like working with my oldest to learn how to read... not that it will happen in one day, but just working towards it. A good day could be visiting my grandparents that live a block away and spending time with them or spending some time with other family today. We think about our time a little like money. We talk about how we spend it or waste it. We each only have so much of it and then it's gone.

Just keep going. That's been my approach to social media for our vacation rental properties. Although, I have slacked off on our first one because we're booked all the way through November of 2020. So it feels less urgent than our new property that still has a lot of weeks to fill at this point. I'm trying to have 3 posts ready per week that are scheduled out ahead of time. There are tons of websites, posts, and videos that will tell you how to do it and claim that certain times work best, but I don't know how true they all are. I think you've got to just start going and really look at your own data and what it tells you as you keep trying more things.

It can be so easy to get scammed these days. A couple days ago I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and I saw something about a giveaway at ALDI that someone else I knew had liked and commented on. Without thinking I went ahead and liked it and commented on it as well and then proceeded to tell my wife about it. Upon seeing it she said, "That's totally a scam." I looked it up and she was right. Fortunately, I didn't give my information in the online form as well to get the free giveaway, but there were tons of people that were liking the fake ALDI Facebook account. It should have been obvious because ALDI never does anything like that. Plus, me being a graphic designer I should have noticed the rough Photoshop work on the box with the old ALDI logo. But I didn't. All I can say is be on the lookout. If it sounds too good it probably is.

Ever-changing. How do you keep up? Facebook had over 58,000 employees as of December 2020. I have no idea what that many employees are doing between Facebook's different entities, but that's a lot of people. When I thinking about keeping up and things always changing I was. thinking specifically of Facebook and the software changes that seem to roll out all the time. It does make the platform better, but it's hard to know the best way to do things because there's always a new way. I do create posts for our rental properties and we typically post on Facebook and Instagram to our business accounts. I think I've figured out a way to use the Facebook business account area to get our posts scheduled for both Facebook and Instagram, so I don't have to do it the morning of or during the day when I'd like for them to happen anymore. You can always just schedule them in the normal area of Facebook as well, but there's a new area under Publishing Tools called Crea

In this broken world there will always be things that need fixing. Just yesterday our double stroller had a tire that got a hole in it, so we'll have to replace it. Our tile floor in our main bathroom shower has a pinhole in it so water ends up in the basement, so we'll have to fix it. Nothing lasts forever. Those that create things try to give what they create as long a life a possible, but there's an increase in cost the longer that something will last typically.  The only thing that is made to last forever is our soul. God created each of us to last forever. To spend eternity with Him. In a world that is redeemed. In a world that isn't broken and that doesn't have things in it that break. Jesus is the one that redeemed our brokenness by being fully God and fully man and being sinless. He paid the payment for our sin upon the cross. He died for our sin and rose again, fully alive. He conquered death. This payment paid for our sin if believe in Him and turn from ou

There is a skill to introducing yourself to others. To being friendly. To some, it comes more naturally than to others. We're trying to work with our oldest on introducing herself to people she doesn't know as she gets ready for kindergarten. She can be pretty shy and can easily sit back and just observe. That's what happened yesterday with her when I could tell she wanted to go play with her neighbor girlfriends, but they had other friends over. So, she just watched them from across the street. I finally told her she had to go inside and my wife talked to her about introducing herself and being friendly. So my daughter decided she would go out and introduce herself to them and practice. She did great. We just have to push her to do it.  It's uncomfortable to talk to people that we don't know until we do it and then it's not. The only way we'll get good at it is to do it. I think we'll be trying to do this more with our kids. I think it's a great ski

We were made to share with others. Why is it that when we have something in common with someone else it's so easy to talk about it? We want to share our experiences and ask questions about theirs. I had this happen yesterday when a coworker approached me a few weeks back and asked if I'd be willing to get together and talk about our vacation rental property experience. So we got together and talked about all kinds of stuff related to buying a place and getting it ready to rent. We had some of the same pain points, but we also have experienced a lot of the payback that a vacation rental property can provide. It was fun. This also gets me thinking about getting together with others for me. With me, usually, there's an agenda. It's rarely hey let's just get together and chat about life. I'd like to push myself to just have some time getting together with other guys where it's just to see how they're doing, to form relationships. To do it because I care, not

Today you can basically have your own "show" that you can syndicate out to many people through the social media outlets that are out there. Between Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube you can reach a lot of people. My familiarity with these grew a lot through my current employer as for a while I handled all of the postings that happened on these platforms. That's not the case anymore, but now I'm using them for our rental properties and I believe it makes a difference. The big key with any of them though is you have to stay active, meaning continuing to post things in order to gain traction with your audience and gain more followers. I've chosen to mainly focus on Facebook and Instagram for our vacation rental properties, creating their own accounts on each platform and supplementing posts with my personal account and the other members of our LLCs accounts. I'd like to post more to Twitter, Linkedin, and even YouTube, but it means also staying

I like routine. I like getting up early and making a cup of coffee. I like sitting on the couch with a blanket over me and a pillow behind me while I read and write in the morning. I've missed this over the last 2 weeks and it feels good to get back to that. The comfort of home. I also missed my kids and wife so much while I was gone. Even the craziness of our life with three little ones!

I think this may be the longest amount of time since I started blogging that I haven't blogged. I have to say I've missed it, but the last couple of weeks with all the work on our newest rental property made it really hard to keep going with a post every morning. It was also hard to decide to start doing this again over the last few days back home with tons of emails to get caught up on and just getting back into life at home. We did it though. It took us about a week longer than expected, but we finished The Little Lady in Gulf Shores, Alabama. My brother-in-law, sister, and I had a lot of long days last week getting everything pulled together. Some days we were working 16 to 17 hours. We had things like the wrong size appliances that we had to return and purchase new ones. We had appliances that were badly scratched that had to be returned. We had the challenge of not having a truck and needing to have our maintenance guy run these appliances around for us. We had to go to Pe

We got a lot done yesterday on our new rental property, The Little Lady. Starting out the first few hours it felt like we were just spinning our wheels though. All of us owners were running all over the coast trying to get ahold of materials, including windows in Pensacola, Florida because we found out really quickly that the windows that were on the house were horrible.  We also decided to totally gut the bathroom, which wasn't on the list and we found out the day before that we were going to have to do work on the roof. We're over our budgeted amount, but I think we'll be ok for the year still... according to Chad. The biggest thing we got done was getting all the windows replaced yesterday evening. It rained almost all day long and it's been cold. I made 3 trips to Home Depot and I've got at least one trip already scheduled for the day today. We also gutted the bathroom yesterday. All the wiring got run for our mini-split (heat/ac).  Today, we're hoping to ge

I've been working with my brother-in-law just in enough to experience his lists now for home improvement projects and they are long and they are ever-changing. We got our list going last night for this renovation project and I'll just say I'm glad I've got a brother-in-law that knows home improvement because we'd be lost without him.  We'll see how the day goes today and what we're able to get accomplished!