PIMP MY CRIB
I’m an avid watcher of home improvement shows. Curb Appeal, Property Ladder, Pimp my Crib; I watch them all. One of my favorites is “Flip this House.” Every time I watch it I tell my wife that I’d like to quit my job and start flipping houses. After all, I’ve changed a light bulb or two in my lifetime, I’m sure that provides me with the experience and skill set I need to do major home renovations.
Well, a few months ago I got my wish. No, I didn’t quit my job, but I did get to flip a house.
When my wife and I got married she owned a cute little 1500 sq ft. three bedroom, two bath home on five acres located in the middle of BFE (google it if you’re not familiar with the acronym). In fact, it is so far out in the country that she thought I had stood her up on our first date because I was an hour late to pick her up. This is because I turned back at least twice on my way there because I was certain NO ONE lived that far from actual civilization. When we got married I moved her into the big city, and her mom moved into her house. Fast forward six and a half years and her mother has gotten to the age that living in a house only accessible by pack mule was not the best idea. Her mom decided to move into a mother-in-law suite at my wife’s sisters and we decided to sell the house.
We asked a real estate agent that goes to our church to come by and take a look at the property and tell us what we needed to do to get it ready to sell. She came out, took a look around, took us aside, and with pity in her voice gently explained that our house appeared to have been built by a troop of blind monkeys, and not only that, but they appeared to have been a troop of blind monkeys with bad taste.
This is not a reflection on my wife. She has great taste, but the people who built the house did not. For example, all of the countertops were a shade of periwinkle so bright that they and the Great Wall of China are the only two man made objects visible from space.
Our agent stopped just shy of telling us to tear down the house and start over, but she did give us quite a list of things to do. Armed with only a Home Depot Credit Card and no idea what we were getting ourselves into we started on her list. We began on Memorial Day weekend. After 14 hours days every weekend, and several evenings during each week, we finished the list on Labor Day Weekend.
I won’t go into everything we did to the house, but I can say that there was not a single surface in the house that was not replaced, repaired, repainted, or refinished. Some of this work proved to be quite difficult. For example; all of the doors and trim in the house were stained pine. Our agent suggested that all of the doors and trim needed to be “bone” white and the walls needed to be tan. Do you know how many coats of paint it takes to change stained trim to white trim? It requires 47 coats of Kilz and 11 coats of paint. Our agent also suggested that all of the popcorn ceilings be taken down and the drywall on the ceilings be patched, sanded, and painted. This makes the people scraping off the popcorn texture look like they have been sandblasted with baking flour.
One thing the people on Flip this House don’t talk about is what I call the “spiraling remodel vortex of death.” This is how it works: I was going to simply put new, more subtle, Formica over the existing laminate on the bathroom vanities. Since I had never done this before and my router skills are a little uncertain I was looking for alternatives to this idea. While making my 932nd trip to Home Depot I found some beige Granite vanity tops with built in sinks on sale. I decided this would save me lots of time and money (You see it coming don’t you?). When I got them to the house I discovered that the two vanities were not the same size. The one in the master bath was three inches wider than the one in the hall bath (the one I had measured). This meant that I had to completely tear the master bath vanity apart and cut three inches out of it so the granite vanity top would work. Of course this meant that the doors no longer fit so I had a custom cabinet shop build new doors for it. The old vanity tops had the sinks on one end of the vanity and the granite tops had the sinks in the middle. Of course this meant I had to completely re-plumb the sinks. It also meant that the top drawer in both vanities would no longer slide in all the way without hitting the new sink. The old sinks had faucets that were on four inch centers. The new sinks required faucets on eight inch centers. This is when I discovered that faucets built on eight inch centers cost more than a hospital stay after open heart surgery. I finally found a set that were discontinued at a reasonable price. My wife told me to get silver fixtures. The ones I bought were brushed nickel. The rest of the fixtures in the bathrooms are chrome. That’s all silver, right? Apparently not, because my wife took me aside, and talking the way one might talk to a severely mentally handicapped person, explained that they did not match. This meant I had to replace all of the remaining bathroom fixtures with new brushed nickel fixtures.
My attempt to save time and money cost me 80 hours and a thousand dollars.
The story does have a happy ending. We finished the house and listed it, and…. (drum roll please)….it sold in four days, and we made a little money. In today’s housing market, I consider that a slam dunk.
So…am I going to quit my job and start flipping houses?
Not only no…HELL no.
Here are a few pictures of the finished project:
