Hello to my dearest readers! I’m doing a slightly different post today that isn’t exactly full of new photos, but more so bringing up a discussion with you all.
This post is about how do you know if you’ve renovated too much? Not everyone out there who is flipping their home might need to know this, but if you plan to not be in your home long term this is a question you must ask yourself. Where and when do you stop improving a home? Well, the first thing you need to look at once you’ve bought your home is: What are the comps in the neighborhood? Did you spend too much on your home initially? If so, this will effect the bottomline.
Omaha for example has a crazy housing market, and it’s in favor of the seller. So if you didn’t buy your home prior to this year, you might want to take a step back and determine what you really want (and have you been approved for your max bid). The professional home flippers are crazy experienced, crazy good, and crazy fast. This is in no means meant to be taken into offense, but a lot of home flippers will leach onto a house as soon as they see a potentially great buy. Now the question is, are they wanting to get into a bidding war? Well if anyone can afford it and really wants a house it’s going to happen.
AJ and I visited a home that was selling far below the value of the neighbor’s homes, and that’s because it needed a lot of work. This home had 6 offers within the first couple days, over 50 showings, and one majorly successful open house. I can guarantee you that home went into a bidding war and the seller got way more than their asking price.
Alright so back to where I was. Once you have your home and you’ve looked at the comps, you need to figure out your spending room. AJ’s parents bought this home first, and AJ rented it while in college. Once I moved in a little over 2 years ago is when we started flipping the home. AJ owns the home now, but we have been doing renovations ever since right before I moved in.
What were the first things we tackled and how did we manage the budget?
- Paint – The house needed it because it was this nasty yellow-tan paint.
- Flooring – We went with a lighter flooring because we knew dark wood was hard to keep clean, courtesy of my Aunt and Uncle for putting dark in theirs. So we found flooring that was reasonably priced (AKA not $20 a square foot) from Costco (I still see it for sale there from time to time).
- The entire kitchen – Alright so this wasn’t cheap but we did a quality and cheaper kitchen flip. We bought pre-made cabinets from Home Depot and AJ built custom ones where we needed them. AJ and I painted these ourselves and it was honestly a fun time. To look back now is just crazy to think about.
We also got the pre-made countertops and installed these ourselves. If you can install countertops yourself you save A LOT of money. Thankfully AJ and his dad knew how (as always, don’t do something you are unsure of or uncomfortable doing, safety first!).
You can check out of few of the cabinet pieces we bought by shopping the photos below:
- A light make over on the main floor bathroom. This included a new vanity, paint, and we extended the floors into this room. Nothing too major, and of course AJ custom built the vanity. We plan to upgrade this bathroom very soon with a new shower, tile floors, shiplap wall and more.
We decided to go with a farmhouse sink and found a great deal on Amazon. This made building the vanity a heck of a lot easier because we only had to drill a small hole in the countertop. You can shop the sink we got here:
So as you can imagine this was a little bit of a hefty makeover in a short period of time, but we made things work and had help. If you’ve noticed one thing with this…we focused on the big pieces. We were not worried about small things like the decor side of things or textured walls. We focused on the big renovations that were necessary to get things rolling. I’ll make a future post on our kitchen with the before and afters, so stay tuned to see what that kitchen REALLY looked like.
AJ and I had help with determining what was a good and reasonable buy until we were able to build up experience and knowledge on home flipping. A few tips for you to keep in mind if you are at this same stage in a home you are flipping (not your dream home!):
- You do not need the expensive Sherman Williams paint. We have used Behr throughout our house and we absolutely love it. It’s about half the cost.
- Really think hard about if you need to put in those marble countertops you want so bad. In some neighborhoods this is a must. In ours it would be out of place (for the kitchen).
- When you pick out your flooring and budget for that, make sure you remember the pad cost. We bought flooring that already had the pad and this saved a lot of time.
- Lastly, do your research. Do not, and I mean do not impulse buy anything. Menards often has sales, as does Home Depot. We waited for the cabinet sales, waited for the 11% off rebate, and more. Patience.
Fast forward two years and we have almost completely renovated this home. The second floor has been completely redone, the main floor has a couple things left, and we need to fix up the garage a little from a paint perspective. After that we stop any updates because at that point we will lose money. How did we determine this? Go back to your comps and look at what you paid. Figure what you want to make on the house and then you’ll come up with your budget.
I hope you have all enjoyed see a few snaps from when we started renovating! I will continue to post more room specific renovations, but if you want to know about anything in particular please let me know!