Making The Switch - Good News/Bad News on our First Flip House
Bad news: it took us approximately 7 months to complete our first home renovation and resale (flip). That’s just about 4 months too many LOL!
Good news: our profit was approximately $60,000 . Not too shabby indeed!
Bad news: we had to pay $14,000 in capital gains tax since we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to find another good flip option during the 2022 real estate boom. And, as it turns out, we were right. We’re still looking!
Good news: our partnership is still intact and we still all like each other. We’re family, so we kind of have too
Sooooo - Let’s take a look at a few of the Before and Afters! This is always my favorite part! It’s so cool to see the side-by-side comparisons.
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Before - Kitchen: If you can even call it that. The glass block breakfast nook was interesting though.
After - Kitchen - what a bright and sunny transformation! I love the gold hardware and the sputnik light (which we got from Facebook Market - SCORE!). We also removed 2 unnecessary doors to create additional cabinet and counter space.
Before - 1 car garage and laundry area:
After - newly created Family Room: we created a family room, mechanical room and laundry room out of the 1 car garage. The garage was pretty unusable anyway and a nice shed was out back so we thought this was a much better use of space.
Before - Upstairs area: This area was a diamond in the rough. It had a dilapidated door that walked out to a tired looking deck area.
After - Upstairs area: We had fun with this space turning it into the ultimate man cave with a mid century modern bar area and fireplace update while also making it work as a 3rd bedroom. The man cave must have worked because a single guy bought the place from us! The tired covered deck also received some love with a newly painted roof and exterior door.
Before - Back patio and yard: The yard was terribly overgrown, the shed was a mess (although surprisingly nice and clean inside) and the patio was totally cracked.
After: Backyard/Patio/Shed: It’s crazy what a few days pulling weeds and painting can do! We created a firepit area with adirondacks as well as a newly poured patio (which we had some luck with the city on and were able to get that done for a song) area. The shed was painted a fun black and white and we even added a window box to dial up the charm.
Before - Front: This is what sold us on purchasing this house, even though it was a complete mess, gutted, sad and lonely. The architectural features of the home were so cool, we couldn’t wait to bring her back to her original, even better, glory!
After - Front: We love how this turned out. The art piece with the modern house numbers was one of the doors we removed from the kitchen. We purchased a cool modern front entrance to replace the plywood doors that were covering up the garage area. Repainted the entire house and added some landscaping. All during construction people would stop in and talk to us about how they’ve always hoped someone would fix it up, they were so happy to see it and how it was turning out!
Some landscape lights and party lights on the deck set the stage for a wonderful first open house!
It was such a learning experience and so much fun to do. We can’t wait to do it again. We couldn’t have done it without the construction expertise of @CarriganConstruction so big shout out to Greg & Greg, the father/son duo extraordinaire. Hopefully we’ll be able to find our next diamond in the rough soon so we can add this sign back in the yard! Thanks Andy @caribee-sign for always making us look good with our signage. Check them out. For your signage and promotional product needs. Affton area by @9milegarden on Gravois.
