15. Rehabbing For Big Profit

Rehabbing For Big Profit!

Rehabbing for a big house flip profit is an art I tell you! Here is the trick. When every other investor tries to fix things as cheap as possible, with predictable materials we take the other route.

If you were doing a walkthrough considering to buy a house. You see nothing special, nothing that you can immediately tell they went out of their way to build it with love… why would you get excited or confident the house will last?

But you enter a house and you see handcrafted cabinets, brilliant/clever design/layout, bathrooms are nothing standard, nothing off the shelf, you will beyond a doubt feel confident the repairs were done right, not quick fixes.

Yes sure, but it cost a ton to do that!

Nope you munchkin, not necessarily. Here is what we did… read on!

Weather sucks monkey butt!

Well more delays. As of now, we are scheduled to put the house on the market by  April 3rd!

The good news, however, is that all is really coming along smoothly. I had no idea picking materials, colors, and such would be so damn difficult!

We went shopping!!

So now we need to plan things super tightly to make it. Rain tomorrow so we can not finish siding. So we will start trimming and finish tiling. Also, the basement floor is going in!

If you have never done a flip before, I will tell you. The feeling of new “stuff being delivered on a huge truck is just awesome!

So here are the new goodies!

So we went to work to beat this crappy weather. One team is siding, the other painting, while yet another is laying tile.

A monkey with half a brain can paint so I decided to do tile to learn the trait.  Yeah.. well… truth be told, painting is hard… friggin hard, and I hate it. I already did a few rooms and I had enough. Hence the tile choice.

WAY too many choices!

It is so damn hard to pick tile and paint colors. It seems everything I find disgusting is in right now. Subway tiles, greys, and boring! I like earthy colors.. but do I want a beautiful awesome home or do I want to sell it fast?! Both !! So I decided to compromise. One bathroom (common) will have nasty subway tile.. while the other (master) will be well… more my style.

Common Bathroom:

We decided to go to a boring and safe route. Ugly grey tiles for floors, while vanity, and subway tile.

We have a shower and a tub here. As we already have a walk-in shower we decided not to tile the walls all the way up (as I hate subway tile). There originally was a full wall there but cutting it in half makes the bathroom look bigger, brighter and more “Custom“.

Master Bathroom:

Now I am really happy about the choices we made here.

Remember the original floor plan?

 

The master bath was as wide as a bathtub. Seriously. So there was a bathtub against that back wall. You can see how little space there would be left for the proper pot. Needless to say, there was only a single sink vanity.

Changes made:

We removed the hallway to enter the room and removed the closets at the front entrance of the house. Removing those closets gave is a nice shortcut to the master bed. That original hallway we claimed for the bathroom and made that a (pretty big) walk-in shower. We plan to go pretty custom on this.

We put our negotiating skills to work looking for tile. Keep in mind that when we had our contractor budget it all, he budgeted for 2 dollars/sq ft in tile, and nothing custom.

So the challenge was how can we still get a super custom look while staying within budget.

So we tried to cut as much cost in tile and wherever we could. My motto, Kitchen and Bathrooms need to be jaw-dropping. Kitchen is no big deal. With the open floorplan and that fireplace, the moment anyone opens the front door they will be happy…

The bathrooms however.. the other story. The house is an older built. Back then no one cared for larger baths.

Regardless, here is what we did so far.

Because it is a custom shower, we have to be careful doing it all right. A leak further down the road would be disastrous and expensive to fix. So we took a triple precaution. First, the thick plastic tarp, as you can see above.

Next,

We sealed it again after we put the cement down with some sort of rubber compound as you can see he-ah below.

Before we did all that, we laid down the tile, (I don’t think anyone would be able to resist). Alas. her is what it will look like…

Seriously, how awesome is that!?

Wait, let’s look at it again!

Friggin BAM!

I have a few more surprises planned for the bathroom, but you have to wait for those. Regardless.. you walk into a bathroom and you see that floor. Will you say “Oh dang it,  soo predictable”… I think not!!

So wait, what were we talking about int the beginning again?

Oh yeah, Rehabbing For Big Profit (the clever way how to put my keyword in the body huh) 😉

So how do you do Flip For Huge Profit (see what I did again? the same keyword but with other words 😉 😉 ) without increasing the original budget?

Easy. Skimp on where you can skimp and flash up where it matters.

Shower floor, we used very nice looking porcelain tile 18″ x 18″.. yup Earth colors in the master. $4.99 /sq.ft. But we asked nicely and he gave it to us for $2/sq.ft. WIN!!

So now, the wall tiles do not need to be made out of “Unobtanium“. No one is going to bang their skull into it so it can ceramic…. ahum.. very cheap ceramic. Why? because with the other surprises I have planned, believe me, no one will even look at the wall tile (ceramic). SO all the money we save skimping out on those parts we put into other parts that will completely overshadow the cheap wall tile.

That boizz und frauleins, is how we do it.

Apply this to the master bedroom, Kitchen, Basement, exterior, and before you know it, every room someone enters and their yaw will drop all over again!

Next Up:

Contractor Took Money And Ran

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