Road Trippin' and Rehabbin': Part 2
From last week’s post we shared all about our trip to Colorado. Our next stop on that trip was back to one of our favorite places… Minnesota!! It may sound like a random place to be one of our favorites but take a trip out to the Twin Cities and you will fall in love too :)
While in Minnesota, we were finalizing rehab plans with our contractor for a new property, and walking through another one we have under contract.
A New Flip
This property is probably the most unique flip we’ve had in that we should be able to restore some of the old character to the home. This is a home that fell way behind on taxes and was forfeited back to the state. As a result, it has been vacant and in complete disrepair for quite some time. The city categorizes vacant buildings as Category 1,2, or 3. This is considered category 2 which means the city is very involved in making sure everything is fixed up to code and done correctly… yay more red tape! We’ve worked with the city on another category 2 property with the same contractor in place and we are comfortable with the extra work this entails.
This will be a huge project as EVERYTHING needs to be redone. New electric, plumbing, HVAC system, kitchen, bathrooms, and rerouting some walls to make the flow of the house more suitable for the end buyer. Original quotes from multiple contractors came back to be over $100,000 in repairs, and at that point there wasn’t enough room to make things work with our budget. We were able to work with a contractor we’ve worked with before and made some adjustments to get our rehab costs down to about $80,000, which means we’re back in the game! In order to meet this budget we will need to get creative with some cheaper materials while still making the house look classy and higher-end. If you follow our instagram account (@ourflippingfamily) you can help us make some design decisions along the way!
We’re excited for all this house entails and can already envision the transformation that will take place. Check out this video to see the inside and see what we’re up against. We finally closed on the property last week and construction started Monday. Of course we will be sharing our progress along the way… hopefully there won’t be too many surprises!
A "Bear" of a Deal
The other house we have under contract is on Bear Ave, in a suburb of the twin cities. It’s in an awesome area that’s always in high demand and once people move there, they typically don’t leave. In fact, one of our challenges with this home is that there aren’t any homes on the same street that have sold recently, so trying to figure out what we can resell this one for has been an adventure (thank goodness for good realtors).
This home is a bit smaller than others we have worked on, and should be a pretty basic remodel. Unlike the other house, we won’t have to redo the major mechanicals, everything is mostly cosmetic. We will be taking down only one wall to open up the living area a bit more.
But it is never that easy, right? We do have some bigger issues to work out: the roof leaks in one area and the floors are uneven because of foundation settling, but overall this should be a pretty quick turnaround and something we should be able to tackle pretty easily. We are finishing up our inspection on this one to ensure we don’t miss any major issues--our biggest thing we are looking into more is that foundation to ensure it will not cause any future problems with the structure or getting a loan for our end-buyers. If something does arise, we’ll go back to the bank who owns the property and negotiate the prices accordingly. One thing we’ve learned is that no matter how simple a project may seem, you always have to do your due diligence to check for surprises and ensure the task ahead of you will work with your budget.
We had a good time on this trip and were grateful to be able to take the whole family. We were able to see some great friends and relive some of the memories we had while living out there. Bryndee (with Kade in tow) will be heading back out there in a couple of weeks to check on these projects and to ensure everything is moving along as planned. Hopefully by then we’ll be making good progress on the first project and will just be getting started on this other one.
If you are curious to see the progress on these projects as well as the other things we are working on, be sure to follow our pages on Facebook and Instagram (icons with links on the top of the page).
