So I've always had the real estate itch, and I even joked with Justin once earlier in the year about buying an investment property with the cash we had on hand from selling our home. I wasn't too serious and he wasn't hearing it. After talking to a friend over the summer about her plans to start buying and flipping properties, the bug hit me again. I talked Justin into it since we had enough money sitting in the bank since we still hadn't started construction on our house. We looked at buying from bank auctions for about a month but didn't see any really good deals, so decided to shift our focus to MLS and look at homes we could actually see before buying (unlike the auction homes). This little gem was a probate sale and we put an offer on it within 2-3 days of it being listed. We paid $113,000 for it. It was a 1960s era home, 3bed 2 bath, 1092s.f. in Tempe that hadn't seen a single upgrade since the decade it was built. Did I mention it was FILTHY??? Absolutely disgusting. It was a great layout though and we saw potential.
Master shower, the wall on the right was completely rotted through after years of mold and moisture.
wall in the master bedroom on the other side of the shower.
Kitchen
Main bathroom. No vanity lights except a built in one on the small mirror. No shower, just a bathtub in awful condition and the toilet was brown, inside and out. Grease stains on the walls EVERYWHERE. Holes everywhere, bugs everywhere. Our kids referred to it as the "old stinky house" and didn't even like going inside. I didn't blame them. I felt like I had to wash my hands every time I left the place.
We spent just over a month renovating. We were tired, burdened, stressed, and sick of this house!!! But when it was finally done, it was adorable. Even Brighton and Adaira said they would actually live there.
All we did on the front was put in new columns and paint the door and inside of the windows. We hired a landscaper to clean up the front and back yard.
On the inside we completely redid everything. Scraped off the popcorn ceilings, fixed lots of drywall, reframed and drywalled both bathroom walls, new fixtures, new floors, new windows, new paint, new electric to allow installation of ceiling fans in all rooms, new kitchen and appliances. It seriously became such an amazing little house. I would've loved it as a newly wed or married student.
New master bath
New hall bath
New living room
New kitchen
Minimally staged for selling
I loved this dining area chandelier btw.
It turned out to be worth all the hard work. We put about $32k into the project, and listed it high and had a contract on it within 5 days. Netted a profit of about $23k on it. Wished we had thought of doing something like this sooner so we could have flipped 1-2 more homes and made some more money before tying all our funds up on construction of our own house! It is so much easier and affordable to do something like this with cash than having to have banks involved.
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