Use a HELOC to purchase or wait to sell remodel

[Lonnie ADams]

My wife and I are looking to purchase our first House Hack. We currently own one house that has around 44k left on its mortgage and has a value of around 120k that we rent out with positive cash flow. We own another house out right that we are remodeling for about another year and its value is 250+. We are looking at what to do after we sell the remodel in the next 12-18 months. There is a home for sale that we are interested in because it already has an 1 bd. 1 ba. apartment set up in the basement and the upstairs is 3 bed. 1.75 ba. It is on the market for 250k, but we would not move into it until we sell our current house. We are waiting to sell our current house so we don't pay capital gains. We know we can't do a FHA loan so we would use about 25k in HELOC on the flip house to help with the 20% down and closing costs.

Basically, should we get into this house hack or do we wait until we can truly do the house hack.   We were thinking of purchasing it and rent out the upstairs and downstairs until we can move in.  Total rent would be around 1800/months if both units were rented out.