First Solo Flip

[Brandon Siewert]

I bought our first solo flip in early October, listed for sale in mid November and now we're just waiting for our 2nd open house.  

The flip went pretty well.  Everything went pretty much as I expected with only a couple of minor surprises.  The biggest mistake we made was not having our materials suppliers in place, which took additional time.  The house was less than a mile from a a big box supplier, which we thought would be convenient, but what I discovered is that the big box stores don't necessarily keep the volume of what you need on the shelf and the lead times for even simple things like lights and sinks can range from a few days to a few weeks.  Rather than start our supply list over, we stuck with it and it was not a smooth process and through the process I also learned the savings by going to a big box versus local suppliers results in only a nominal to zero savings and not worth the extra hassle.

The biggest lesson learned is that compiling fixtures lists is time consuming and unless you're engaging a designer to spec materials and fixtures to be used, like I do on my commercial projects, you need to be better prepared than I was.