I'm looking at an old church to convert, need advice

[Joshua Springman]

My wife and I are looking for our first property, and we found an old church for sale by owner for 38k cash. We don't have much cash saved up, definitely not that much. We've looked at it and structurally it looks good, the issue is that as is, we most likely can't get a mortgage on it mostly because there's no heat, and there's no bedrooms yet. We made a list of what we'd want to do to it before reselling it, and the contractor we had walk through quoted us about 50k to get everything done. The houses in the area are all around the 150-200k mark. We think this would be a good first property to try to flip, we just don't know how to proceed. My father-in-law has some experience flipping houses and owns a few single family properties he rents out. He thinks it would be a good idea, just quite a bit of work. I'm fine with the work, I just don't know how to go about paying for it. Is this something worth pursuing?