Complete Overhaul on a 1976 Split-Level!

[Hannah Krebs]

Hello All of BP!

Yesterday we finally hit the listing milestone for a live-in flip that was a whole year in the making.

We bought this 1976 split-level in a smaller town south of the Twin Cities in Minnesota last April. The family needed to move in a hurry so we were able to get a pretty solid deal on it with a purchase price of 171k. Consequently it was left in a fairly trashed state. They didn't clean out their dog's kennel (you can imagine what that looked like) and there were rotting vegetables strewn about all over! Here she is on the day we purchased.

And here are the new listing pictures as of yesterday.

The upstairs kitchen and dining room were separated by a load-bearing wall which made the space feel smaller than it actually was. Here is the kitchen and dining before.

We made the decision to remove the load-bearing wall and replace it with an island and a slide-in range. There are a lot bigger houses around us so we wanted to try to stretch the 1500 sq ft of the house as much as possible! The permitting process was fairly easy. I believe it was $80 plus free engineered drawings from the local Home Improvement store. We did the work ourselves. We removed the popcorn from the ceiling, painted, replaced cabinet fronts, and replaced the flooring with LVP throughout the whole space to give it a more modern feel. Here's how it turned out!

We did mostly cosmetics in the bathroom upstairs. The previous owners had painted over wallpaper so I had to scrape that down to sheetrock as well as remove popcorn from the ceiling. Here's the before followed by the after!

There were 4 legal and one semi-legal bedrooms in the house when we bought it. The semi-legal one was actually the downstairs living room that they had converted to a kinda-bedroom during their residency. We decided this made the relatively small basement feel extremely cramped and decided to convert it back, which involved knocking down an extremely heavy stone mantel that used to house a wood stove. Two days after our purchase the northeast bedroom flooded "for the first time ever" according to the sellers. We had to pay a professional to install drain tile and a sump pump which cost us $3,600 and was the most expensive part of the remodel. The other 3 bedrooms just needed paint and carpet! Here are the before and afters of the bedroom I remembered to take pictures of, including one of the flood and one of the bane-of-our-existence stone mantel.

Before:

Bedroom 1:

Living room (bedroom 2)

Bedroom 3 (hot pink and flooded. Double score!)

After:

Bedroom 1:

Living Room:

Bedroom 3 (no longer hot pink. No longer floods):

Bedroom 4:

Outside the house, our big project after cleaning up the free range compost was to replace the deck boards. The footers were just fine but the deck took up most of the usable space of the back yard. We decided to just strip it back some, replace the deck boards and railings and call it good! Here's the deck before and after.

All said and done the numbers look like this:

Purchase price: $171k

Misc Fees for Purchase: $5k

Remodel: Estimated $15k

=$191,000

List price: $240,000

Realtor Fees: $12,000

Estimated Misc Fees: $5,000

Profit Estimate = $32,000

Since we have lived in it the bulk of the time I'm not adjusting for holding costs. If I did took out the months we didn't live there it's about a $6,000 hold. In the mean-time we got to live in a nice neighborhood in a decent house! It was a fun and challenging DIY flip and we are hoping to provide a nice family with a move-in ready house.

Thank you for reading!