House Hacking to Pay For Home Reno

[Nicole A.]

Hi fellow BPers! Today's been a lazy day and I've been lounging around watching all the fun house renovation/flipping shows, and it reminded me of my current house-hacking story that might be fun to share. Maybe it will help someone in a similar situation.

My husband and I have been in our personal home since 2009. Since then, we've done a lot of DIY renovation. While that was great, it took forever to finish even smaller projects. In fact, we've had undone projects ever since 2009. I got tired of living in a construction zone, and we've been positioning ourselves to move and turn the house into a rental property. We have plenty of equity and the house will be paid off in 7-8 years at our current rate. Recently, we had just renovated a rental property (using the BRRR method) and were pretty happy with the contractor we used. I wanted to hire them again to this time renovate our entire home (mostly, finish tons of half-done projects and re-do our cramped master bathroom).

The estimated price came in at $28,000...very close to my guess of $30K. Then there was our yard. We haven't done a thing for our curb appeal in all the years we've had the home. Over the past 3 or so years, we've lost a lot of ground-cover and topsoil due to more frequent and heavier rains. This cost came in at $13,000. So, that's $41K to dump into our home.

My husband didn't really want to do it because we'd never see that money back. It was unlikely it would increase the value by at least $41K. He was right, and I knew this. But I still felt we were in an interesting situation where our lack of desire/drive to do these projects ourselves was going to make it so we would one day have to scramble to hire and pay for the projects anyway when the opportunity/time came to move. I figured why not fix up the house now *and* enjoy it a bit ourselves rather than continue to live in a construction zone and then pay a bunch of money to finish the projects anyway just to have other people enjoy them.

But what about house-hacking, I thought? We have no kids and no pets (although if you're determined, kids nor pets should necessarily stop you from this either). We have 2 extra bedrooms that can fetch $800 *each* per month. We did house-hack for several years in the beginning usually to friends. I proposed that we hire out the renovation projects and then house hack again. If we choose to rent out both of the bedrooms for 2.3 years, it would pay off all $41K. In the end, this won him over. We technically would be using any (or very little) of our own cash if we let tenants replenish our reno cost cash.

So get creative! Maybe you don't have big renovations, but maybe you need to increase your savings or pay down debt. If you have an extra bedroom, let it make you some extra money! But the key is you must stick to your financial plan that made you house-hack in the first place. So don't increase your spending!