Best way to handle building materials for rehabs?

[Josh Ridener]

Hope everyone is well. I wanted to start by saying thank you so much for everyones help and your contributions to BiggerPockets! My name is Josh Ridener and I am flipping houses in the Los Angeles area. BiggerPockets really helped me get started and its been a great adventure so far.

There is one thing that I am really struggling with, that I’d like your advice on. My first flip, I did an all-inclusive bid with my contractor, that included labor and materials. The issue I ran into was the materials that he wanted to use, didn’t always fit into my idea of the design or quality. This caused me to have to spend quite a bit of money out of pocket to ‘upgrade’ to those materials. As a side note, none of the materials were extravagant or very expensive.

The second flip I did, I decided to purchase all of the materials myself. Except for plumbing, electrical, lumber and drywall. I found that this was very time consuming and actually came out to be pretty expensive as well.

My question is, what is the best way of going about this and what do you do?

I obviously want to be able to pick out the finishes but want to be more efficient moving forward.

Any insight would be amazing!

Thanks,

Josh Ridener