We unintentionally did a live-in flip

[Lam N.]

Greetings.  I wanted to share an unintentional success story about doing a live-in flip.

2 years ago, my spouse and I was in the market to buy another house.  We wanted to be cheap, so we bought a foreclosed house for 84K.  We thought we could fix it up and make it a nice home for ourselves. 

So, we went ahead and gutted the kitchen.  Replaced the flooring of the entire house.  Knocked down a couple walls here and there.  Replaced all the doors.  Completely gutted the bathroom and put brand new everything in there.  Porcelain tiles, tub, etc.

Fast forward to late last year.  I'm a bridge engineer.  My company was about to start an operation building a couple new bridges in another state and they lost their main bridge engineer.  They offered me a bonus plus all living expenses paid for if I agree to go there for a year to lead the project.  It just happened that my spouse was about to go over to Italy to study abroad.  So, I said yes.  So, we came up with this plan.  Why not sell the house now, live rent-free for half a year, then when we go back to Chicago area we could buy another house? 

To my surprise, we are about to close at 162K.  I kept meticulous records of every penny we spent on the renovations.  Overall, it cost us about 14K to redo the entire house.  We did everything ourselves, so that was a lot of sweat equity.

Needless to say, we are totally excited of the huge profit, considering this was all unplanned. 

My spouse is about to come back from Italy because the semester is about to end.  We've been talking over the phone and we are super excited about this.  We have decided we will try to do this again.  Considering we know how to do everything ourselves, we could do another live-in flip.  And because we were there exactly 2 years, we completely avoided the capital gains tax.  Again, totally unplanned. 

To give you an idea of what we did with the place, here are the before and after pictures of the bathroom.

And here are the before and after of the kitchen.

Both he and I will of course work full time jobs.  We will do the renovating on weekends and holidays.  That's pretty much what we did with this house anyway.