My first house and remodel - Before and After - Camas House

[Marc Nicolàs Mariano]

Hello,

Just wanted to share with you all the project I did a few weeks ago, this was my first home purchase ever, my first fixer, and my first rental. Except for drywall, I did all the remodel entirely by myself and it took me 8 weekends.

I purchased the house for 200k, initially, it seemed to be a good deal, but it was also the first time I was doing a project like this, and you don’t know what you are going to face until you literally face it.

The remodel consisted of the following:

• New LVP flooring
• New subflooring
• New trims and baseboards
• Full interior paint.
• New interior and exterior doors.
• New kitchen and appliances
• New vanity and toilet.
• New lighting and upgraded electrical.
• Leveling backyard (with a loader)
• New foundation and patio paint.

This is how the kitchen was, old cabinets from the 80s, good quality but outdated. Here is where I did one of the main mistakes of the project, I will note that further below, but as you can notice there's one missing door.

The entire house had no dors, the previous owner decided to remove them to facilitate mobility. Soon I realized that when you are rehabbing an old house you will find with doors with odd sizes which you can't find in HD, and the only option is going custom or working with a local door supplier that might have doors to that size.

This is the living room, the walls had different textures all over the place. Used more than 25 boxes of mud to cover the ceiling and walls to remove the textures.

The house had a good floorplan, 2 beds on opposite sites of the home, a bath in between, and a large open space/dining room between the kitchen and the living room. 

And here the bathroom and the 2 other rooms.

All right, now the entire remodel.

1st Removing the middle bar area, ripping carpets, vinyl flooring, and trims.

2nd - Fixing up walls, patching holes, mud on ceilings, skim coating , new doors and window trims and paint.

My idea was to paint the kitchen cabinets, which I did. However, I was not satisfied with the result.

So I decided to demo and install new cabinets.

The floors had several transitions and different heights, in some cases up to 1-inch difference. I personally dislike houses with different heights and probably I didn't have to do it but I decided to completely level the house. This way everything could be at the same height and without transitions. This required me of more than 30 subfloor boards.

Now that I had all the house leveled it was time to install the LVP. This part was extremely hard, more than it seems on youtube. The house is old and the irregularities on the floor made it difficult. If I had not cared about installing transitions I could have installed the floor in 2 days, however, it took me 4 full days installing the floor without transitions. On the positive side, I believe the result it's quite good.

Moving now to the outside, I leveled the graded backyard and removed a dead tree. 

Now, time to put everything together. Install cabinets, backsplash, doors etc.

and now the project finalized.

Here a detailed view of the remodel cost, probably it would have been 2x if I had contracted everything. 

Appliances $1,920
Kitchen $2,465
Flooring $1,150
Bath $780
Lighting $300
Painting $850
Landscaping $1,170
Drywall $4,000
Dumpster $500
Miscelaneous $4,000
Tools $1,000
Total $18,13

ARV 290k

Profit/Equity gain 67k 

Where I did mistakes?

• - Cabinets. Lost one full day, sanding and painting the cabinets, plus 200$ for the custom missing door. I should have replaced for new ones right from the getgo.
• - Sub-flooring. Probably the additional cost of the 30 OSB Boards plus the full day of cutting and intaling them to avoid floor transitions across the house.
• - Leveling the backyard. Between the rental of the vermeer, dump trailer etc I spent 2 full days with it, for a rental not sure if I get the right return for it. But driving the loader was pretty fun.
• - Paint. I had to go back to homedepot multiple times to go for more paint. ALWAYS buy at least 20% more of what you think you would use. In my case almost twice as much.

The house took 1 week to get rented for 1550$, with CoC of 7%. This is not the best deal ever, but I see it as a good learning experience, now I can evaluate MUCH better the repair costs when analyzing deals, and have a better judgment to find good deals.

Well, that's it, hope you like the project and I'm open to hearing your thoughts and what would you have done differently!