Pictures and Numbers from my first flip of a historic home.

[Matt Jones]

As life goes I got busy and did not get a chance to post about the flip that I sold in April.  This was definitely one of my more interesting projects as it was the largest rehab I had handled up to that point and the home was right at 100 years old and in a historic district which caused some challenges of its own.  This was a longer flip because I had some other projects going and still had a full time job at the time which posed another challenge, the market regressed in the area before I was able to get it sold.  The good news is that I still made a profit, although smaller than I planned, and I got one heck of an education in the process.  That really is one of the great things about real estate, I learned more from this project than I would have in 2 or 3 years of classes and I made money instead of paying out thousands to go to school.

Beginning Numbers on this 3 bedroom 1 bath house.

Purchase Price - $95,000

Rehab Budget - $35,000

Estimated Sales Price - $170,000

This is the den after all of the boxes, furniture and clothes were moved.  This had more and less been a hoarder house and had been vacant for 15 years.

The one bath was not in great shape...

There was a garage with an apartment in the back yard that was rotting to the ground, neighbors complained of rats coming out of it and tree's had grown through the roof in multiple places.  It was torn down and the back yard(jungle) cleared, leveled and sodded.

This had been a laundry room off of the master bedroom, looked like it may have been a porch when the house was originally constructed around 1910.  This is where I added the master bath.

*This is only a fraction of the work that was done on the house, in truth every surface in the house needed work and there were electrical surprises, plumbing surprises, closets added, walls moved to create a new laundry room and more.  The results can be seen in the pictures below and final numbers at the end.

Sheetrock work and then painting in the den and refinished the pine floors under the nasty pink carpet.

Tore out siding on the porch and added sheetrock, installed new fan and light fixture, painted, closed in a window that looked from a bedroom onto the enclosed porch...

Managed to save the cabinets, added granite and stainless appliances.

Refinished the tub, kept the original floor and redid the subway tile in the original bathroom.

Added this closet in the master, refinished the floors after ripping out purple carpet in here, painted walls, sanded and painted woodwork and added the fan.

A laundry room no more, added this great bathroom onto the master bedroom.  5ft double vanity with granite top, toilet, free standing tub and custom shower.

After having 5 tile contractors no show, either for the bid or after I had given them the job, I used a stock fiberglass shower pan from Lowe's and tiled the walls around it to avoid any more delays.  I was a bit surprised when I got my first estimate for the enclosure though as it was $2400, luckily I kept looking until I was able to get it done for $1200 but that was still tough on the budget.

Here is the backyard going in...

Purchase price - $95,000

Rehab - $45,000

Other expenses and holding costs - $12,000

Sales Price - $165,000

Profit - $13,000

The results could have and should have been better but this place was a surprise at every turn.  I was glad to get out with a profit considering my issues with contractors, all of the surprises old houses can offer and the fact this was 2.5x the size of any other rehab I had done to date.  My next project was slightly bigger, went faster and was much more profitable largely thanks to what I learned from this one.   Thanks for reading BP!